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I guess I'll do this. Horror movies freak me out so I tend to avoid them, so I'll barrel through all the classics I've missed like Evil Dead and Phantasm. Goal: a bunch of movies??
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Sep 17, 2017 17:06
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| # ¿ May 19, 2024 01:11 |
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I hope The Gate turns in this thread a few times.
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Sep 18, 2017 04:42
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The Gate probably would've given me nightmares as a kid, but even as an adult it's just got this wonderfully pervasive atmosphere that makes it impossible to look away from.Franchescanado posted:Me too. I was expecting it to be someone's staff pick, but it didn't happen. You mean the '87 one, of course? 
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Sep 18, 2017 05:39
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Lurdiak posted:A Doom House? Now you're outside my basement...and inside my mind!!
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Sep 19, 2017 01:43
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MOVIE ONE The Brood - Cronenberg, 1979 It's 1979 in Canada, and this is what a playground looks like:  Chilling! This is one of those great movies where everyone stalks around in wood-paneled houses wearing triple-layered knits and spouting sub-Koontz dialogue, and it's all kind of endearing and cozy. It really feels like a pulpy Stephen King knockoff, which lends an aura of charm, but it doesn't quite hold up the first half of the movie. The basic mystery isn't scary or mysterious enough, and the character's aren't fascinating enough for the amount of time we simply spend sitting around with them. But there's a charm to the semi-amateurish script and acting, the edges of the construction are so easily felt that it's kind of just fun to hang out with the movie. I appreciate its intimations of Bergmanesque intrigue and sturdy interpersonal relationship drama, which have a subdued, adult quality - this is a movie for grown-ups, darn it! This is the earliest Cronenberg I've seen, and I'll probably explore a couple of his previous films in this thread, but his fascinations with sex, psychology, and mutilation show up here. The concept is that a famous kook psychologist is running a kind of brain spa devoted to something called "psychoplasmics", which involves sitting on a stage playing out personal issues and seems to be spurring physical transformations (he's the best character in the movie, the entire runtime is worth it just to hear his bizarre line delivery) and weird addictions to therapy. The connections are pretty obvious once the little monsters show up, which means it's not a difficult film to figure out, which takes some of the power out of the middle third. However, the last act has a couple satisfyingly chilling moments, and there's something so sturdy and methodical about Cronenberg's way of directing that it's hard to turn away from, as kludgy as the script is. The way everything ties together is so awesomely dime-store trash horror, as well, and is carried by the utter weirdness of Samantha Eggar's face:  I would be hard-pressed to call it scary, but I was definitely gripped a few times, and the overall atmosphere is pervasively eerie. It's just a good, solid, workaday B movie. You could build a house out of movies like this. 8/10
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Sep 21, 2017 06:36
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Egbert Souse posted:Even the movie adaptation of the Webber musical looks pretty It really, really does not.
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Sep 22, 2017 04:38
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MOVIE TWO The Wicker Man - Robin Hardy, 1973 I went into this expecting a horror film, and instead got a musical. English folk is low-key one of my favorite musical genres, so when the recorders and tambourines came out and the movie started to shamble to life as a surreal, semi-gleeful film about the follies of religion, I was thrilled. On the whole, this was entirely what I expected it to be, totally in line with similar 70s English movies where people buried under lumpy sweaters trample the wide-angle heath under a chilly, bare sun, which is also one of my favorite genres. I really like textiles, I guess, and old whitewashed inns lit by bare bulbs. What I didn't expect was for it to be written by Anthony Shaffer - he's not my favorite of the two Shaffers, but he and his brother share a talent for witty, earthy dialogue and the propulsive fascination of the inquisition. Where Peter turned this towards the frothy and gossipy, Anthony embraced the English trappings of the whodunnit, which is present here. It's nice to see movies that simply tell a story from beginning to end, with minimal fuss. This and The Brood have both delivered - we follow the exploits of a conceit from start to finish, with each scene illuminating and illustrating the overall theme, while simultaneously propulsing the plot. It's very economical and it's very effective - by zeroing in so earnestly on its own plot, there's no room for any irony, which would kill it entirely. Some of the post-hippie