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As before, my rule for myself is one movie a day only in October. No early peeks in September! So even though I just got back from watching It, it doesn't count for my total. And all films I haven't seen before, though these days the list of horror films I'm interested in and haven't seen is getting really, really short. Worse for me, I'm insanely busy these days with several days a week having pretty heavy time crunches. So doing it will be a true challenge. I'm still in though. My secret weapon is Kanopy streaming, a service for colleges and universities that has things like recent indie films, a ton of international films that don't have strong distribution in the US, and the bulk of the Criterion collection (though I've now watched pretty much all of horror film selections there). One thing they have is a pretty hefty amount of Italian horror and even though I've bounced off of it pretty hard in the past, I'm going to have to dig into some of the big films there in a way that I haven't before. From previous years, I'm still looking for more films by Nobuo Nakagawa (I think I've seen almost everything that has translated into English except The Snake Woman, but if there are more films translated I want to see them) and Den' Gneva, the second of two horror films produced in the Soviet Union which as far as I know has had a translated version air on TCM once and is completely unavailable otherwise. Irony.or.Death posted:1. The Boxer's Omen - Hell yeah Shaw Brothers horror. How could you go wrong? I watched Mr. Vampire last year and that was a fun change of pace. I may toss this one on my list.
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Sep 16, 2017 22:10
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warez posted:Oh, woah, I didn't know this existed (and my university is enrolled with it, sweet!). Watch Kuroneko, it's fantastic and hardly anybody has seen it.
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Sep 16, 2017 22:34
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Arivia posted:Oh, before I forget, do either or both of 8mm or Army of Darkness count for the challenge? (I imagine Evil Dead 2 definitely does.) Is it a movie? Would a Blockbuster employee possibly shelve it under "horror"? If the answer to each of those is yes, then it definitely counts. Alternatively, accept that horror is ambiguous as a genre and the only thing that really matters is if you feel a movie should count since nobody is going to call you out on not really watching a horror film. "I'm sorry, that film is actually scifi/adventure and not horror. You are hereby disqualified from the horror movie challenge. Turn in your badge and gun." And if you're watching 31 movies (or going completely nuts like some of the posters here and shooting for significantly more) then you need some variety to break things up, anyway. Untrustable posted:Movie 4: Train to Busan My reaction to Train to Busan was that while it was well made, it was also pretty much bog standard zombie movie with effectively nothing new it was bringing to the genre. Also, pregnant women can apparently run a lot better than I thought they could. 
Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 13:04 on Sep 17, 2017 |
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Sep 17, 2017 12:56
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Basebf555 posted:Yea Slugs is on Shudder, for months I kinda just assumed it was bad because I'd never heard of it and how could it live up to the poster? Turns out it's actually good though, at least according to a few people in the horror thread. I kind of like Slugs, though I'd never actually recommend it to anyone. It's very much a 1970's "animals go crazy and kill everyone" environmental movies which get under my skin more than most genres. STAC Goat posted:Its a shame he just didn't really make anything the last couple of decades. It seems like his 90s stuff kind of went over badly, he demanded a big fee to direct H20 they passed on, and he just kind of gave up after that? That seems like a really sad ending to a really great career. I'm not a fan of post-In the Mouth of Madness Carpenter, but Cigarette Burns is really good (though thematically very similar to Madness). Franchescanado posted:
I never watched Texas Chainsaw Massacre until last year's challenge because I always figured it would be a grindhouse slasher and that's the kind of horror movie that I like the least. And then it turned out to be really great. So it's a great pick to watch and then be annoyed that the lesson other filmmakers took from it was to have a big guy going after teenagers with sharp implements. Franchescanado posted:Texas Chainsaw Massacre 1 & 2 (they are very different from each other; 2 is insane) The key word in the title of the first one is "massacre". The key word in the title of the second is "Texas".
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Sep 18, 2017 23:38
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Basebf555 posted:The story tends to go that King was doing A LOT of cocaine during the production of this movie and even though I have no idea if that's actually true, it's very easy to believe it after watching. While I can't provide any direct information, it was produced right at the height of King's substance abuse problems so it would be more of a surprise if he wasn't coked up and/or drunk 90% of the time. Ambitious Spider posted:for the thread My only problem with Ghostwatch is that they give the game away about five to ten minutes too early and just go full goofy at the very end. It's so close to perfectly done that I wish they had played it straight and gone with something really weird and offputting as the ending. Of course, given that this scarred a generation of children in the UK, it's probably for the best that they did things that way; there would still be viewers unable to sleep with the lights off if they had kept the tone up.
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Sep 20, 2017 18:44
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:Okay, seriously, are there any guides to what's on Amazon or more user-friendly ways to look at their selection? There's a bajillion horror movies on this thing and it's organized like complete garbage. An online streaming service providing an actual usable interface for browsing their collection? Don't be absurd. You have to look at just these four movie posters and slowly scroll through them one at a time as god intended.
