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 Yeah yeah, I didn't see it until today. Sue me. The Exorcist is a movie that sparks a lot of debate. Not about whether it's good, but about whether it's good today. As revolutionary as it was in horror, it's still over 45 years old. Literally hundreds upon hundreds of horror films have been released in its wake. In 2019, what does that look like? To talk about it in a vacuum, it's a slower burn than you may expect from pop culture. Most of the famous/infamous content is actually in the latter half of the movie, with Regan's possession coming in after quite a few scenes (including a rather long intro in Iraq) and starting out with Pazuzu seeming more like an rear end in a top hat who hates doctors more than anything. As it progresses, it becomes increasingly more gruesome and disturbing. The infamous crucifix scene remains just as shocking today as it was when the film was new. But when it comes to how the film has aged, I find it in a weird place. In terms of "aging badly", it hasn't. It's still a great horror movie and Pazuzu is a surprisingly humorous and well-written villain. But a lot of what was special about it in 1973 isn't as special today. It's been copied to death by every film and TV show that's ever had an exorcism, either just trying to copy the formula or making jokes about it. It's hard to find "The power of Christ compels you!" very....well, compelling when you've heard it a dozen times as a joke. In the end, watching it is sort of like watching an old sitcom that used to be edgy and funny but is now old hat. You'll still get enjoyment out of it, but if you lack the context of what the genre was like at the time you'll wonder just why everyone calls it one of the greatest films of all time. And scariest? Not even close.
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Jan 2, 2019 06:15
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 So, The Birds. Probably the first film in history to be scarier for the actors than the audience. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure in 1963 this was fantastic and terrifying. But the effects that had been nominated for an Academy Award have aged incredibly poorly, with the only convincing bird attacks being the ones where Hitchcock just let real birds loose to bite and scratch his actors (including children, who I'm sure came out very traumatized from what probably seemed like a great acting role when they auditioned). There's one huge masking job that's done well and still mostly holds up today, but there's also tons of sodium vapor "yellowscreen" tricks that look blatantly obvious. While the slow burn and initial impression of a romantic comedy aren't necessarily a problem, the bigger problem is that it tries to return to slow drama scenes after the initial big bird attacks and the infamous eyeless corpse. It's a weird pacing choice that throws off the film. Much of the rest of the film is unintentionally comedic, as the Discord server's records will show. Not even kidding, I liked Birdemic better. Both movies were unintentionally funny, but only one of them kept it going from start to finish. Basebf555 posted:As always with Hitchcock though, the scenes that land are extremely harrowing and memorable. Tippi Hedren getting completely mauled by the birds in the house towards the end really is extremely effective, although Hedren certainly suffered for it, by all accounts that was not a fun scene to shoot. I couldn't get past how all of the sounds she was making in that scene sounded more like she was shooting a sex scene, complete with a breathy "Oh Mitch...."
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Jan 3, 2019 15:53
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 Hoo boy. Here we go. A lot of people talk about this movie as if it's 10 minutes of auditioning and 90 minutes of excruciating torture. What you actually get is a masterful slow burn by Takashi Miike, gradually revealing the true depths of depravity that a strange girl at an audition will reach. What starts as a dramedy with one strange girl suddenly turns creepy, and builds up to a horrific conclusion. Eihi Shiina gives an incredible performance as a sociopath who only shows true happiness when she gets to cause pain. Miike freely engages in trippy, drug-induced sequences and hallucinations to further unnerve the audience. The final torture scene had me cringing, but the vomit eating had me nearly throwing up. Audition by far remains the scariest of all the horror films I've seen in the past year. It may not hit every mark perfectly, but it'll remain burned into your mind forever.
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Jan 4, 2019 05:19
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married but discreet posted:I also can't help to think that this movie has played a role in the demographic crisis of Japan. I think it's definitely a movie that brings the Japanese demographic crisis and cultural weirdness around dating and gender roles to the forefront in a pretty horrifying way.
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Jan 4, 2019 15:12
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 Sleepaway Camp is the best horror movie I've ever seen. As a horror movie, it's surprisingly well-made. It has excellent buildup to the infamous ending (which I finally got to see a live reaction to for the first time in my life on Discord) and the makeup and gore effects are all phenomenal even today. But what really gets me is that it's loving hilarious, almost entirely unintentionally. First off, this is flaming gay as hell. Muscular men in cut-off shirts, mesh shirts, and Daisy Dukes flexing and stripping naked to go skinny dipping together. Pranks involving butts. An extended flashback sequence to kids catching their dad in bed with another man and giggling at him. And, you know, the ending. It's also filled with unintentional comedy, from Mel mistaking Ricky for the killer and ignoring a drowning girl to throttle him to "ENJOY COCAINE" graffiti in the canteen to a fat kid named Mozart trying to stab the rest of his bunk for a shaving cream prank to the complete lack of care everyone seems to have for multiple campers dying in the season. Some of it is due to filmmaking or scripting gaffes that somehow make the movie even funnier (like a closeup of a cop's mustache revealing it to be the most obvious Halloween store fake). Aunt Martha manages to steal the entire movie despite only having two scenes. Literally every single character is either a sociopath, an incompetent idiot, or a pedophile; somehow this makes the movie even more entertaining because it's such a cast of over the top assholes that it become surreal. Is it a flawless movie? Yes and no. It's absolutely filled to the brim with flaws, but those flaws all come together to create a gut-bustingly hilarious party film with shockingly gruesome deaths. I give it 5 out of 5 gratuitous penis displays (which is fewer than the movie actually has).