sexuality aspects are kind of silly (the innkeeper's daughter dancing around naked and slapping the walls is particularly disruptive), but because it's all woven so tightly into the narrative and supported by the cinematic mood, it functions. There's a sense of internal logic that I really appreciated. It just kind of goes. Everyone knows the ending, but they do a great job of making the journey itself entertaining and diverting. The focus on Christianity vs paganism - legitimacy vs fringe - is extremely solid and kind of provocative, and I appreciate the strength of writing in the characters. The protagonist, Sgt Howie (played by an increasingly sweaty Edward Woodward) throws himself full-bodied at the island, arriving with a haughty urgency that smacks of xenophobia, and you kind of hate him for being a prude. In the end, you kind of respect him, but he never really arrives as a likable protagonist, and he's unlikable in a way that feels real and strange and legitimate, and I like how this forces you to kind of stay above the movie in an analytical position. It's almost a challenge from the movie to the viewer, and in a funny way it sort of unlocks the surreality. If the main character had been blandly likable, it would become too easy to lose yourself inside the narrative, and part of the fun is seeing how everything is woven together. 9/10 screaming martyrs
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Sep 22, 2017 05:46
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Yeah, I'm jamming to it on Spotify right now. I just love the mood of the film. My parents took me to Scottish games all the time when I was a kid so there's something very homey and nostalgic for me about people playing bagpipes and weird, pale children doing maypole dances, and the way all those trappings of English culture violently collide with an ultrasexual pagan sacrifice ritual is legitimately unsettling. The way it keeps a playful air while maintaining an oppressive mood of creepiness is kind of impressive. Shaffer has a keen understanding for how audiences enjoy a: learning and b: playing games, even if that's not what they consciously sit down to do.
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Sep 22, 2017 05:56
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MOVIE THREE Phantasm Don Coscarelli, 1979 It's like The Holy Mountain was on one train, and Manos: The Hands Of Fate was on another train, and they collided. It's great, and it's bad, and it's intoxicatingly weird. There are glimpses of true psychosurreal greatness, like the way the sphere gloms onto people's foreheads, or the red sky of the dwarf planet, but it's mostly mired in long passages of simplistic dialogue and time-killing intrigue. Unlike The Brood and The Wicker Man, but like most passable cult B movies, the individual scenes aren't entertaining or enlightening enough to carry the concept from start to finish, but the stuff that stands out is so intriguing that you sit through what doesn't work just to get back to what does. There's a lot of murky business that goes on, but the themes do coalesce. Trauma of losing loved ones, dealing with growing up, fears of abandonment. An undercurrent of anxiety over lack of control runs through it - how do we feel as a teenager, in the between space, travelling from the carefully managed cocoon of childhood into the fearsome, open plains of adulthood? The leash gets longer and you start to panic as it slacks - one day it never pulls back in, and you're out there forever. What dies in the film aren't parents and brothers and loved ones, but the organic, fleshy, true trust of childhood. I don't know if there's anything scarier than realizing that others are permanently walled off from yourself. Boy, says the void, as you're whipped into the blackness. While it's fun to see this in its 4k remastered form, I kinda wish I'd stumbled across it first as a tween. I vividly remember seeing at least part of it when I was eleven or twelve and I had a budding, intense interest in high-concept horror, but I think I got bored and turned it off. I'd love to see this on a tatty old print in a dumpy theater after barhopping. There should be smoke curling in front of the screen, and I should be a little drowsy, and sometimes it's hard to tell if there was a reel change error or if the film is just like that. Some kind of liminal state is required for this movie to really work. Next time I'm up at 3am with the flu, I'll put Phantasm on, and I'll probably have the time of my life. 7/10 whizzing spheres
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Sep 24, 2017 07:51
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Franchescanado posted:So after two attempts, I apparently can't watch The Dark Half without falling asleep. The "dark half" is the half of the movie you watch with your eyes closed. X-Ray Pecs posted:Counterpoint: the one thing I miss most from Phantasm to its sequels is how gorgeous the first one is. The lighting's just on a whole different level, and it's a shame Coscarelli never DP'd any of the others. The remaster really makes the lighting pop, and I think it adds so much when you can see how much care Don put into his nonsensical low-budget horror movie. Yeah I noticed that! The lighting is stunning, a few times throughout I was like "man, this looks better than most modern movies".