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Sep 21, 2017 12:32
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Woo! October 1st! Time for the challenge to begin! I've got a real uphill battle this year with severe time crunches and I'm currently pretty sick. But I'm sticking to my rules of one movie per day and only new movies to me (which is the rule that's going to hurt the most since I'm running really short on classics to watch). Part of the fun this year is that I'm going to have to watch some of these in the student lounge at my school (7am to 9pm days three times a week suck) so I may get some responses to what I'm watching on my laptop. October 1 The Ruins  A bunch of really lovely college students on vacation in Mexico meet someone who tells them about some obscure, off the map ruins that are now in the middle of the jungle. Naturally, they think this is an awesome place for a party. And pretty much entirely on their stupidity, they find themselves isolated and trapped by the flesh eating plants that have overrun the ruins along with the locals who are trying to keep the plant confined to structure. And because they are incredibly stupid, they keep making things worse for themselves. I wasn't expecting a lot from this film, but I was kind of hoping for a fun romp and I didn't get even that. It's over twenty minutes into the film before they get to the evil ruins and forty five minutes before the actual threat (as opposed to just "evil foreigners") shows up. Since that time is filled with boring "drama" that makes you hate the characters and want to see them get eaten by monster plants, the fact that it goes on for so long without progress on that storyline is a real problem. It's like they were trying to mix the "students get mixed up with foreigners in a country where they don't speak the language and then get murdered" genre which was popular at that time with a "survive in an isolated place with a monster" genre and the result is less peanut butter and chocolate and more peanut butter and cauliflower. And that's a problem since the concept really works. You've got killer, infectious vines. They go after blood. There's some kind of spore infection that accompanies it. There's an inherent structure to that which can really work; every nick and scrape is a threat. Get some botanist out there who was doing field work to tell them, "We can't leave without a full quarantine containment!" to try to keep the dumb students there to get rid of the angry locals keeping them trapped aspects. Visually, this movie shows its low budget with it's incredibly limited locations that are all shot from the exact same angles with the exact same camera movements. A creative director could still have done something with this, but we're not dealing with a good director here. This was his first movie and his last one until 2014... I think what it mainly comes down to for me is that everything in the film is half baked. There's no issues with food or water as they're trapped on the pyramid for days. The evil plants demonstrate abilities which the characters keep forgetting about. The concept that the students leaving would be a bad thing is barely touched upon (there's one of those "unrated endings" out there so presumably it features evil plants getting loose and performing a musical number). There's a lot that could have been done but the focus was all on lovely characters that I hated. Just as an aside, if a rope is too short by a lot to reach the bottom of a shaft, maybe don't have it go to the bottom in the next scene. Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 18:21 on Oct 1, 2017 |
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Oct 1, 2017 18:17
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a foolish pianist posted:5/31, Ghoulies: Hands up everyone who spotted the word "Ghoulies", immediately got ready to reply, "They'll get you in the end,' and then were disappointed that a foolish pianist included the poster making that redundant?
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Oct 1, 2017 22:44
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Wilhelm Scream posted:6. From Hell It Came-1957: 4/10 (Turner Classic Movies) Infamously, a review at the time was in its entirety: "And to hell it can go!"
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Oct 2, 2017 18:06
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graventy posted:All right, now that October proper is here I can stop procrastinating and post. There is no method to my madness all choices are arbitrary and random, which I think particularly stands out in yesterday's double feature: House 2: The Second Story is the one to watch, though I don't know if that's positive or negative thing. Definitely check it out though because it's memorable as hell.
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Oct 2, 2017 22:43
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October 2 - Bride of Re-Animator I don't think it's overstating things to say that the original Re-Animator is one of the greats. But I had heard that the attempts to revisit the film didn't remotely live up to the original so I never bothered checking them out. But it's October and I have 31 new movies to watch so it's time for me to see if that was true. So somehow Herbert West survived the end of Re-Animator and fled the country with his pal Dan until the heat was off. Then they decide to come back and go to work at the other hospital in Arkham and set up their new lab in a former mortuary next to a cemetery. Dan wants out but West promises him they can build a new body out of spare parts for his dead girlfriend and they decide to go for it. Then all the things that you'd expect to go wrong with this plan do. So obviously Jeffery Combs is absolutely fantastic. The way he deadpans in even the most horrific situations ("She's hysterical."  ) makes West such a memorable character. Sadly, nobody else in the film is really a memorable character; I thought the pathologist might have been, but he vanishes for almost an hour after the film starts getting underway. The first half of the film felt kind of slow and dull to me. Then the second half got deeper into the weird and crazy stuff that I wanted out of Re-Animator though the puppetry doesn't have quite the same skill. It gives the film kind of a half-baked feeling, particularly the very ending where everything is resolved by the roof suddenly caving in for no good reason. I think I would have had more fun seeing more of West's crazy hosed up experiments. Those were often my favorite moments where I was going, "Oh poo poo! I can't believe they did that!" but there weren't enough of them. The titular "bride" was kind of a let down for me. Disconnected from the original, I think this would have been a kind of quirky horror film that didn't live up to its potential. Compared to the original, it's more of a disappointment. Also, Gozu has the better "guy hurls a really bad looking dog puppet into a wall" scene. Ambitious Spider posted:9)The living Skeleton I'm glad someone else watched The Living Skeleton since I thought it was pretty interesting. I felt it was like an EC Comics horror story with its gothic style and atmosphere and revenge story, only produced in Japan for some reason. Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 01:52 on Oct 3, 2017 |
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Oct 3, 2017 01:49
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Skwirl posted:In terms of horror films named House, the Japanese one from 1977 is definitely the one to watch, and I will physically fight people over that. Well, obviously, but if we're talking about films in the American horror series called House, then you go with House 2. Also, everyone here has already seen the Japanese House and telling someone that they need to would it would be insulting because it would assume that they hadn't.
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Oct 3, 2017 02:22
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Bruteman posted:13. The Visitor The Visitor is the only film out there where God and the Devil play pong against each other.
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Oct 3, 2017 04:28
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October 3 - Black Sabbath (Note: this poster contains more headless horsemen than appear in the film.) So I've bounced of Italian horror hard in the past. In my experience it tends to lean hard into aspects of the genre that I don't care for. But for a variety of reasons this year, I'm probably going to be watching quite of a bit of Italian horror so maybe I'll learn to appreciate it. Or at least find some films there that I like. And what better choice for me to start down this road than Bava's Black Sabbath. I kind of like horror anthologies in general, especially ones like Black Sabbath where there's a variety to the stories. More than most genres, horror benefits from getting in quick, hitting you with the horror and getting out; I'm positive I'm going to complain plenty of times this month about clunky pacing. There's no time for that kind of cruft in an anthology. The first of the three stories features a woman alone in her apartment being menaced by phone calls from a former lover who seems to be watching her every move. The timing and knowledge of the caller in this short strains credibility (so she was peeping through the windows, then running back to her own apartment to make the phone call, then running back? And they live close enough that this is possible and never see each other anymore?) but it's fine. The twist was nice (the first one I mean, the second one was the obvious conclusion from the first). The short is a bit slight since the premise pretty much all there is to it and I feel that the actress didn't really go with it. In the second segment, a traveling nobleman stumbles into a remote manor house where the patriarch has left to hunt down a wurdulak, a kind of vampire that especially enjoys the blood of its former loved ones. His family has been told that if he does not come home in five days, then they should kill him if he returns and it's now the evening of the fifth day. Just after the clocks strike midnight, the patriarch (played by Boris Karloff) arrives at the door making them wonder if he is a vampire or not. I loved the locations used in this segment. The manor house and its exterior were just okay, but pretty much everything else looked terrific and Bava gave this segment some real style. It's hard to judge performances but I really liked what Karloff did with his role even if I'm sure he was dubbed; he's just got a look that he's using in his scenes and it's great. The final segment has a nurse called out in the middle of the night to the decrepit house of a crazy cat woman and spiritualist who has died. She's to prepare the body and notices a nice ring that the corpse has on so decides to do a bit of grave robbing to get more payment. But the housekeeper says that the woman died of ghosts and when the nurse gets home things start happening. The thing that stood out to me most in this segment was the lighting. Bava really uses it to enhance the mood in this segment. So overall, I liked the movie. I have finally seen an Italian horror movie that I enjoyed. Hopefully the first of many.