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Jan 5, 2019 04:43
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 Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is an ugly movie. I don't mean that in a derogatory sense. In fact, this movie was meant to be ugly. It's the kind of ugly that exists everywhere, and has existed everywhere since the dawn of humanity. It's the story of Henry and Otis, two psychopaths living together and killing together and how Otis's sister starts to fall in love with Henry because she's pretty hosed up herself. The film is grounded in reality to a disturbing extent, as Henry and Otis are extremely realistic depictions of a pair of seriously messed up serial killers. The film's pacing and structure are unusual, as there's no true buildup to a climax. The very first shot in the movie is a corpse, and it continues from event to murder to event to murder without really slowing down. Everything is aided by the phenomenally creepy soundtrack and the equally phenomenal performances, including the one that put Michael Rooker on the map for life. If you can handle the disturbing reality of everything that happens, Henry is a masterpiece of grounded horror.
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Jan 6, 2019 04:07
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 This is an odd movie, one that defies genres in a lot of ways. At its core, it's a romance between two really hosed up 12-year-olds. But it also incorporates horror in a weird way. The horror elements are a relatively small part of the film, but when they appear it's through incredibly graphic gore with body parts flying and faces melting. In the end, it's a fantastic film. The one criticism I have is in the sense of overthinking it: a romance between a centuries-old vampire and an actual 12-year-old boy is weird at best, statutory rape at worst.
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Jan 7, 2019 04:42
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STAC Goat posted:I think that's very much part of the film. When the movie begins you see it as a story of two 12 year olds getting to know each other and being first love. As it goes on you realize that one of them is a grown, God knows how old, monster preying on a lonely child. You see the man who has been with her and he's a beaten down, depressed, trapped, monster himself. And I think there's one question that lingered with me when the film was done. "When did she meet him?" I couldn't shake the idea that she did the exact same thing to him and she was now just seducing and abusing her replacement after 40 years of abusing and preying on him. I would say whether or not it's a criticism depends on how the filmmakers intended it to be. The sequel novel goes one way with it, but the film has no sequel and as far as I know won't be getting one. So you have to consider whether the ending is intended to be cute or if it's intended to be horrifying.
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Jan 7, 2019 05:55
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I've already seen it, so I'll be doing Zombi 2, the knockoff Italian sequel!
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Jan 7, 2019 20:32
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 Is it called Zombie, or is it called Zombi 2? Yes! My replacement for today's essential is an odd duck. You see, Italian copyright law in the 1970s made it legal to make a sequel to a film you didn't have the rights to. The original Dawn of the Dead was recut by Dario Argento, given a new soundtrack by Goblin, and released as Zombie in Italy. Lucio Fulci was tapped to direct the Italians' knockoff sequel. As you can see from the gruesome poster, he certainly put his all into it. It's almost strange to see a horror film look so....clean. No filters, no unusual lighting choices, no post-production changing of the colors. From start to finish, everything looks surprisingly crisp. Fulci makes up for it with nauseating amounts of worms and tons of incredibly graphic violence. A gruesome headshot opens the film and the first zombie kill is less than 7 minutes from the start, bright red blood pulsing from an open artery before a big lumbering zombie climbs up the steps of a sailboat. The acting is, at best, nothing to write home about. Neither is the script. The music is often intentionally dissonant synthesizer mashing, and what isn't is almost unusually tame for a horror movie. What you're here for is the gore, and the ridiculous zombie vs. shark fight scene that clearly took a ton of effort to create something utterly baffling. It's a horrible film, but it's a memorable one. One in which it peaks at the shark fight and then never really captures that expression on your face again.
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Jan 8, 2019 02:04
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 The 'Burbs is a great film. It hits that weird sort of aesthetic of the late 80s to the early 90s of throwback 1950s suburbia that felt like it was all over the place at the time. Much of the movie was improvised due to the writers' strike preventing them from editing the script while filming, with Tom Hanks especially pulling off some incredible slapstick and one-liners as they go on. That being said, I'm hesitant to really put this movie in the "horror" category. The horror elements are very limited and almost exclusively played for comedy. The movie overall comes off as a straight black comedy,.
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Jan 10, 2019 05:10
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TrixRabbi posted:The zoom on the femur is definitely the highlight of the film. It reminds me of the 2017 IT movie where they find Ben's New Kids on the Block poster and it suddenly plays part of "Hangin' Tough" while rapidly cutting to the poster. It's just so out of left field.
