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Triangulum posted:I really like the Millennium trilogy but it's definitely not horror. And I know I'll probably be skewered for saying this, but the Fincher remake was better. I'm curious about this opinion. I went into the remake fully expecting it to be better, but was sorely disappointed. He somehow made the pacing much worse.
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Jul 25, 2012 12:43
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I'm not sure it really belongs in this thread because it's not really horror, but "The Skin I Live In" is definitely a psychologically charged drama about plastic surgery that is pretty unsettling but never really visually disgusting. I would say it's about very disturbing things, but the film is almost entirely beautiful. it's less of an edge of your seat thriller and more of a mystery. Like I said, I'm not sure it belongs in this thread, but the thread for it disappeared before I got a chance to watch it.
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Sep 16, 2012 01:25
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Irish Taxi Driver posted:I couldn't stand The Game, I thought it was dumb and made no sense. I watched it a few years ago though. I love Fincher so I'll give him another chance. It is dumb, and while it kind of makes sense, it's also pointless.
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Oct 1, 2012 16:47
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kuddles posted:My problem with The Game was that I just completely bought into the concept. As a result, I always assumed that the whole thing was part of "the game" right from the start, so at no point did I find any of it remotely suspenseful, and instead speculated on how cool it would be if that actually existed and I could afford to do it. And the film basically asks you to do this. I also feel that that the moral of the story is essentially "yes money can buy everything. even catharsis for your father's suicide" Add to this the fact that as much as I love Michael Douglas, he's playing his most generic rich white businessman character. I felt like there was no character, it was just Michael Douglas.
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Oct 1, 2012 17:16
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The Conjuring has some decent actors in it, and it wasn't bad, but I thought it was a very bland and predictable, mediocre, 'safe' genre film. It also has kind of a happy ending, which isn't technically a fault, and I guess that isn't predictable, but after the rest of the movie not being anything special, I thought that it was just extra lame. I watch like 90% of mainstream horror movies, and I wouldn't recommend The Conjuring to someone who watches a lot of horror/suspense. Maybe if you aren't inundated with the genre it works better...
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Mar 2, 2014 00:52
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Why in the world would you spoil that? Sometimes I think that the nature of a criticism, if valid, can reduce someone's enjoyment of something. Since there's no accounting for taste, I don't want to poison someone against the film if they aren't a genre person.
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Mar 2, 2014 04:54
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I just watched the Spike Lee remake of Oldboy and I'm wondering what other people's reactions to it were. It's been like 5 years since I saw the original, but I will be watching it again soon to compare it better. One thing that I was surprised at was that, unlike the original, I did not think that they did a very good job of making the main character appear to have aged. Also I cannot wait for Spike Lee to stop putting his obnoxious trademark dolly-shot in every movie he makes. The effect is kind of interesting, but it sticks out like a sore thumb and in this film you can actually see when Josh Brolin steps off the dolly. Otherwise I thought it was a pretty well done, if unnecessary, remake. One big change that I liked was the lack of hypnosis as a plot device. The movie seemed to work perfectly fine without it and the new ending that this creates is much better I think. The hypnosis required even more suspension of disbelief The violence in the remake is freaking insane. I'm not sure I agree with all the changes in the fights from a dramatic perspective, but people who like really brutal martial arts sequences are in for a treat. I caught at least one specific nod to something in the original that's not in the remake, the octopus in the fishtank at the first Chinese restaurant he goes to. Eating the octopus is actually one of my most vivid images that has stuck with me from the original.
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Mar 8, 2014 18:04
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The Clap posted:I saw The Sacrament last year at Fantastic Fest and was completely underwhelmed. I'm typically a huge fan of cult-related fiction like this but it was just so predictable that I couldn't get into it. There was little to no mystery aside from the cult leader, who ultimately ends up being a very generic villain. For reference, though, I went absolutely bonkers for Kill List which, in my opinion, works the cult angle much more skillfully and with significant, heavy suspense. I watched House of the Devil last night based on recommendations from this thread and was also unimpressed. I enjoyed because the look of the film was great. I feel like there were a lot of missed opportunities and overall the film was pretty generic. I cannot believe that the babysitter RAN UPSTAIRS when she could have run right out the front door. I thought we were past this. I also thought it was a poor choice to show us, the viewer, the sacrificial scene inside the locked room upstairs, because it basically tipped the film's hand and left no question as to what was going to happen for the rest of the film.