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Oct 3, 2017 19:42
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October 4 - Death Bed: The Bed that Eats [People]     I am 100% certain that George Barry thought he was making a deep, meaningful film but he's so incompetent at it that it reminds me of something like The Room. He's trying for art but it's so amazingly incompetent top to bottom. It's like I have a million things to say about every aspect of this movie but it's all about how goddamned insane it is. It's a bewildering deluge of madness. There's no way that this is a misguided attempt at parody. There's too many stabs at being artistic for that to be the case. It's sincere and that makes it so much more amazing. In conclusion, I really wish Death Bed had been defeated by smoking in bed.
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Oct 4, 2017 22:23
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October 5 Haunted Mansion This wasn't the Eddie Murphy version! Thursdays are literally the only day where I have free time and I dug around Instant Watcher looking for something streaming that was a bit different. Now normally I'd pass over this as yet another generic, cheap horror flick (I'm sure I'll be watching a few of those this month, anyway) but something in the description caught my eye: "students from Manila". Was that a Filipino horror movie? Yes, it was and since I've never seen one I had to check it out. There a decrepit mansion out in the country and a bunch of high school students go out there one weekend including one that sees dead people. One guess what the problem with that mansion is. Hint: it's not foundation damage from a water leak. The first problem with this film is that it's front loaded with a ton of lovely teen drama. The first hour does have very, very occasional ghost moments, but it really revolves around mean girls bullying the nice girl who has a crush on the jock. And it's not even particularly fun mean girls. It's literally at the one hour mark when the general students decide, "Hey, lets hunt around this supposedly haunted mansion for some ghosts!" It's even later when they finally introduce the plot element that gets things moving (a ghost's confession and anyone who hears it sees the ghosts and gets attacked). Haunted Mansion has the all too common problem of just copying other, better movies. The most interesting things to me was the fact that exorcising the devil from a character is something that took place off screen and the last second, "Oh, yeah, there's a witch, too," reveal. The ending makes me think that the final girl is going to keep getting out of the hospital for her ghost injuries, finish recovering, and then get attacked by the same ghost who she defeats after getting severely injured by shoving some new religious icon in its face, then repeating the whole cycle. There's just not a whole lot to talk about with Haunted Mansion since it's so by the numbers in every respect. An attempt at cleverness was done with the ghost of a guy who burned to death still smoldering, but they weren't even consistent about that. In conclusion, is it common for churches in the Philippines to have large crucifix-shaped lighters?
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Oct 5, 2017 21:45
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October 6. Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things "This is a grim-or-ee." This is one those films I've heard of forever as a landmark horror film of the 70's and never got a chance to see. After checking it out, I could see why it was hugely influential but at the same time, it's got some major problems that prevent me from saying it's a good movie. OTOH, it's got a really fun third act so maybe it's worthwhile? A group of actors, led by a guy who is the prototype for all those hipster stereotypes only forty years early, go for a night of fun on an island cemetery. The plan is to have some fun, mess with some corpses, and raise the dead (drat, now I've got the Treehouse of Horror episode stuck in my head: "Did you wreck the car?" "No." "Did you raise the dead?" "Uh-huh." "But the car's okay?"). For some reason, this plan goes horribly awry. So I think I've talked a lot about pacing in horror films this month and this is an example where the bad pacing I see in horror films all the time is there, but it manages to work. Things don't really get going until a bit after the hour mark in this 90 minute film, but that first hour is filled with a pack of assholes being assholes, harassing and tormenting each other, two satanic rituals, and a gay marriage to a corpse. Even though you're not getting much in the way of zombie action, there's still plenty of things going on. Then when the dead do start popping out of the ground, the film gives you a goddamned army of zombies; when I saw the opening credits and they had about fifty names in it I knew they weren't just going to have three or four guys in make up rotating in and out of shots. The real biggest problem with this movie is that it's a horror comedy where the characters are all supposed to be witty, but they're actually insufferable assholes who I couldn't wait to see get eaten. Especially the leader of the troupe who needs to have the poo poo smacked out of him badly. This is a movie where the idea of someone going into an ethnic Jewish stereotype in the middle of asking Satan to show them some zombies is considered to be hilarious. So, a clunky movie, but one that delivers on its promises and winds up being kind of neat for that. The seams of the student film are showing, but it's such an earnest effort that I don't mind that. I'm impressed by all the people checking out Hammer's The Mummy this year; that's a good movie even if it didn't need the flashbacks to earlier in the film.