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Jan 10, 2019 16:46
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This is another one I've seen. I wonder what to replace it with...
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Jan 10, 2019 21:30
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 The Candyman has a place in the horror pantheon with Chucky, Jason, Michael Myers, Freddy, Leatherface, and other famous horror slashers. This is an injustice to himself. Candyman is not a slasher movie, and despite his fame I would never put him alongside slashers. It's the story of urban legends and how they progress into myth, seen through the eyes of a pair of college students studying the legend of the Candyman, a lynched slave that kills people in the Chicago projects. Another writer and director would have made a plain slasher, with the Candyman cutting a swath through the ghetto in pursuit of his target. Instead, Bernard Rose crafts a relatively slow and creepy story about the investigation. The Candyman is less interested in killing and more interested in taking another urban legend to join him, leading to him framing the protagonist for murder and encouraging her to give herself to him and join him in immortality. The structure of the film bucks many trends and cliches and creates something wholly its own, aided by a low-key gothic score by Philip Glass that lends the crumbling slums the atmosphere of a Victorian mansion. Candyman has immediately landed itself at the top of my list as one of the best horror films I've ever seen, and I encourage anybody who's serious about the genre to watch it.
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Jan 12, 2019 05:01
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 Being very familiar with Psycho but having never seen any ANOES movies past the first one, I decided instead to join the stream for A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. At its core, Dream Warriors doesn't seem that great. It's one of the quintessential 80s slashers with awful acting and cheese out the wazoo. But the plot (a group of kids haunted by Freddy discover their dream powers and take the fight directly to him) is surprisingly original for the time period, and the special effects are absolutely phenomenal. The film is practically an effects showcase: multiple window jumps, fight scenes (including with a stop-motion skeleton!), some excellent early examples of CGI and computer-aided masking, massive amounts of practical effects and puppetry, even whole rooms that change and distort. The film almost has more scenes with effects, stunts, and elaborate sets than without. Even the bad stuff isn't necessarily bad, except maybe Heather Langenkamp's atrocious acting. One girl's dream power is parkour and gymnastics and she evades Freddy by backflipping off a wall. Another's power is turning into the Wizard Master with a Dracula high-collared cape ensemble and lots of rotoscoped magic. Another turns into a punk with a 12-inch mohawk and dual switchblades. There's cheesy one-liners and lots of Dokken on the soundtrack. Watching it is like being transported into the cheesiest version of the 80s to ever exist, and it's magical.
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Jan 13, 2019 04:53
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 You know exactly what you're in for when a zombie comedy opens with a title card saying that all events are true and everyone is a real person being depicted. Return of the Living Dead is an unabashed send-up of zombie films decades before pop culture would play the genre out until it's undead itself. The protagonists are a group of punks in outfits so extreme as to be parody, from oversized checker suits to dyed mohawks and leather jackets with enough metal to make the wearer fly into every MRI machine in a 10-mile radius. The movie never takes itself seriously at any point, with the initial zombie creation treated with all the urgency of an industrial accident that nobody wants to get out. Much of the humor comes from the complete lack of care or caution much of the cast has for their situation. These zombies are also the only ones that you can credibly call a threat to the world. They're virtually indestructible, intelligent, and maintain their full speed and strength. Whereas the zombies in Dawn of the Dead are slow and clumsy enough that you can easily jog through a crowd of them untouched, these are basically impossible to do anything about even with military force.
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Jan 14, 2019 04:11
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 First, Gene Wilder means I'll always pronounce "Frankenstein" wrong for the rest of my life. Second, this is a hell of a throwback! The age in which horror films were adaptations of 19th century stories with fourth-wall-breaking intros in front of a curtain, matte paintings and constructed sets on a soundstage to the virtual exclusion of location shooting, and sweeping orchestras over the credits. The first Frankenstein is a slow, gloomy, gothic masterpiece. The set design (matte paintings of dark clouds with no horizon, giving the impression of a looming and endless sky) practically defines the gothic horror aesthetic. Even for a black and white film, it feels incredibly dark and depressing. Chiaroscuro abounds. Befitting its age, the film almost comes across as a world used to stage plays trying to figure out what to do now that they have cameras and microphones. The film's structure and script could be almost perfectly transposed to a stage setting, with everything divided into specific scenes in specific locations. It's like if you gave a theatrical director who's only ever known theatre the opportunity to have unlimited time to decorate a set of any size he wanted before each scene, rather than a few seconds of blackout to transition . This is no surprise, as James Whale was exclusively a theatrical director who only had 2 years of experience in Hollywood and 2 cinematic directorial credits under his belt. As usual, the big question with old films is "Does it still hold up?" I would say it holds up as a movie, just not a scary one. The acting is the bold kind that was trained into everyone at the time, still transitioning from theatre. Boris Karloff's performance as the monster is surprisingly subtle and easy to understand through the heavy makeup and plodding movements. If you go into it without the expectation of being scared, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised and gain a new appreciation for humanity's transition from theatre to film.