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Aug 18, 2014 03:49
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Sarchasm posted:I'll agree with you on the second spoiler, but the first spoiler actually makes sense. Whether the house is besieged by a killer or not, there's a little old granny upstairs who she has agreed to watch over for the night. She can't just bolt out the front door and leave granny to fend off the murderer for herself. I'm talking about after she wakes up in the basement and the ritual is being performed and she knows the people that hired her are up to know good. She escapes and runs up the first floor, and instead of running out the door runs up the stairs, fights the young guy and kills him on the second floor and then runs up to the attic.
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Aug 18, 2014 04:38
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I finally watched Oculus, which I think was mentioned in this thread. I thought it was pretty good. The ending was pretty predictable, but the visual storytelling was fantastic. The way that flashbacks and hallucinations blended together seamlessly was a really powerful storytelling device. I don't think I've seen something quite like that before.
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Sep 26, 2014 15:36
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Stargate SG-1's "groundhog day" episode is amazing. There is a 2010 film called Repeaters which is supposed to have a time loop premise, but I haven't seen it yet. I wholey recomment the short (13? episode) tv series Daybreak, which stars Taye Diggs as a cop repeating the same day. The catch here is, unlike other time loop stories, he quickly finds that if he is injured, his injuries carry over into the next loop. This means that unlike in Edge of Tomorrow, he cannot learn by trying until he succeeds. It's even worse than not looping, because while his injuries carry over in to the next loop, his clothes and any bandages do not, so he wakes up with open wounds.
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Sep 26, 2014 19:03
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I recently watched Housebound on netflix and wanted to recommend it here with one caveat: It is also a comedy. Now, it's not that really popular brand of self-aware comedy, it's just regular funny. It does a good job of building some genuine tension and subverting expectations. I highly recommend this film to anyone who watches haunted house type supernatural/psychological thrillers. I watched I Know Who Killed Me after hearing about some of the ridiculous poo poo in it. It's bad. It's a hilarious combination of reasonable production values and horribly amateurish direction. Everblight is not kidding. It's not like "oh this scene has kind of a blue pallet" it's "Everything on the screen is either black or blue", or "everything on the screen is black or red." The plot is another thing.
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Mar 13, 2015 09:21
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Yaws posted:The 1989 one? Or the Daniel Radcliffe one? The Daniel Radcliffe one is... not good. But it's like a study in jump scares. It's like the best movie you could make if you had to use only jump scares to tell your story. It uses every variation. Jump scares where it was just a bird, jump scares where it was just a bird AND THEN A GHOST, and where it acts like there will be a jump scare, and then nothing happens. It's got a couple of neat visuals, but it's definitly not good. I will have to watch the original sometime. edit: Horns was pretty good though, if you are interested in post-Potter Radcliffe.
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Apr 15, 2015 16:27
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I wouldn't say the movie does a good job of "tricking" the viewer, but I also don't think that's a negative. To me the plot and titular gimmick of Horns were mostly mechanisms to look at human nature. I haven't read the book.
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Apr 15, 2015 22:19
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:yeah Horns adds some additional hosed up pacing issues to a book that was already riddled with pacing issues. very disappointing to see something that shoddy come out of an Alexandre Aja/Joe Hill collab. I enjoyed it. Although I probably drank as much as Radcliffe's character while I was watching it.