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Oct 7, 2017 00:52
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October 7: The Fog This is the 2005 remake, not the John Carpenter original. I've always found the original movie to be lesser Carpenter; not really bad but if I was going down a list of Carpenter films I'd get to the end and go, "...uh... Ghosts of Mars... Oh yeah! The Fog, too!" I kind of wish I hadn't seen the original before because then I could watch it for the challenge and follow it up with the remake, but instead I'll just have to say that I barely remember anything about the original. I know there was a radio station, ghost pirates, and people trapped inside a church, and that's pretty much it. Of course, the fact that we're just over ten years after this film was released and I went, "Wait, when did they remake the Carpenter movie?" doesn't speak well to this movie's potential. It's coming up on the town's big anniversary celebration but This movie doesn't make a drat bit of sense. And not in the "holy poo poo this is a window in the mind of a crazy person" way, It's a "way too lazy to make their film hold together at even basic levels" way. There's a ton of things that are just off about the film, but a stand out for me was the radio host telling people to "Whip up a pitcher of martinis,"; I'm not much of a drinker but I'm positive that martinis are not made in pitchers. People do stupid things for the sake of moving the plot forward, get information in stupid ways, fail to use that information because they're stupid, don't talk to people because they're stupid, and hide important evidence because they're stupid; seeing a pattern here? The ghosts don't seem to follow any rules either. They're constrained to the fog unless they aren't. They possess people and corpses unless they don't. They're after descendants for revenge, except when they don't. For a film that has an obvious, natural structure to the threat, this movie completely ignores it all the time. So I can barely remember Carpenter's The Fog, but I'm positive it's better than this movie. At the very least it has the advantage of being directed by John Carpenter so it has to be better than this dreck. This is lovely, generic, early 2000's PG-13 horror with absolutely nothing to recommend about it.
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Oct 7, 2017 16:19
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October 8: The Ceiling at Utsunomiya Castle Okay, this requires a much bigger write up than I usually give because this is about one of my bigger personal discoveries from previous October challenges: the films of Nobuo Nakagawa. So who is Nobuo Nakagawa? He was Japan's first horror film director. Starting in the mid-1950's Nakagawa started making low budget horror movies for a small studio. These did well and so Nakagawa began to specialize in them at a time when horror movies in general were effectively unknown there. He made the first vampire film in Japan, for example. So that makes Nakagawa historically interesting, but it goes deeper than that. Once Nakagawa moved away from the poverty row flicks, it turned out that he was a really good director. He had a real visual flare, especially with how he used color. His masterpiece would come in the early sixties when he directed Jigoku, or The Sinners of Hell, a film that found international acclaim. The thing is, however, that Nakagawa's films are almost completely unavailable in the west. As far as I have been able to determine, seven of his roughly twenty horror films have been translated into English. There's another that I suspect has an English translated film print since it may have been shown at film festivals in the early 1980's but does not seem to have any kind of video release in the west. Two of his films, the ones I'd recommend with hesitation, are found in the Criterion collection, one had a DVD release from a cult film distributor that isn't too hard to find, and then the remaining films seem to have gotten some very limited releases from some extremely shady distributors. The Ceiling at Utsunomiya Castle is one of those in the last category and it was Nakagawa's first ghost story. He had directed two horror films before that, neither of which are available in English. Nakagawa's films are often adaptations of traditional ghost stories and this movie is one of those. In fact, this one is based on a true story, though history contains less ghosts and the possibility that there wasn't even a real plot. The shogun is due for a visit to Utsunomiya Castle and Lord Honda and a wealthy merchant have a plan to assassinate him. They have arranged for a group of carpenters and stone masons working in secret to build a device in the quarters planned for the shogun. Two of the shoguns scouts have caught word of something weird happening at the castle, but a mysterious masked samurai working for the merchant opposes them and the group will kill indiscriminately to fulfill their ambition. So as a traditional ghost story, this follows the familiar pattern of bad guys being total poo poo heads for the bulk of the movie, then their victims (or victim in this case) returns from the grave to make sure they get their comeuppance. As a result, there isn't a lot of supernatural horror in this movie, though when the ghost does show up it looks pretty good. Instead, this is mainly a mid-grade samurai film for the period with no real acting talent behind it. It's a few years too early for really quality fight choreography to become more common in Japanese films, too, so there's just a lot of flailing about with loosely held swords. I think Nakagawa's talents as a director really show up when he's working in color so this film doesn't have the complex shots or lighting use that I enjoy in his later movies. There's moments where I'm going, "Oh, this bit looks kind of nice," but for the most part there's not a lot there. So an interesting movie as an early work from an influential director, but not really worth the effort of chasing down. Especially if you're looking for good horror movies. I've got two more Nakagawa films to go here, so I'll save my recommendations regarding his work until the end of that. Oh yeah, the villain does grab a cat by the neck and throw it down a well, so he totally deserves the ghosting that he gets.
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Oct 8, 2017 18:42
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October 9 - The Ghosts of Kasane Swamp Things I've learned from Nakagawa films: people really shouldn't start stabbing when they see a dead person appear right where one of their family members was a moment ago. Soetsu is the only blind masseuse in feudal Japan who isn't a master swordsman. One evening he leaves his family to go collect money he's owed by his customers. The first one he goes to is a samurai who doesn't like a peasant saying he owes him money and so he chops up Soetsu. The body is dumped in a swamp with a sickle left behind to help him fend off the spirits. Shockingly, he rises from The murder scene is goddamned brutal in this film with the samurai gleefully cutting down the stumbling, blind masseuse. It's a film from the mid-50's so there aren't giant blood splatters going everywhere, but it's still a viscous attack. Sadly, the same cannot be said about other attacks in the movie; a woman takes an axe head to the face, though the consequences of that one are pretty drat grusome. Ghosts of Kansane Swamp leans toward the violent melodrama of Jigoku where violence escalates out of control with especially cruel consequences. Nakagawa is starting to get a feeling for how to use lighting in this movie and that leads to a lot more dramatic, moody shots, though it's still not completely there yet. Still, it's one of his better early efforts at horror and you can tell that it wouldn't take much longer before he worked out the formula. Only one more Nobuo Nakagawa film to go for me. However, time crunches limit my options for viewing until Saturday, so it'll be a few days before I get to it.