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Jan 15, 2019 17:38
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 It's not obvious unless you've read the book, but Bride of Frankenstein is more than a cash grab sequel. It's a "What if?" story exploring the possibility of Dr. Frankenstein having not had second thoughts about creating a mate for his monster, in addition to a small amount of the book that wasn't adapted. The film is shorter than the first in some senses, as despite a similar runtime it opens with Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron talking about her story and recounting the first movie (including reusing footage) for about 5 minutes after the opening credits. However, you can sense an immediate improvement in Whales's directing. The camera has even more motion and more cuts during dialogue and action, a sign of Hollywood's slow march toward modernity and away from imitation of stage plays. Likewise, the changes between scenes and sets are more fluid between large locations rather than seeming like a theatrical director trying to figure out how to film a stage play. The film hits far stranger notes than its predecessor, from Dr. Pretorius and his miniature people (which Frankenstein reasonably describes as "black magic") to the horrible screaming of the Bride when she awakens. No longer constrained by attempts to stick to even the bare plot of the original novel, William Hurlbut's screenplay takes more risks and further develops the monster's character. The film is more about the creature than the people, creating a fleshed-out and complex monster that can truly be called a classic.
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Jan 15, 2019 22:04
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 I was surprised to find out something that appears so cheesy is apparently considered one of the most influential horror films of all time. Who knew? Cat People is the story of a Serbian immigrant who turns into a man-eating panther when sexually aroused. This sounds like the kind of bizarre concept that you'd see in a no budget indie movie released on Dailymotion today, but it's played in full 1940s seriousness here. The lighting designers clearly put in overtime, with strong chiaroscuro and deep shadows that perfectly highlight or silhouette exactly what's meant to be focused on. Simone Simon delivers a complex and believable performance as the lead cat lady, especially her unease with moving forward in a relationship. The film is an extremely low key horror, even for the time. It could easily be mistaken for a plain thriller if you're not told beforehand that it's meant to be a horror movie. Some missteps (like only seeing two dates between the leads before their marriage, or Irena's belief about turning into a panther being revealed in 15 minutes) seem related to the very short run time, just over an hour if you discount the credits. Take that away, however, and you get a surprisingly intelligent psychological film for a very early point in the genre.
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Jan 16, 2019 21:12
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 While not my intended film for last night, I managed to catch most of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter when Rabbit decided to actually work. As the name suggests, this was intended to be the end for Jason Voorhees. Much like Halloween, the producers had never intended for the Friday the 13th series to become the phenomenon it did and either never planned a sequel or wanted the sequels to tie the name to an anthology series, depending on when you asked them. As such, the film ends with Jason's seemingly permanent death, one that the sequels would need to outright zombify him to counter the damage dealt. By this point, the series has already become entirely about the kills and the nudity. The cast is increased purely so all but two of them can be murdered with rapidly increasing frequency; the MPAA cut out as much as they could, but the uncensored kills show off some of the year's top notch gore. It hits every single slasher stereotype, right down to Jason painstakingly hanging and arranging corpses so the Final Girl can find them one after the other in the climax, with the one body that's not hung up being thrown through the window to scare her. Every character is completely flat, to the point where loving Jason gets the most complexity at the end. So what we have here is spectacle in its purest form. A film that exists only so that teens can hoot and holler at the screen and pause to make out in the back without worrying about missing anything important. At least it's fun to laugh at.