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Apr 16, 2015 04:44
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Firstborn posted:Does A Scanner Darkly count? I recently rewatched it, then heard the fantastic audiobook narrated by Paul Giamatti (it's on audible, seriously, do yourself a favor and go listen). I think the rotoscoping of the film lends itself to Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) character explain why he left his wife and changed his entire life. He says (paraphrasing) that when he was a straight, every day was the same. It's like a little sailboat that goes on and on and one day just ends -- but now that he is on all of these crazy drugs, little awful and sometimes beautiful things happen to him all the time. Every frame of this movie is intensely watchable just because of the visuals, in the same way Bob finds the mundane interesting under the influence. Yeah, I saw it back when it was on netflix. I watched it by myself in the dark while drinking. It was a pretty powerful experience. I love PKD though, so... edit: Real content: Just this evening I watched The Canal with my roommate because she said it was on some list of horror films to watch on netflix. It was bad. It was very generic, plodding, a few neat "scares" but even those were still just generic "there's a ghost" jump-scares. The none of the "twists" were twists if you've ever seen a horror film before. It's like they threw a bunch of gimmicks at the wall and none of them stuck. I don't mind when a film takes a generic story and tells it well. This movie does not even close to make up for how unengaging and predictable it is. Snak fucked around with this message at 05:57 on May 23, 2015 |
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May 23, 2015 05:54
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MagnumOpus posted:I actually prefer my otherworldly invaders inscrutable. Why should they have motives sensible to the living? Banshee Chapter is not necessarily the best handling of this, though I enjoyed it for what it is. A better example of this is perhaps The Ring, where the protagonist goes in this whole quest convinced she understands ghost logic and makes everything worse by doing so. Okay but that's been done so much it's been run into the ground. There's practically an entire subgenre of "we though the ghost needed laid to rest... we thought wrong".
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Jun 2, 2015 14:14
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MagnumOpus posted:I think that's more a statement about the horror genre in general. It's not like ghosts/aliens/monsters/etc have not also been acting on human motives since forever. How many times have we been subjected to the ghost of Dr. Badguy still performing his illegal experiments on randy teenagers who wandered into the abandoned hospital/mausoleum/mine/ship/station? The whole genre is pretty heavily mined at this point. Well yeah, like any genre, the quality of a good horror film is completely independent of the plot beats. Movies that tell a good story well have their details copied by poor imitators. Unrelated, I want to watch Oculus again. I really liked the thing they did with the flashbacks in that.
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Jun 2, 2015 14:37
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I just watched Late Phases on netflix. It was okay. I wouldn't say it was bad, so much as nothing special. The most interesting thing about it was that the protagonist was blind, and the movie's sound design was based entirely around this. I thought for sure google would reveal that this was a movie made specifically with a blind audience in mind, that doesn't seem to have been the case. The movie does not have descriptive audio for the visual impaired, at least on netflix. It's a real shame, because if it did, I would wholeheartedly recommend this movie to blind horror fans. As it is, there are probably a few parts where a sighted person would have to clarify what's going on. The visual effects are decent, I think there's no cgi at all. Lots of practical effects, but nothing that I haven't seen before, so there's not a lot of originality to the makeup and prosthetic effects. They are well done, but sort of "last season of buffy" level of quality. I nearly forgot, but I also watched Odd Thomas. It was... well I loving hate Dean Koontz. I feel like this must have been a pretty stylistically faithful adaption because it felt like a Dean Koontz story in every terrible way. So I thought it was pretty much complete garbage, but almost entirely because of the dialogue and story. The acting and effects were pretty decent. If you somehow like Dean Koontz, this is probably worth a watch.
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Jun 13, 2015 21:19
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Vulpes posted:If you like 'people with cameras go to investigate weird spooky place' movies, check out From Above, So Below. Nicely claustrophobic and a genuinely interesting premise. Is that a found footage film? I don't remember the trailer...
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Jun 17, 2015 04:42
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flashy_mcflash posted:I have to agree with this. I have no real opinion on Koontz but I couldn't make heads or tails of what this was even supposed to be. Lines that read as dripping with sarcasm are completely earnest, and it never settles long enough on a tone. Just horrible. I have read one of his books because a coworker saw that I read books and gave it to me. It had the exact same tone that I later recognized in the movie.
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Jun 17, 2015 16:36
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Just watched It Follows last night. I knew the premise going in and expected the theme/metaphor to be really heavy handed. Well, it was, but it also worked really well. Great movie. edit: I was starting to roll my eyes at their plan to catch it in the pool, but since that fell apart spectacularly, I was very pleased Snak fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Aug 1, 2015 |
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Aug 1, 2015 17:39
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Uroboros posted:Kind of got burned by It Follows...I don't mind movies going for a slow burn to buildup tension, but this movie held almost zero suspense for me. Sadly, I went in excited that a horror could garner such high viewer ratings and bought it on iTunes. While it wasn't "bad" I wouldn't of paid money for it. Heck, I found the Babadook more suspenseful and even that was a but of a let down. I found It Follows to be good because it had great cinematography, sountrack, and was a decently put together drama. I agree that if you are looking for a movie to keep you on the edge of your seat and scare you that it might not be a good fit. Babadook was a much "scarier" movie, I think. It Follows was more about existential horror.