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Sep 24, 2017 16:05
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I'm kinda still blown away by the effects in The Invisible Man, they're so simple now but they do a great job of blending them all in and the physicality is really charming.mobby_6kl posted:2. Don't Breathe (2016) Don't Breathe owns kinda hard. It slipped under the radar last year a little bit but it's excellently focused and I love the way it spirals into a truly grotesque situation.
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Sep 24, 2017 18:05
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MOVIE FOUR Bram Stoker's Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992) This movie is such an embarrassment of riches that I felt unworthy to be in its presence. It's always amazing to me how much more effective grand physical effects - models, matte shots, city streets done with panache - are than grand CGI. It's fun to see the handiwork, and play a part in creating the film by accepting the limitations and embracing the aesthetic qualities. Yes, that train is clearly a miniature, but when combined with the score, editing, and lighting, it's almost explosively affecting. When the wall of strained, false reality is removed, we are more free to engage with the subject in all its flights of fancy, and Coppola uses this to his advantage by overloading the film with a cramjam gridlock of stylistic flourishes that work in the moment and buoy the viewer from one narrative weakness to the next. No, the script doesn't make direct sense, but when the whole movie flies at you at once like a huge, diverting freakshow it's allowed to operate above the confines of structural logic and skip over the surface on emotion. Take, for instance, the way Dracula romances Mina. It's a syrupy, fearsome sequence that clearly underlines the festering grotto that was London (the city seems to boil around them like flesh, all sunset, smog, and shadow) and makes his weird advances almost acceptable. We understand the need for escape from the lockbox of Victorian society - if all options are oppressive (the one moment of true fresh air in the film is the semi-romance between Mina and Lucy - unacceptable, of course), why not take the dangerous, thrilling one? Like the devil at the end of The Witch, he offers her something more than the bland scramble for heaven, and the way that Coppola makes it work is probably the most astonishing aspect of the movie. It's not a scary film, but it's truly, deeply unnerving because of how lurid it is, like rotting flowers - putrid, heady, and weirdly sexual. Also, it was fun to see this after having played the (extremely excellent) pinball machine for so long and hearing the quotes in context. It is a beast! A monster! 10/10 Gary Oldman butt-forehead prosthetics
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Sep 26, 2017 17:48
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It's a Spielberg movie.
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Sep 28, 2017 20:55
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Go to hell both of you scanners is perfect from beginning to end although it can never touch the pants-wetting fear the box art inspired in me every time I encountered it in the local video store from the ages of eight to eleven.
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Sep 29, 2017 00:54
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MOVIE FIVE The Re-Animator (Stuart Gordon, 1985) Pauline Kael calls this "indigenous American junkiness", which is about as bang-on as you can get. It's a great mixture of 40s gothic horror and 80s underground comedy - there are talking heads, headless bodies, and stumbling zombies, there's a discomforting rape scene, a cat puppet, and glowing green serum, and right in the middle of this nonsensical thunderstorm is the cool, cold, calculating face of Jeffrey Combs, who plays Herbert West with so much nervy psychopathic panache that I wish the movie went on for another two hours just so we could enjoy his presence that much longer. It's absolutely silly but it's also impressively sure-footed, maintaining a weird tone from start to finish and running on a thread of manic energy. Even the aping of the Psycho theme makes a weird, subconscious sense - this was a great era, after all, for the mix-and-match apocalyptic collision between the atomic future and the atomic yesterday. It's even a little scary. For all its exuberant, pimply enthusiasm and dry college wit, the underlying concepts have a disturbing edge, and I really appreciate that. A good horror film, even the friendly ones, should have that discomforting bite. Herbert West's drive is unnerving, the effects of his serum are creepy, and the way these characters are all trapped in a quagmire poured by the previous generation borders on gutwrenching, and the reedy 80s humor keeps the movie prickly. It's great! I loved it! 5/5 lecherous heads
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Sep 30, 2017 17:11
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The only Alien-related cut that I can think of as needing to be in the movie is the cocoon scene.
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Oct 29, 2017 23:13
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| # ¿ May 19, 2024 01:11 |
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The butt prank made me laugh really hard.
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Oct 30, 2017 02:13
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