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Jan 17, 2019 15:36
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 I've seen yesterday's film, so I decided to go with a film that many describe as a landmark for the slasher genre: Black Christmas. Coming several years before Halloween and releasing the same year as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, it hits virtually every note of a stereotypical slasher, in some ways even stronger than the more famous pair of films. From the use of the killer's first person perspective (including complex shots like climbing up the side of a house) to the holiday setting and the structure of a killer slowly picking off the entire cast in isolated areas until the climax, it could easily be mistaken for something a decade older. The killer (played by Nick Mancuso) gives an obscene and incredibly creepy series of threatening and grotesque taunts over the phone at the beginning of the film, quickly setting the tone for the ensuing bloodbath. Black Christmas makes a somewhat unusual decision for a slasher by never revealing the identity of the slasher. While the 2006 remake gives the killer a name and background, the prowler remains unnamed (except for the possibility of "Billy") and unseen except for a silhouette. Not only does he never get his comeuppance, he's barely even human. He's something less than that. Considering its age and provenance in the development of slashers, it's easy to try and compare it to Halloween as the closest film to it in era and style. Honestly, I'd give Black Christmas the prize here. While the killer is too anonymous to be as iconic as Michael Myers, there's a larger cast of characters that I think are more rounded than the ones in Haddonfield. I'd also call the film scarier, thanks to the disturbing phone calls and constant cuts to the killer's first victim slowly rotting over the course of the film. The kills are played for drama and horror rather than spectacle for the audience or showing off special effects, and the killer's ability to change voices so smoothly and dramatically almost implies something supernatural. Because of the length of time the film takes place over, there's more proactive behavior on the part of the victims: the whole drat college bands together to search for the first victim, spurred on by her boyfriend bursting into the police station and confronting the original uncaring cop who refused to take her disappearance seriously. I think the only thing that kept Black Christmas from becoming the franchise Halloween did was the lack of a distinctive killer. With only a shadowy figure, there's no real personality behind the murders to drive people back to see him kill again. Every major horror franchise rapidly becomes less about the quality of the film and more about seeing your favorite murderer find new, creative ways to kill. Black Christmas is a better movie, but it's not a better franchise. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Jan 25, 2019 |
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Jan 17, 2019 19:00
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 The Haunting is one of those movies where it could be cheesy anywhere else. It's so stereotypically "gothic horror" as to be almost ridiculous: horns blowing and strings shrieking at everything, dutch angles and off-kilter sets full of shadow, even a narration and montage at the beginning showing how the house's owners all met their demises. Somehow, it ends up working perfectly. I'd compare the film most strongly to Hereditary, in part because Julie Harris and Toni Collette look similar and have similar characters and in part because both films deal with the possibility of what seems to be paranormal activity actually being all in the protagonist's mind. Unlike a more typical female protagonist of the era, Eleanor is a broken and hysterical woman who jumps at virtually everything and loses her temper quickly. Whereas Hereditary ends with a confirmation of the haunting being legit, The Haunting keeps it ambiguous from start to finish. Eleanor's trials are accompanied by voice-overs constantly giving us her internal monologue in which she demonstrates just how many screws she has loose. The Haunting is a masterpiece that one could argue was very ahead of its time. It's rare to find horror in the intervening decades that matches what it accomplished, making it feel almost like a modern movie recorded with an old camera.
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Jan 18, 2019 23:21
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 Pet Sematary, one of the innumerable Stephen king adaptations, doesn't hold back the creepy even in the first 10 minutes. When the neighbor across the street is asked about the path into the woods while meeting the Creed family, he makes sure to give a pregnant pause before glancing meaningfully into the distance and saying he'll bring the family down there some time. Like in any good Stephen King work, the Creeds are a family struggling just to deal with basic life. A husband and wife in conflict over their recent move to rural Maine and bratty kids only find things getting worse as they discover that the pet cemetery behind their house has the ability to zombify whatever gets buried in it. While King is known for his grand scale cosmic horror, Pet Sematary sticks to a relatively simple concept and does it as well as possible. It's only aided by King writing his own screenplay. It takes a while to really get going, but when the horror truly starts it doesn't stop. While the children are pretty terrible, the adult actors are all very strong in their parts, Dale Midkiff especially. Like any good King work, it hits a lot of emotional beats beyond simple horror and works hard to develop the characters even without a cocaine-fueled writing spree. It showcases some of the best that King can accomplish when given the screen.
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Jan 21, 2019 01:15
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 At the time Rosemary's Baby was filmed, Roman Polanski had not yet become the Roman Polanski we know today. He was engaged to Sharon Tate a year before her horrible murder by Charles Manson's cult. What we have instead is Polanski in his prime, before he lost his wife or raped any children. The film doesn't do anything to set up what occurs. It plays as a drama at first, with only the ludicrous amount of blood surrounding a woman who leaped out a window and smashed her head on the pavement suddenly shocking you into remembering that it's a horror. This only serves to make the horror more disquieting when it slips in; the audience experiences the growing sense of something not being right as Rosemary does, with seemingly innocuous but unusual events being reflected on after the true implications are known. It's a landmark in creativity and experimentation in film, creating something that seems 40 years ahead of its time. When it comes to the question of "giving him money", I take the stance that the film is not purely Polanski's work and that it's not right for people like Mia Farrow, Krzysztof Komeda, and William A. Fraker to have their hard work deleted from the public memory because of a director they had association with before he did anything bad. In fact, I'd argue a film like Rosemary's Baby has even more resonance today than it did in 1968 in the wake of the #MeToo movement as a film about rape and how a woman struggles with the ensuing pregnancy.
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Jan 21, 2019 17:46
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 Peeping Tom came out at a similar time as Psycho, both major contributors to the birth of the slasher. While Psycho gained incredible fame as one of the greatest films of all time and multiple Academy Award nominations, Peeping Tom virtually ruined the career of its creator and shocked the world with its darkness. Our protagonist, Mark, is also our villain. Carl Boehm delivers a fantastic performance that easily matches Anthony Perkins's Norman Bates in skill and intensity. Twisted into insanity by his abusive father, he has become obsessed with making a "documentary" of the women he kills. Unlike a typical slasher, we follow Mark as our viewpoint character. He's quiet and reserved until something sparks his twisted creativity, at which point it can be hard to snap him out of it. He falls in love with Helen, a girl who can actually get through to him but seems to have a sort of danger fetish of her own from how she reacts to things. One of the best scenes for showcasing the movie's style is his murder of Vivian, a stand-in for the lead actress in the film he's working on. When he puts on jazz, she immediately flies into a choreographed dance routine around the studio typical of Singin' in the Rain and other musical films of the 50s and 60s. Mark moves around her almost with annoyance, completely apart from her as he sets up the circumstances for her death on camera. It's a noticeable riff on genres of the time, as if he's an interloper barging into a studio fantasy film and bringing horror somewhere it doesn't belong. Ultimately, Mark is an endearing and tragic protagonist. He's clearly too far gone to really help, but showcasing a slasher from the slasher's point of view gives you possibilities for a glimpse into their complexities and what they actually desire.
