|
jeremy oval office posted:A movie's distribution method shouldn't exclude it from in-depth discussion, especially a movie like Triangle--which, I imagine, went directly to DVD because it was difficult to market. Even the cover and poster art betray its greatness, making a cheap slasher film out of a thriller built around an incredibly ingenious plot and sharply drawn characters. Agreed. I think it's criminally underrated. I don't think the people sperging out over it are necessarily seeing poo poo where there isn't, there's definitely something very smart about this movie, but for me, it's summed up by my conclusion at the end of the film, which was that all Jess needs to do is get back in the cab instead of running to the yacht. The cabdriver is Death, and he's left the meter running. Anyway, some movies I haven't seen mentioned...  The Killing Room A group of people respond to a classified ad looking for participants in psychological research, promising payment. A scientist specializing in the analysis of facial microexpressions shows up for her first day of work, ushered into an observation area overlooking the room where the days' subjects are sitting around a table. Nobody is told what the nature of the research is - the participants are told they will be paid at the end of the day after several tests, and the new scientist is told to observe the participants as they are put through the tests. Of course, things get ill pretty quickly, but they're done in a really smart way that's not overly expository, escalates tension, and keeps you guessing throughout as to the purpose of the tests, and for that matter, who's actually being tested. Plus it's got a really strong cast for a direct-to-DVD movie. Definitely worth checking out.  My Little Eye One of the better "reality show participants stuck in a DEADLY GAME OF SURVIVAL" movies I've seen - what makes this one stand out for me is again, how much of the exposition comes from what the characters do, rather than what they say. We're expected to observe and pay attention to figure out what's going on. Plus, as a movie pretty much relying on the idea of surveillance, it does this nifty trick where we start out the movie watching the characters through cameras of varying quality, with the point of view becoming more and more intrusive as events escalate, until by the end we are right there in the house with them. It gets pretty violent toward the end, but rarely in a gratuitous gore flick type of way. There are a couple of plot holes or disappointing story choices that bugged me at the time, but matter less and less over time in my consideration of the movie as a whole.  Cthulhu A really well-done contemporary take on Lovecraft. It gets rid of all of the lurid, feverish aspects of his stories (as seen in, say, Dagon) to concentrate on the ideas of family, tradition, and inescapable destiny in the modern-day Pacific Northwest. The protagonist is a young man living in Seattle, who is called home to a small town in Oregon for his mother's funeral. Here we find out that he's estranged from his father, who is some kind of local religious figure. His family has expectations of him that he can't or doesn't want to fulfill, which is why he moved to Seattle in the first place. What follows is his slow entanglement in the problems of the town and the conflict with his family and tradition, against a backdrop of increasing global strife and rising oceans. The whole movie is pervaded with a dreamlike feeling of wrongness that reminds me of Roman Polanski's movies, complete with a segment reminiscent of Mia Farrow's rape scene in Rosemary's Baby.
|
#
¿
May 17, 2011 19:10
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 02:58 |
|
|
IShallRiseAgain posted:Don't be deceived, this isn't a Lovecraft story at all. Its just named Cthulhu to trick fans into watching it. Just watch the trailer, and you will see it has nothing to do with Lovecraft's works. It isn't based on one of his stories, but it's most definitely Lovecraftian. IShallRiseAgain posted:True, but it bugs me how many movies claim themselves to be based on Lovecraft's work, but the only similarities are some names, maybe some plot elements, and that they are horror films. There still hasn't been any halfway decent adaptation of any of Lovecraft's works. Did we even watch the same movie? IShallRiseAgain posted:Also, I heard the film is pretty bad, with a heavy-handed message, bad acting and incomprehensible plot. Although, I didn't see the film myself for the aforementioned reasons, so I can't confirm that is a valid opinion. Hahahahahahahaha. That explains it.
|
|
#
¿
May 18, 2011 04:07
|
|
|
PateraOctopus posted:I enjoyed the silent adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu, as far as adaptations go. But a lot of his work is based on what you don't see rather than what you do, so it makes sense that it'd be hard to adapt to a visual medium. I guess it depends on what you consider "Lovecraftian." The Call of Cthulhu is really cool as a pretty straightforward adaptation of one of Lovecraft's stories, done in an appropriate medium for his time. Cthulhu is in many ways the diametric opposite of this approach - it takes place in the modern day, it's set in the Northwest instead of the Northeast, and there's a distinct lack of squiggly things, Elder Signs, and "Ia Ia Ia!" in it. It's not a lurid pulp story - it's pretty restrained, but it's about a young man trying to distance himself from his family, the traditions of a small, isolated coastal town, the inescapability of horrible fate, and the stars and world events aligning for an apocalypse. Seriously, it's all there - it's just pretty subtle. But it does help if you've actually seen it.
|
|
#
¿
May 18, 2011 04:15
|
|
|
Mr.Graves posted:The Exam is far far superior to The Killing Room I disagree - The Exam felt, to me, like a SyFy movie-of-the-week take on The Killing Room. The pacing felt off, it didn't so much rise to a climax as sort of eventually walk there, the protagonists were painted too broadly, and the ending didn't feel earned at all. What I liked about The Killing Room was its general plausibility and a palpable feeling of desperation from the characters (the "tests" devised for the characters in The Killing Room made more sense to me as well, in a pitting-them-against-each-other way.)