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Oct 10, 2017 00:11
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October 10 - Blair Witch I ran into not so much as a time crunch today as a "time slamming your hand in a car door". So after a fourteen hour day where I had no opportunity to watch anything (and I'm going to have similar problems tomorrow), I got home and immediately put on the first thing I could find in order to have a chance of finishing it before falling asleep. And that was the Blair Witch... reboot? Sequel? Whatever? And perhaps it's the exhaustion to the point of utter collapse talking, but it was kinda decent? What the hell? Wasn't this supposed to be a lovely cash in? So obviously this movie doesn't just follow the same path as the original cultural phenomenon. It really can't since the original was built on getting some actors in the woods with some recording equipment and trying to scare the gently caress out of them for a few days. It spawned a billion terrible imitators with low budget horror film makers. This one is actually slickly produced, more carefully structured, and it's even better shot and edited than most found footage movies. About twenty years after the Blair Witch Project, the brother of one of the student filmmakers who died thinks he's found a video online that points to his sister still being alive somewhere. He gathers some friends, the people who found the video that was posted to youtube, and together they go into the foods trying to find the house. And then things go wrong. I remember people complaining about how time and space was messed up in The Blair Witch Project back when that movie was originally released. That never bothered me since it was clearly intended as an indication that something supernatural was dicking with them. This movie cranks that warping of nature way up and makes it explicit that it's part of the weird happenings. And in a strange way, being more explicit about this aspect of the film, let the filmmakers escalate things more. The universe has turned against the hikers in this movie and its getting worse throughout the film. It gives the scares something to hook on and I really think it works. Of course the big controversy with this reboot was them actually showing the Witch. I'm kind of divided on this. I didn't need to see the witch, but at the same time this is a more direct movie than the original and it doesn't actually harm the film (or any kind of precious mythos) to have a ghost witch appear on screen as the final escalation. So it's not a perfect movie, the time loop footage doesn't make sense even in the context of the film since it was found on video tape but shot on digital to an SD card, but it is way better than I was expecting. I could have done without so much people screaming in the darkness at things I can't see, but overall a solid horror film.
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Oct 11, 2017 03:57
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October 11 - The Witches I'm just a little too old to have this movie be a childhood staple which is why I had never seen it before. But I wanted something light this evening and it felt like a good pick. A recently orphaned child and his sick grandmother go to a British seaside resort for some rest. Unfortunately for him, the resort is also the site of a convention of witches who have plans to deal with all the children of Britain. They're going to turn them into mice and the boy becomes one of their test subjects. I can see why this movie would have had a huge impact on kids at the time. It's freaky and weird and scary in all the ways that would delight children. Even as an adult some of the scenes were a bit disturbing (that first kid turning into a mouse, for example). I'm still wondering what happened to that housekeeper who may or may not have been turning into a mouse after she got into the formula. The adult cast is fantastic, especially Anjelica Huston who must have been entering the "witch roles" phase of her career. The kids... well, the kid playing the lead tries pretty hard but can't really carry all the weight of the film like he has to. He's not bad all the time, but there are moments. I guess the elephant in the room is that the very ending of this movie is terrible and it feels like the studio demanded a deus ex machina to make sure there was a "happy" ending. If it had ended a minute earlier it would have been fine, but then a fix for everything comes out of literally nowhere. Still, overall it was a decent movie and definitely one to scar children with. Basebf555 posted:It's what makes what Craven did with New Nightmare so impressive. He saw that the world of NOES that Freddy had been a part of up to that point had been watered down to the point that it couldn't possibly be scary anymore, and so he figured out a way to literally take Freddy out of that world and place him in a brand new one. The lazy, uninspired way to do that of course is a reboot, but we saw how that went. I know what Craven was trying to do in New Nightmare, but I think he completely failed at it and the film is a clunker. I would have really loved to see Peter Jackson's revamp instead since that would have been fun.
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Oct 12, 2017 01:48
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October 12 - The ABCs of Death I remember a few years ago when it seemed like every other person doing the horror movie challenge was watching this. And since they were generally going, "Ugh, this is poo poo," I didn't bother joining their ranks. But here I am, needing something I don't really care to dedicate my full attention to and it was available, so what the hell. 26 international film makers got assigned a letter and each made a short film about a word starting with that letter. I'm not going to talk about all 26 segments because that would be really stupid. Instead let me go on with trends: these were really bland segments. Most of them are something like a first draft, immediate response to the chosen word. Too many of them go on for far too long which given that the average is a bit under five minutes is saying something. And there's a lot of "this segment has been going on too long so... everybody now dies, I guess." These are the ideas that should have been brought up, and then thrown out when the brainstorming went on and a better concept came up. There's also way too much filmmakers deciding to put their fetish on display. In conclusion: what the gently caress, Japan!?
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Oct 13, 2017 01:34
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Basebf555 posted:That's Creepshow 2. Probably my favorite Creepshow segment. Great segment and it's a shame that the rest of Creepshow 2 isn't as good as Creepshow 1. I feel like if cutting The Raft into Creepshow would be best.
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Oct 13, 2017 19:43
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I want to say I'm looking forward to all of the reviews from the Scream Stream viewers of Kwaidan. A lot of people are getting exposed to great cinema this evening. Friday the October 13th Part XIII: The Final Reboot  Woo! Joining the conversation since it's pretty much obligatory to watch one of these movies given the date. However, I loving hate the Friday the 13th films. How much do I hate them? My favorite is Jason X. Seriously. They're derivative and lazy to the point of boring me. There's no tension or atmosphere. So I wouldn't watch another of these films except for the fact that today's Friday the 13th. But since I was having trouble remembering which of the original series I've watched (they're all so generic they blend together; though I'm positive I haven't Jason Takes Manhattan), I went with the reboot. A bunch of lovely teenagers go out to an abandoned camp in the woods to gently caress and smoke pot. I think everyone can fill in the blanks from from here. So pros for this movie: they know exactly why the audience is there and gives it to them fast. There's essentially a twenty minute Friday the 13th movie that was the opening credits. There's some sequences that play out pretty well. Cons: after that the movie stops for just as long of "wacky" antics. The missing sister subplot was totally unnecessary which you can tell because it basically went away for the majority of the movie, and having Jason keep a girl captive felt completely wrong for the structure of the film. There's too much forcing it into being a direct reboot for my taste; I didn't need baghead Jason at the start and then showing me him getting a hockey mask. The film winds up being adequate, but not really anything I'd recommend to anybody. Which I guess puts it in the upper range of Friday the 13th movies for me. It's better directed than most of them at the very least, though that's a super low bar.