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Jan 23, 2019 01:14
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 As you can probably tell from the poster, The Abominable Dr. Phibes is a camp's camp. From the very beginning, when a couple dance in ridiculous Flash Gordon-esque costumes to the tunes of an automaton band (obviously played by real musicians wearing creepy plastic masks), you know what you're in for. While the film is technically classified as a comedy horror, it has very few actual "jokes" and a synopsis of the film could easily be mistaken for a straight horror film. Any comedy comes entirely from the over the top campiness of the characters in a colorful world of bizarre costumes and elaborate sets with elevator-mounted organs. Vincent Price is almost an outlier, playing the part of a serial killer wearing a mask of his own face almost completely straight (well, as straight as someone so inherently hammy can play anything), but then you realize that the entire film has been played straight. It takes something bizarre and treats it like it's the most normal thing in the world. The film wastes no time setting up the plot of Dr. Phibes killing people, to the point where it almost feels like your copy is missing about 20 minutes from how rapidly it gets going. This is likely the film's biggest flaw, as there's no real gravitas to the killings (especially when one of them is revealed by an awful fake flying bat effect) and the inspectors have the typical laconic investigatory methods and line delivery of any 1970s British detective. It's an ordinary film that becomes notable by its strangeness, marred by unusual pacing.
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Jan 23, 2019 17:47
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 Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is the classic attempt by a slasher franchise to redefine itself, fail, and go back to doing the same thing over and over. Much like Halloween 3: Season of the Witch suddenly derailed in a vain effort to end Michael Myers' story and become an anthology series, the creators of Jason Voorhees wanted to retire the character but maintain the formula. After definitively killing off Jason in the previous film and setting up Tommy Jarvis as having been driven insane by the murders he witnessed (and in the case of Jason, committed), it follows up by revealing the "revived" Jason to be a faker in a costume and all but outright stating that Tommy would be the hockey mask-wearing villain going forward. As we all know, the film received savage reviews and Jason was promptly resurrected as a zombie in the next film while Tommy Jarvis continued on as a recurring protagonist. Like the rest of the 1980s Friday the 13th films, Part V is a "hidden flask of vodka at the drive-in with the cheerleader you're trying to get to third base with" flick. It plays up the hockey mask even in the opening credits, knowing exactly what people are here to see: naked teens killed in creatively gruesome ways. The characters are universally flat cookie cutter stereotypes, including Tommy Jarvis as "the quiet traumatized guy who fights the killer." You've got the fat guy who's always eating, the punk with way too much eyeshadow and a Walkman, the slut and her rear end in a top hat boyfriend, the token precocious child.... The most unusual part of the film is that the first kill is actually by someone other than the killer and serves to set the plot in motion. Otherwise, it's a paint-by-numbers piece of schlock. Watch a compilation video of the kills, read the Wikipedia plot synopsis, and you're good.
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Jan 23, 2019 21:15
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(Pardon any typos as me being drunk) Henry probably bears the closest resemblance to Peeping Tom. It’s a drama about a serial killer rather than a traditional slasher, setting the protagonist as the killer from the first minutes. It works hard to make a killer sympathetic, but with radically different treatments of the killer’s love.
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Jan 24, 2019 03:15
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 Gremlins is arguably one of the most famous horror comedies of the 80s. So why is its sequel almost forgotten? If anything, Gremlins 2: The New Batch is even more distilled 80s than its predecessor despite coming out in 1990. A pastiche of Donald Trump (strangely accurately represented as an incompetent manchild who needs everyone else to do everything for him) owns a big gleaming tower downtown with a rotating centerpiece on the sign outside that resembles a set from Robocop. He has his own news network with reporters that have hair that seems to have been crafted to be as precisely obnoxious as possible. Everyone has shoulder pads. Haviland Morris exists. It's a bizarre film from top to bottom. Every sequel is made for people who already saw the previous one, but Gremlins 2 is incapable of being viewed as a standalone film. It drops you into the plot and following up on the previous film so fast that anyone who hasn't seen the first will be utterly lost, almost as if Gremlins was originally 4 hours long and got chopped in half. Christopher Lee plays the evil Dr. Catheter trying to create battery rats and read the brainwaves of cows with a pair of clone assistants. A gremlin becomes a genius with a British accent after drinking the right serum and unleashes a winged gremlin on New York, which leaves the Batman symbol after crashing through a window. It's utter chaos. Gremlins 2 manages to be one of the strangest films I've ever seen. With Joe Dante being given unlimited creative control for a movie he didn't really want to make, it almost feels like a protest. It's self-referential, breaks the fourth wall, and insults itself. The black comedy of the original is replaced with cartoonish slapstick parody. Would I recommend it? Abso-loving-lutely. It's the kind of movie that can only be made by a man with lots of talent and no intentions whatsoever of following a single rule. The moment it clicked was when the gremlins suddenly invaded the movie theater playing their own movie, forcing Hulk Hogan to make them play the rest of it. Who the hell thinks of that?