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Aug 4, 2015 17:44
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space-man posted:Reading this I feel like the only person who sort of took the movie as there is a supernatural entity following a girl who lives in a world with no adults. The no adults thing is pretty clever. The person I watched the movie with didn't even realize the whole thing was a metaphor for sex, and the physical and emotional dangers that are associated with it, until we talked about it the next day. The fact that the movie is about teenagers trying to allay their fears by having sex with each other even though they don't fully understand the rules or potential consequences, and they have no role models to turn to, is genius. edit: added spoiler tags because it's a mild spoiler for people going in blind.
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Aug 4, 2015 20:52
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I would say the overall theme of It Follows is that danger can never be escaped and the consequences of your actions will follow you forever. The best thing you can do is find someone you care about to share this burden together. And that's life. I liked the ending because to me it didn't feel like a "they beat it! ...or did they?" but rather the inevitable conclusion of something that cannot be stopped.
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Aug 5, 2015 20:51
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mrking posted:The entire time I was watching It Follows I kept asking my friend "Where are all these kid's parents." I think the whole thing is about parental neglect. yeah, the few parents you do see in the movie are passed out drunk or interacting with other adults.
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Aug 8, 2015 01:29
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It Follows basically contextualizes insecurities about having sex, who you choose to have sex with, and why, into manifest fear. And it's something that's invisible to people that aren't you or your sexual partners. It's like the transition between having a good sexual experience with traumatic consequences, to trying to get over it with casual sex, to reigning that in and trying to have a stable sexual relationship with someone that cares about you. That's the movie. The STD angle is obvious and definitely present, but I think the general fears and insecurities aspect is what makes the movie genius.
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Aug 12, 2015 22:14
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Well, it doesn't have an "older setting" but I thought the recent Oculus was fantastic. There are probably some jump-scares in it, but I didn't notice because I was busy being blown away by the dynamic integration of the characters having flashbacks with what was happening in the present. It might come across a gimmick and you might hate it, but I thought it was great and haven't really seen anything quite like it done before.
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Aug 16, 2015 00:03
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monkey posted:Oculus reminds me of another film, but I can find it even with imdb keyword search... What is the movie where doppelgangers come out of reflections in glass to stalk and kill their originals, I think the slow reveal is that the main character is not an original, but she doesn't know it. Anyone know the movie I mean? I recall it being kind of classy, like the characters are all fairly well off, I think it was from around 2010. There was a movie that was vaguely like that with Kiefer Sutherland. It was called Mirrors and came out in 2008. I don't think it has the aspect you describe as the slow reveal, though. edit: V I will have to check that out. Snak fucked around with this message at 03:56 on Aug 16, 2015 |
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Aug 16, 2015 03:44
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IShallRiseAgain posted:The protagonist travels back in time, and manages to stop a bomb from going off and killing everybody on a train. Except he had to posses someone to go back in time, and he just permanently takes over their body. The protagonist never tells the guy's girlfriend what happened, and just continues the relationship. The movie never acknowledges this. Of course the movie never acknowledges this. That's the ending.
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Aug 17, 2015 01:38
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el oso posted:I just watched Oculus today and enjoyed it a lot. I love movies that mess with the perception of reality and the mixing of the past and present events was really dynamic. Yeah... And you can see the ending coming a mile away. It's established pretty early on that the thing, whatever it is, will trick you about reality in order to hurt you. As soon as they unveil the "safeguard" it's like "oh no, I see where this is going". But that's not really a flaw in the film, because the journey is so good.