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Oct 14, 2017 03:21
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I had another movie lined up for today, then as I was thirty seconds into it I went, "Hey, isn't there a movie titled..." and I was right, so naturally I had to watch: October 14 - Saturday the 14th  A family inherits a cursed house with a Book of Evil (actual title) in it. The son lets the monsters in the book out accidentally and then hijinx ensue as they try to stop them. So, I don't think there was a single laugh for me in this "parody". There were a few ideas that could have been funny, but they didn't have the skill to pull them off. Stuff like the television only playing episodes of The Twilight Zone, but it's all pretty straightforward Rod Serling-esque lines instead of The Scary door. The best joke in the movie for me was the giant headline of "The Exterminator Times" that the pest exterminator was reading that said, "30000 Cockroaches Dead in Philadelphia!" The film is rated PG and it's not even a 1980's PG, so they don't even go for the Sam Raimi style horror comedy antics. OTOH, there is the definitely underaged actress getting naked and being sexually menaced by a fishman in the bathtub while something resembling but legally distinct from the Jaws theme plays. So, yeah. Jeffery Tambor is in this movie and he can't do anything with his terrible role as a vampire who wants the house. I knew the film had a bad reputation going in, so it being a dreadful comedy wasn't a surprise. But it was a disappointment since they couldn't even get the easy things right. There's actually a sequel to this out there, but I think I'll save it for the next time there's a Saturday the 14th in October.
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Oct 15, 2017 01:08
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October 15 - Bram Stoker's Dracula No, not that one. This is a 1973 BBC television production of Dracula with Jack Palance as the vampire. I saw that and I thought, "How could I not watch Palance doing Dracula?" and he turned out well but the rest... Well, it's definitely a BBC television production from the 1970's. Dracula is tired of the humdrum life in rural Transylvania so he decides to go to the big city. He hires a solicitor to prepare a house for him and moves to England where he samples the local food. However, certain people catch on that there's a foreigner from eastern Europe taking their women and they won't stand for that, driving the immigrant back out of the country. Adaptations of Dracula have to go pretty broad given the nature of the original novel. A lot of them are based on the stage play adaptation which limits locations and cast. This one strips things down to the absolute bone. It gives it a herky-jerky feeling where we're just jumping from plot point to plot point. One thing that got me in this movie was the lack of sexuality in the film. Given how sexually charged the source material is, most adaptations of Dracula lean into that. Even the Bela Lugosi version has that simmering undercurrent. Here, though, the closest you get is triple layered Victorian undergarments. There's no passion in this Dracula. So not the worst adaptation I've seen, but it is definitely a bargain basement BBC adaptation.
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Oct 15, 2017 17:01
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October 16 - The Happiness of the Katakuris Okay, Sound of Music meets Dawn of the Dead is really pushing it. The musical numbers are more extreme than than Sound of Music and the family definitely isn't the Von Trapps. And there's no zombie apocalypse, though I'm willing to concede the commentary on Japanese culture. A laid off department store employee and his wife buy a remote country inn with the thought of healing their broken family. The criminal son, divorced daughter with her own daughter, and father all move in to help. The inn is too remote to attract guests, though, and when they finally get one he kills himself. For the sake of the inn, they decide to cover up the death. Then other guests arrive and also wind up dead and they keep doing it as the deception spirals out of control. All of this is accompanied by outlandish musical numbers. I kind of liked this film, but I'd never ever actually recommend it to anyone else (which is how I react to most Miike films, come to think of it). It's grotesque and absurd and surreal and disjointed but it's never dull. The scenes of them dealing with the madness their lives have become are pretty good. On the other hand, sometimes I feel the movie goes too far; I didn't really care for the claymation sequences and how they sometimes derailed the film. Oh, and there's pedophilia though at least in this film it's supposed to come across as weird and creepy. And then the sumo wrestler dies in the middle of sex and crushes the twelve year old and you get something so horrible that you have laugh.
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Oct 17, 2017 02:49
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October 17 - Prom Night 2: Hello, Mary Lou So the original Prom Night was not very good, being a cheap Canadian cash in whose biggest draw was that they actually had Jamie Lee Curtis. On the other hand, I had heard that Prom Night 2 goes in a different, weirder direction so I thought, "Why not?" Holy poo poo I'm glad I did since this is the kind of off kilter horror film that is peak 80's. Thirty years ago a prank gone wrong caused prom queen Mary Lou to go up in flames as she was being crowned. Mary Lou was an all around "bad girl" who enjoyed things like talking back to her parents and having sex. Now it's 1987 and it's time for the prom again. Good girl Vicki has been denied a new prom dress by her strict mother and decides to go hunting in the school basement for something she can use. There she unlocks the trunk with Mary Lou's prom regalia and lets her ghost out to go get some revenge. In an odd kind of way, this is a low rent Nightmare on Elm Street. The adults in town have all buried the events of that prom night but now the ghost is back and taking it out on their children. Vicki keeps getting pulled into This is the kind of movie where a priest realizes Mary Lou's ghost is running around so he immediately breaks out a candle pentagram and performs an exorcism. Not exorcising anything in particular, mind you, just tossing one out there in general. Apparently the bible has rules for ghosts in it that theologians have been overlooking for centuries. There is absolutely no mistaking what decade this movie was made in. It pegs the 80's meter hard. One of the fun things in this movie is that the first half is weird stuff appearing. The second half is Mary Lou doing crazy poo poo. The whole result is something trashily entertaining. Funny enough, I thought Swordfish originated the blowjob while hacking scene...