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Jan 25, 2019 05:26
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 Here's my replacement for John Landis. Silver Bullet seems to be one of the more obscure Stephen King adaptations. Neither the novella Cycle of the Werewolf or its film adaptation are particularly well known outside of King aficionados. Like just about every King work, Silver Bullet is set in a small town in Maine that looks like every other small Maine town from Stephen King books. It bears some resemblance to It from the same time period, with kids solving a mystery to hunt down a monster plaguing their town. Rather than a group of misfits, Silver Bullet features a paraplegic Corey Haim (who later gets a wheelchair built like a three-wheeled motorcycle) and his sister teaming up with Alcoholic Uncle Gary Busey, which is really a cast that could have only happened in 1985. The film follows the typical King structure as well. The protagonist trio all have problems in their personal lives and relationships, especially with each other, which they confront and overcome to succeed. Kent Broadhurst gives a fantastic brief performance as the father of one of the werewolf victims, as does Everett McGill as the werewolf reverend himself. An excellent scene not in the original book features the reverend desperately attempting to stop the lynch mob hunting him, only to end up slaughtering them in the woods that night. The confrontation in the foggy swamp is easily one of the best "werewolf hunters get wrecked" scenes I've seen in the genre. While the film sometimes gets a bit too comedic at odd times (such as the werewolf looking like a wrestler in a fursuit, grabbing a hunter's bat out of his hand and beating him with it) and I find the after-the-fact narration by adult Jane a lazy way of filmmaking, it's a solid flick that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend for someone looking for a new 80s film to watch. Plus the motorcycle chair is awesome.
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Jan 25, 2019 18:58
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I saw this in the Discord a while ago, so I need to think of a good replacement. Or just watch the next Friday the 13th or Halloween in the series.
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Jan 25, 2019 22:58
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 Riki-Oh is a Hong Kong adaptation of a Japanese manga. This is the most normal part of it. It's a movie that you watch with friends with absolutely no expectations of being good. What seems from the very barest exterior to be yet another kung fu movie is a baffling gorefest in which nobody seemed to consult a script before moving on to the next scene. Men who can disembowel or decapitate with a single punch somehow stay in prison instead of slaughtering everyone and walking out. The warden carries around a single-shot pistol that can fire multiple rounds in a row, all of which are compressed air bullets that make people explode. And he can hulk out and turn into a monster; this receives no explanation. It's a river of blood and guts. The plot is meandering from one scene to another, as if every scene is just a reaction to the previous one with no foresight of what's going to happen next. Likewise, there's no sense of pacing or a climax because the final scenes aren't really that much more insane than the first ones. Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is an always-on menagerie of weird death.
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Jan 28, 2019 03:46
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 Creepshow was a bit of an oddity at the time of its release. Anthology films weren't very common at the time of its release and The Twilight Zone had been off the air for almost 20 years. An anthology series doing a throwback to Pre-Code horror comics is a popular idea today, but unusual and rather radical in 1982. Because Stephen King and George Romero knew they were doing something unusual, they decided to throw caution to the wind and eliminate anything traditional about a film's structure or appearance in favor of making a moving comic book. Shots are often shrunken down and bordered to resemble panels, sometimes with several on screen at once. Colors and animated backgrounds are used with wild abandon and Tom Savini creates grotesquely cartoonish living corpses and gore. The acting is often just as over the top to give the feeling of reading a 1950s comic. Usually the only thing people talk about with Creepshow is the stories themselves, but they're only a small part of what some of the best craftsmen of 1980s horror accomplished. Especially since this was Stephen King's coke period, so you just know he was off his loving rocker to make this. Maybe he gave Romero some of his stash.