|
|
#
¿
May 24, 2011 20:12
|
|
|
JessJezzz posted:Also, I was going to post The Relic in this thread, but I haven't seen it in such a long time that I didn't feel confident in recommending it - what do you guys think of the film? I thought it was okay, but nothing special. More of a monster film than a psychological horror film. A couple more to recommend... Yellowbrickroad is about a group of people investigating the legend of a small town in New Hampshire, whose inhabitants all picked up and walked up a trail into the woods one day in the 1930s. The team (a psychologist, photographers, cartographers, and a forest ranger) follow the trailhead used by the townsfolk and end up, well, nowhere good. Some people will try to tell you it's a ripoff of The Blair Witch Project, but they are wrong. The only thing it has in common with Blair Witch is the idea of people lost in a possibly-haunted forest. I thought it had more in common with what I'd think a film adaptation of The Navidson Record would be like. I'd also forgotten about Fallen, a moody, tense supernatural possession film with a great cast (Denzel Washington, John Goodman, James Gandolfini) and a sense of unease and paranoia delivered with minimal gore.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 2, 2011 21:15
|
|
|
daccats posted:According to IMDB, Sean Bean's character was tacked on. I place as much blame on fans of the game series as I do the studio. If they'd just been allowed to tell a story about the town of Silent Hill without shoehorning in characters from the game or dealing with issues of continuity raised by a vocal fanbase, it could have been a really good American horror film. As it was, it was a missed opportunity.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 20, 2011 19:19
|
|
|
jeremy oval office posted:Yep. "I live in the weak and the wounded." This was how I read it too. Gordon's under a lot of stress with the job and his new baby - he's prepared to push his crew to the limit before they even start because he's desperate for the work - and it's on that first visit that he hears someone saying "Hello, Gordon." He goes home from work after the first day, intends to celebrate the job with his wife and ends up snapping and killing her instead. It just goes downhill from there. That bit at the end, where Gordon was talking to his wife, begging her to take him back, on an obviously broken cell phone, that was such a simultaneously heartbreaking and chilling moment.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 21, 2011 19:40
|
|
|
I think Martyrs is an excellent film, but a psychological thriller it ain't.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 28, 2012 20:10
|
|
|
oiseaux morts 1994 posted:That film just devolves into nihilistic torture porn and doesn't belong here. It's too gory to qualify for this thread, but dismissing Martyrs as "just...nihilistic torture porn" is selling it very, very short. Topic: I really liked The Caller. It's...sort of a ghost story with no actual ghost, if that makes sense. Some violence toward the end, but relies much more on tension and the viewer piecing together what's happening for its scares.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 20, 2012 04:40
|
|
|
Ominous Jazz posted:There's no way you, having seen (A Serbian Film), are saying it's not just obscene goreporn I think it's too gory for inclusion on this list, but it is definitely much more than "just obscene goreporn."
|
|
#
¿
Sep 15, 2012 19:44
|
|
|
Cinnamon Bastard posted:Special Bulletin, which is available in full on youtube. Here you go: I saw this on TV when I was a little kid, probably when it first aired - I think I just turned the TV on and it happened to be on that channel, and I was too young to understand that it wasn't real. It scared the poo poo out of me.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2013 15:18
|
|
|
Regarding Pontypool:kuddles posted:I disagree. While I thought the inclusion of a new character who literally explains what's going on to the audience was unnecessary, I loved the overall reveal and the way it concluded. I really didn't like the way it concluded, because I thought a lot of the tension dissipated with the exposition dump and then the insistence on beating a single idea into abstraction. On the other hand, it was really faithful to the spirit of the book. On the third hand, the book was (as the author freely admits and for which he apologizes) a deliberately impenetrable exercise in semiotics.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2013 19:20
|
|
|
Anal Surgery posted:Just finished Kill List on this thread's recommendation... I like your reading that each of the hits represented some element of society. and though my own take on it was more literal, I don't know that the two readings are necessarily exclusive. The way I took it was that Jay was chosen to play the role of sacred executioner in some larger ritual staged by the group that hired him, and each of the hits was a sacrifice necessary to complete the ritual (hence most of the targets thanking him or dying willingly). I'm assuming Jay was chosen because he was willing and able to take human life. Gal's girlfriend (who was only with Gal to get to Jay) marked him as the chosen one when she carved the symbol in their house during her visit there, and from there forward every assassination they did fed into the ritual. I'm not sure whether the intention of the ritual was for some faction within the cult who hired them to replace the existing leadership of the cult (they do refer toward the end to "a change in management", or for the cult to acquire more power over the world at large. Certainly, the idea that each of the hits - as sacrifices - represent some element of society might point toward the latter. I don't know that some of the distinctions really matter that much, because I think one of the movie's biggest strengths is that we don't get the whole story - we just glimpse suggestions of much bigger machinations and conspiracies to which Jay and Gal aren't ever really made privy, so neither are we. We are shown just enough to know that whatever's happening, it's really loving bad. It's easily one of my favorite horror movies of the last few years.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 26, 2013 15:32
|
|
|
Drifter posted:I'v eyet to see timecrimes, but I really liked Triangle, and enjoyed all the little bits and bobs that you might otherwise not notice over the course of the movie. It's pretty cool. I didn't like Timecrimes nearly as much as Triangle. I think it's more straightforward and less atmospheric, and sort of built to an anticlimax compared to Triangle, but I know plenty of people who disagree with me on that front.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 5, 2014 23:30
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 02:58 |
|
|
ozmunkeh posted:Timecrimes is essentially The Butterfly Effect but without the unintentional hilarity. It's like a fair to middling feature length episode of the 1990s Outer Limits. Triangle certainly has its flaws but it remains a wonderful little movie, far more interesting than Timecrimes. Yeah, that's my take. I mean, Timecrimes pretty much ends up being it was him the whole time and he did all of that stuff because he saw that all of it had been done, but it was all done because he did it! and that felt like such a wet fart of a denouement to me. Triangle at least feels like it's a mystery that sort of builds and builds and keeps revealing pieces of the bigger picture all the way to the end. Triangle surprised me, Timecrimes didn't.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2014 02:37
|
|