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Oct 17, 2017 21:36
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Hot Dog Day #89 posted:2. The VVitch: A New-England Folktale, 2015 The letter W is a fairly modern invention and it was commonly placed in printing presses as literally two V's stuck together. It's used in the marketing and credits for this movie to try to invoke the feeling of the 17th century. And before you ask, it's "double u" because the letter V also is a fairly recent invention and what was U was written as V until someone decided to break things up and move the vowel to U. October 18 - Cabin Fever  So I don't like the movies of Eli Roth. His choices in horror are generally the opposite of what I enjoy. I don't find them scary or horrifying, just unpleasant. But the October Horror Challenge is all about pushing things, or at least it is for me, so I decided to watch Cabin Fever. At the very least, I was kind of hopeful that his full Rothiness hadn't developed yet when he made this movie and I could appreciate it more. A pack of young adults have rented a cabin in the woods for a week of what people in these movies usually do at cabins in the woods. Then a sick man covered in bleeding sores pounds on their door looking for help and it isn't long before they kill him but wreck their truck in the process. They're trapped in the cabin, unable to find help, and panicked that the infection is spreading. I think it was an interesting choice to have pretty much all the characters be incredibly terrible shitheads. That's not sarcasm, either. The initial scene sets up a disturbed yokels situation which everyone is familiar with, but it doesn't take very long for the movie to turn that on its head and prove how terrible the main cast is. The local people are creepy weirdos, but they're also the victims of these these people who are killing their family members, robbing their homes, and generally being asses. And then their own behavior gets turned back on them. OTOH, it does cause problems for the movie. This is the movie for you if you like scary musical stings over shots of glasses of water. I honestly thought until the last twenty or twenty-five minutes that there was no disease and people were just panicking and making things worse. Unfortunately that last third where it shifts to being a more straightforward film kind of undermines the scenario for me by throwing it back to "evil hillbillies after the young people". I would have liked the movie more if the locals were just unpleasant people but not actively trying to kill the outsiders. So, I'm kind of mixed here. The first part was okay but not fantastic. It was at least interesting enough to keep me engaged. The second part, though, was just eyerolling. So I guess that averages out of mildly negative? Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Oct 19, 2017 |
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Oct 18, 2017 23:19
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October 19 - Hell House LLC Years ago a group of people set up a haunted house at an abandoned hotel in a small New York town. On opening night, visitors flee the building in a panic and all but one of the people behind the haunted house die. A cover up of what happened in the hotel ensues, but a documentarian attempts to piece the truth together from footage taken during the hotels construction and other footage taken that night. So this movie is terribly written. It's central conceit that it's a documentary about that night makes no sense since no documentary would be like this film. The acting is pretty awful. And yet I still kind of liked it. I think it's because the film embraced the haunted house theme and just went, "Okay, keep throwing spooky poo poo out there," and wound up in a groove with that. And really, isn't spooky poo poo why you want to watch a horror movie anyway? One thing about this movie is that unlike most found footage movies, it feels like an editor actually took footage and assembled a movie out of it. Most found footage movies are just about running the camera to fill time and as a result there's a lot of things that don't make a whole lot of sense to be in a movie. Hell House, on the other hand, actually uses editing at several points; for example, they combine two shots together to show that something weird was happening. They're not that blunt about things through the whole film, but I still kind of wanted more of it since it gave the movie a distinct feel. So this fulfills the requirement of "a creepy movie" nicely, even if I felt it could be a lot more. Still, it's not bad to run into one of those rare found footage movies that's actually watchable. BTW, you know if the town is named Abaddon that there was some seriously evil stuff going on its past. STAC Goat posted:I said it when I watched it earlier in the month. I can't imagine why there hasn't been a sequel in a genre that makes a sequel for everything. Killer Klowns was a near miss for me, but I would watch the gently caress out of a sequel in the hopes that they improved.
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Oct 19, 2017 23:46
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STAC Goat posted:I will again reiterate that for whatever flaws Hell House LLC had it was the one movie this month that turned me into a little baby who couldn't go to bed with the lights off. Yeah, they got the tone and atmosphere right which goes a long way with me.
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Oct 19, 2017 23:50
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CopywrightMMXI posted:Is Hell House LLC on American Netflix? I watched it on Amazon Prime.
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Oct 20, 2017 19:05
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October 20 - The Girl With All the Gifts Frankly, I don't get how this movie ties into the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy at all. There is a secure facility where every day children under heavy guard are carefully strapped into chairs completely restraining their movement and taken to classes. The children are brilliant and the military guards and teachers are clearly terrified of them. They've never been outside, their captors do not touch them, and the slightest personal effects are not allowed. Melanie is student #4 and is the teacher's pet. One night a doctor asks her to pick a number and student with that number disappears the next day. So when the doctor asks her for another number, she picks 4. Okay, I'm being a bit oblique since the first half hour of the movie presents the scenario as a mystery, but if you've watched the trailer, check out the movie poster closely, or are just mildly clever you can already guess what's happening. I appreciate that the movie gives a pretty morally ambiguous view of the scenario. The surface reading is, "How can these people do these horrible things to this child," but then the mask drops and you realize that they're not comfortable with it, the child isn't quite the child she often appears to be, and maybe the actions are justified. Really minor spoilers regarding the film's concept here: Zombie movies are so played out and stale at this point that even the rare well done ones like Train to Bussan don't thrill me. This movie, OTOH, really brings something fresh to the table by giving us a sympathetic zombie who still needs to die for humanity to live. The Girl With All the Gifts is a really melancholy film. I wound up more depressed than scared or disturbed by it, which isn't to say there weren't a fair share of disturbing scenes in it. It's obvious from the start that there's no sunshine or happiness coming in this film; it's just a question of if there might be a bit of hope in the end. Which brings me to my biggest problem here, the way the movie starts out is with some really on the nose writing. The story of Pandora's box comes up with obvious implications. There's a writing exercise the children do with obvious connections to the plot. I don't know if that stuff is from the original novel, but it's pretty ham handed in what turned out to be an otherwise great movie. I really have to mention that though the acting is generally good except for a few bit parts, Glenn Close is goddamned amazing. She took a part that could have easily been a mustache twirling villain and made it incredible. This is still probably the best film I've seen this month. It's goddamned intense the whole way through. Even though you can tell it's a low budget affair, they also knew where to spend the money to give things a few big sequences.
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Oct 21, 2017 01:07
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Biff Rockgroin posted:Going out of my usual wheelhouse, I ended up watching a classic Russian horror movie this time. As far as I can tell, the Soviet Union produced exactly two horror movies. Viy is one, Den' Gneva (or Day of Wrath) is the other. I have not been able to find a translated copy of Den' Gneva at all even through the naughty places on the Internet that we shouldn't talk about. Apparently, the plot of the movie involved ecological damage in Colorado and werewolves.