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Jan 28, 2019 18:38
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 Bram Stoker's Dracula almost feels like an accident. It makes so many bizarre decisions and flies off the handle at so many moments that it's almost like Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Coppola, and all of the actors went into a studio together with an entire tractor trailer of drugs and emerged a week later with no memory of the film reels that were now sitting around their scattered, nude bodies. On a surface level, it's yet another retelling of the story of Dracula. But it's just so goddamn weird. The intro (in which Dracula wears red armor that resembles either muscles or the contents of a bag of Ruffles depending on your perspective) seems weird enough with Gary Oldman overacting his heart out and making a cross bleed by stabbing it. I can assure you that you haven't seen anything yet, as the elderly Dracula is even worse. Coppola seems to have known that zero audience members would go into the film not knowing Dracula was evil, so Oldman acts as such a stereotypical evil vampire that it's almost like he's in a bad comedy. He does his hair up in a bizarre horseshoe bun, has fingers the size and shape of freshly picked carrots, and wears a robe with a cape that must be 50 feet long. Keanu Reeves is known in the film for his horrible acting, which I can only blame on his direction given that he's normally a perfectly fine actor. Jonathan Harker is a clueless idiot incapable of any emotion beyond childlike bemusement with a lilting British accent that rapidly disappears, as if he's intentionally trying to be as bland as possible to help highlight the hilarious insanity of everyone else. He also seems to be the only one not given a costume created by a group of maniacs in a steampunk store. One of the most well-known parts of the film is the utter lack of CGI. Told that the effects he wanted were impossible without it, Francis Ford Coppola fired his entire visual effects team and told his 29-year-old son to do it. Despite having no real experience in film beyond what he got at Tisch, Roman delivered such a masterpiece of visual work that it almost feels like it was dictated to him from above. Matte paintings, models, forced perspective, projections, multiple exposures, etc. The entire film is achieved in-camera for no apparent reason other than them wanting to. It's one of the greatest pieces of art of all time. Every single frame is crafted with the utmost care. It's just the kind of care that you get from a lunatic's asylum.
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Jan 29, 2019 01:34
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 As the oldest film on the list so far, I find it appropriate to compare Nosferatu to the original Frankenstein, a film that came only 9 years later. Nosferatu is a silent film, but the orchestra is anything but silent. Watching the film is almost more like attending a concert with pictures attached with how much work they're doing. This isn't too inaccurate, as back in the day it would have received a live accompaniment. Much of the original music is actually missing, so there's a lot of choices you have for sound made over the decades. It's notable that Nosferatu is a good 20 minutes longer than Frankenstein and actually suffers much less from the "filmed stage play" feeling that the later film does. Movement between locations is much more dynamic, with shots cutting quickly back and forth between distinct environments and even incorporating location shooting instead of exclusive use of a soundstage. In a way, it highlights James Whale's inexperience and difficulty breaking out of the theatrical mindset despite coming into film after Murnau. While the film is hardly scary today, it's easy to imagine a 1920s audience being horrified by it. Count Orlok is a terrifying monster by the standards of the time; there's good reason his silhouette on the wall is such a distinctive pop culture memory. Nosferatu is important not just in its influence on later film, but in showcasing the true capabilities of filmmakers in the 1920s.
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Jan 30, 2019 18:00
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STAC Goat posted:Does it really makes sense to compare Nosferatu to Frankenstein? Like can't you chalk a lot of those "stage play" problems Whale had up to the industry's move into "talkies?" I'm no film historian but my understanding is they didn't know how to deal with that, they hired stage directors like Whale to figure it out, and there were growing pains. In the case of Whale, he was initially hired purely as a dialogue coach and worked on films that way before being given the director's chair. It just feels like in terms of staging, Frankenstein was almost a step backwards. Bride of Frankenstein is much closer to what Nosferatu accomplished with the medium 15 years earlier. There's a lot of silent films before it that really were just filmed stage plays, so it's like the industry sort of forgot what to do as soon as people could talk.
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Jan 30, 2019 23:24
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I still need to post my review of Les Diaboliques when I get home, but in total I have 29 films if you include both Frankensteins separately.
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Feb 1, 2019 21:15
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 When I first read the background of this movie, I found it eerily familiar. It turns out the Hong Kong film Hex is actually an unstated remake, which I watched on a Hollis stream a few months ago! Les Diaboliques is the story of revenge. The psychologically and physically abusive headmaster of a cheap boarding school in France openly cheats on his wife with his mistress. As the opening of the film progresses, it slowly becomes apparent that the two of them have connected over his abusiveness and are planning to take care of him once and for all....only they don't count on him coming back. While it initially seems like it'll be nothing but a psychological thriller, Les Diaboliques rapidly begins moving into horror after the murder. I already had the twist spoiled for me thanks to Hex, but it still works today and in 1955 it would have been incredibly shocking. In some ways, it almost feels like a predecessor to Psycho for the boundaries it pushes and the twist that it implores the audience not to reveal. The acting is almost universally good, especially Paul Meurisse. Despite having very little screen time due to, you know, dying, he gives a chillingly accurate portrayal of a violent abuser who makes everything about himself. I will say that -- especially if you're watching on Amazon Prime -- an education in French will be beneficial. There are some words or phrases that the captions exclude for brevity and will only be noticed by someone familiar with the language. Without a doubt, Les Diaboliques is necessary viewing. Not just for horror fans, but for film buffs in general regardless of genre. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 03:43 on Feb 2, 2019 |
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Feb 2, 2019 03:41
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