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Aug 17, 2015 11:46
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I love Source Code and I could write pages about it. The ending is literally a new beginning. Not a restart, not a clean slate, a new beginning. The timeline has been altered and everything is different. Yes the thing that's weirding people out is one of those things. But it's also something you should have come to terms with in the first 20 minutes of the movie. It's not like some weird twist that no one ever thought of. It's actually something that's highlighted throughout the film. It is unsettling, but I don't think it's treated like it's not hosed up. The movie isn't telling you "hey this is totally normal and and definitely doesn't have any hosed-up ethical and emotional implications".\ edit: death of the author and all that, but Harold Ramis, the director of Groundhog Day is on record saying that Bill Murray's character was probably stuck in that loop for 30-40 years. Originally he said 10 years, and later revised it. Just thought that was neat. also I'm pretty sad Daybreak didn't get a second season. While the mythology was a bit shaky, they both executed the mechanical aspects of the premise well AND explored some of the interesting conceptual implications. I really wanted to see more of it. Snak fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Aug 18, 2015 |
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Aug 18, 2015 04:21
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SolidSnakesBandana posted:Would it be worth checking out Daybreak sight unseen? I've never heard of it before this discussion, and I don't want to look up info about it because I prefer to go in as blind as I can. Definitely do it. It's very good and it's only one season, so you aren't making a big commitment.
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Aug 18, 2015 19:51
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Drifter posted:Oculus was weird because they were set to destroy the mirror, but then she wanted to videotape it to prove to people it was real or whatever which made the process last a long time and gave way to their eventual defeat. Were't they trying to prove their father's innocence, or something? It's been awhile, so I don't remember all the finer details of the premise. It's also not uncommon for the obvious "solution" to hauntings/evil spirits to be the totally wrong thing to do. Smashing the mirror might not be a good idea. Also, we have to assume that if they did try that right away, it would use its powers to stop them right away. The fact that it can play mind games with them means it can read their intent. You have to realize, they, as characters in the movie, don't actually know what mirror wants. So "Mirror just want to kill you" may be obvious to us, but not to them. They know that something is hosed up and evil, and they go about it in a rather rational and scientific way.
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Aug 18, 2015 20:25
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Basebf555 posted:Yea Gillan's character wanted to prove that the mirror killed her parents, but proving it to the world wasn't as important as proving it to herself and her brother. She thought that was the only way for them to really move on with their lives and put the mirror behind them. If she had just smashed the mirror right away she'd never truly know that she was right. And I think that makes sense. It's not like she lives in a world where she already has proof that supernatural evil exists. Destroying an inanimate object because you think it somehow forces people to do stuff is basically being a crazy person. She doesn't want to be a crazy person, so she makes a plan. I dig it. Drifter posted:This wasn't an 'evil dead' or 'The Conjuring' type of haunting, I'm much more sympathetic to people caught up in the middle of rampaging ghost kids and plates thrown through the air than I am about a girl who devises a plan over the course of years and then decides that she needs to destroy a thing that can mind control you in the vicinity of the thing that mind controls you. Or do you just go around smashing everything that you think might have evil powers? Snak fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Aug 18, 2015 |
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Aug 18, 2015 20:36
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Coffeehitler posted:Wouldn't the first reveal that the mirror's effects were real (the first "ring" of plants dying) have been sufficient to indicate, if not prove, that the mirror was affecting other things and supported the idea that the mirror corrupts living things in the buildings around it? That, along with the history of deaths following it, should have proven at least to herself (and at least allowed the brother to allow for) the mirror's involvement in the murder suicide. It's true, every instance of suspicious things in real life has turned out to be valid proof of superstition and ghost are real. There are people in real life who point out occurrences like this and claim they have proof of supernatural events. We call them crazy idiots and make fun of them on the internet.
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Aug 18, 2015 20:54
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SirMonkeyButt posted:
90% of your images don't work, for some reason. All iIcan see is "this guy".
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Aug 18, 2015 21:30
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I mean, I think that what makes Oculus special is the direction and cinematography, or general concept of how the flashbacks and hallucinations are portrayed. They just knock it out of the part. I will have to check out Absentia.
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Aug 18, 2015 22:16
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MagnumOpus posted:Absentia is a dreadful experience. In the good way. This is how I felt about Nightcrawler. Nightcrawler was one of the most powerful movies I've seen recently, and it created a pervasive and persistent feeling of dread from the first scene.
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Aug 18, 2015 22:37
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Jacob's Ladder is pretty good. It suffers a little bit from the fact that so many movies have followed in its footsteps. I think it would have had a much bigger impact on me if I hadn't seen so many of its elements in other films "first".
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Aug 19, 2015 02:18
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