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Oct 21, 2017 18:48
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October 21 - Kung Fu Zombie So after the intense and depressing Girl With All the Gifts yesterday, I kind of wanted to go to the opposite end of the spectrum. So I punched "kung fu horror movies" into Google and after eliminating the movies I had seen before, I picked Kung Fu Zombie entirely on the basis that its title meant I was guaranteed the walking dead of some kind and thus a valid movie for the challenge. Okay, maybe not walking... A Taoist wizard and a bandit plot revenge on a good kung fu master by setting a pack of hopping vampires on him. The bandit gets killed by the vampires, though, and his ghost harassing the wizard demanding that he get a new body. Meanwhile, an evil kung fu master shows up for his own revenge on the good kung fu master. When evil kung fu master gets beaten to death, the wizard accidentally revives him as a western style vampire. The bandit's ghost winds up possessing the body of the good kung fu master's father and then everyone punches everyone else. So this was a light bit of fluff as you might expect. It's got the usual mix of comedy and action that was popular in the martial arts films of Hong Kong in the early 80's. The action wasn't as impressive as some I've seen. The two main schools of martial arts were all about endurance and they talked about fighting for hours, so I thought that they might do some impressive They Live style super extended fight scene. Unfortunately, the fight started and then went for about thirty seconds of continuous action and a character said, "They've been fighting for hours!" despite there not being even any edits that imply time passing. Still, the ending with the evil kung fu master vampire fighting while on fire was kind of nifty since you know they had to actually put a stuntman (or possibly even the actor) in some flame retardant gear to cover the spots where he was on fire and then light him up. Frankly, there's better kung fu versus monsters movies out there if you want weirdness or martial arts. This one is just kind of middle of the road, super low budget even by the standards of the era stuff.
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Oct 21, 2017 22:37
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October 22 - The Blackcoat's Daughter I've been trying to find smaller pictures than that for the posters, and yeah, I could have shrunk it down myself, but I wanted those quotes and sources to be readable. it's the day before... uh... late winter break (it's mid-February, so not winter and not spring) and the parents of two students at a Catholic girl's school haven't shown up to pick them up. One of the students had a premonition of her parents dying in a car wreck, the other intentionally pushed off her parents so she could deal with a personal issue. Meanwhile there's a girl having flashbacks to a mental institution who catches a ride with a couple heading toward the school. Oh, any one of the girls at the school starts acting weird. This is a movie that desperately wanted to be a significant, heavy drama with supernatural elements. Instead it's meandering, lost, and never even managed a coherent message even in straight storytelling. The movie has a structure that I'm going to have to get into spoilers to explain, but for those who just want something blind, it's convoluted in a way that film students writing a script think is clever and the rest of us go, "Why would you present your movie this way?" The first half of the film is drama that never means anything and never goes anywhere. The second half doesn't use any of that. So I have to dive into spoilers here to explain why I was so annoyed with this movie. So here's the bulk of the plot laid out: one of the girls is possessed and kills everyone who remained at the school. The girl heading to the school is her eight years later after she escaped from the mental hospital and is catching a ride with the parents of the other girl. Aren't you shocked and impressed by this twist? Oh sure, it meant cutting back and forth between the storylines in a way that made the narrative just drag on endlessly, and then giving us the actual story in flashback over an hour into the movie. And yes, there was no compelling mystery in the first half to make that kind of thing pay off. Oh, and they used two different actresses except they look exactly the same age so it's completely unreasonable to think that they're the same character a few years apart. And they made it clear that something bad was up with both the couple she was riding with and the girl so I said, "If this turns out to be the same character only in the future then this is the stupidest loving moving I've seen in a while," well before the reveal. I'm not sure reworking the script could have saved this one, too. There wasn't enough to the story as it was and the director completely failed to provide any tension or suspense out of what was there.
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Oct 22, 2017 22:32
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STAC Goat posted:I really enjoyed it. It wasn’t great but it was a nice little classic horror story with a twist and a few amusing little side laughs like the snake charming and a snake basket instead of a casket. And it came with its own drinking song. Lair of the White Worm is a film I can't call a good movie, but I still would recommend for people who like crazy movies. It doesn't hold together very well, but drat if it doesn't have some fantastic bits. SMP posted:Nightmare on Elm Street You've got to be a real monster to watch a Nightmare on Elm Street movie on Friday the 13th.
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Oct 23, 2017 14:19
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp_d96GUyu0 October 23 - The Void  So there's some guys running out of a farmhouse chasing some people that they gun down and then burn, but one person gets away. And then there's a cop whose marriage is on the rocks with his nurse wife finding that guy bleeding by the side of the road so he takes him to the hospital that's open for the last night after a recent fire is making them shut down. Then there's a nurse who murders a patient and is killed by the cop, but she comes back soon as a gross monster thing. Then the cop is having hallucinations and a bunch of cultists show up to surround the hospital and prevent people from leaving. And then the two gunmen from the beginning burst into the hospital and start threatening everyone. And that's the first half hour. I almost feel like the Void is two different movies welded together. The first is a decent but not really exceptional "people trapped in remote location by bad things" movie. The other is a really good "holy poo poo have some hosed up insane gross poo poo!" movie. And the two of them don't come together particularly well. There were several points where the characters made some kind of statement or weird jump and I was going, "What are they even talking about?!" and that makes me think there was some cut material that might have helped bridge things better. For the most part the creature design was pretty cool in The Void, though the transformed Doctor didn't really work for me. Everything else is suitably slimy, tentacly, and gross. And all the monsters looked practical to me, though if someone said that they enhanced some things with CGI I would not be shocked. I read that this was Lovecraft inspired and you can definitely see that in certain aspects of things. The god the cult worships is definitely Nyarlathotep, for example (their symbol being a black triangle/pyramid). And the film definitely gets into a "what's the point of even going on" scenario as it progresses. Given how poorly Lovecraft inspired stuff often is, it's kind of nice to see it done pretty well. The Void is pretty solid, especially the second half when things go off the rails. In an odd way, I wish it was about fifteen or twenty minutes longer so that the scenario in the first half could be built up a bit more. Usually I'm wanting padded movies to hurry up and get on with it, this time I'm going, "Yeah, we could have used a bit more mundane threat early on to ramp things up."
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Oct 24, 2017 01:24
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Egbert Souse posted:19: Vampyr (1932, Carl Theodor Dreyer) IIRC, it was shot so that there would be a talkie and silent version of the film and the talkie version has been partially lost. So the "not much dialog" is due to the sound track not existing in its entirety.
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Oct 24, 2017 02:44
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