|
Is there any restriction wrt the movies being new to me? I mean obviously those should be the majority, but I've got a couple of flicks I've seen before, but not in a while, that might provide some good data.
|
#
¿
Apr 1, 2020 07:49
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 18, 2024 22:48 |
|
|
01. House (a.k.a. Hausu) (1977) 2020/04/02  I went into this knowing almost nothing, except that goons loved it. I'd seen a poster at one point, and had this image in my mind of a deeply terrifying movie, with the house as this all-consuming living thing that cannot be fought or escaped. lmao Anyway, this movie is tonally a lot like The Evil Dead 2, except somehow even more light-hearted. The House is in fact a living thing that's trying to kill the cast (a bunch of Japanese school-girls), but in a way that zigzags between lackadaisical and horrifically excessive. In one scene, the girls will bumble their way out of danger without even knowing it's there; in the next, one of them gets swallowed and chewed apart by a piano, noisily, with blood spraying everywhere. The music shifts from one mode to another just as abruptly. The look of the movie is deliberately cartoony, the characters all massive stereotypes. It's overwhelming, the amount of stuff happening on-screen at all times. I didn't notice it til afterward, but the House is deceptively huge, with rooms and rooms and rooms, big enough for like eight people to all get separated in, cluttered yet spacious enough for flying kicks. It was decent. Some of the gags landed (that fuckin cat); others whiffed. I'll be honest: I'm one of those weirdos that likes the first Evil Dead movie the best. I prefer horror movies that pull humour from how hosed everything is, but for that to really work you need some sort of straight-man. Here, everyone is having too much fun for it to work for me. 02 The Exorcist 3 (Director's Cut) (1990) 2020/04/05  Sorry I missed the MotM; I had some trouble getting a hold of this. Anyway, I watched the Director's Cut which tried to undo the studio interference. It removes some large plot elements, and has wildly varying image and sound quality in certain scenes. Never seen the theatrical cut, or Exorcist 2. The movie follows Detective Kinderman, a minor character from the first movie, as he investigates a series of murders with a seemingly supernatural cause. The case grows more serious when his good friend, Father Dyer, is murdered. I loved it. It has this tone to it that's hard to define. Objectively, it's mundane. The movie is overwhelmingly indoors, in hospitals and churches and corridors. Human spaces. Most of the time, these places are well-lit and populated, and you never get lost; the audience comes to know the hospital's layout quite well. Most of the scenes are just conversations between people. There's something in it, though, a sense of seriousness and warmth, that I found very engaging. The mystery Kinderman is unraveling is crazy-- a demon possessing a man, occasionally slipping into other people to commit murder-- yet the movie doesn't play this up, doesn't enjoy the madness. Kinderman takes the case seriously. You could make a movie with the same plot, and have it focus on the cop wondering whether he's crazy, and have him constantly struggle against the disbelievers around him. In this movie Kinderman, when faced with compelling evidence, accepts these supernatural elements readily. There's a scene or two of him in conflict with skeptics, but it's just not what the movie is about. It's not even much of a mystery; the demon just tells him what's going on, albeit slowly. The real narrative of the movie is Kinderman figuring out what to do about it. The Director's Cut is pretty rough. The occasional footage+audio lapses are impossible to ignore, and really break up the flow of things. The changed ending is extremely abrupt; Kinderman just shoots the possessed man, and that's that. Whatever consequences he goes through are left up to the viewer's imagination. He never gets a chance to explain this, or really express his mood at all, though you get hints of it in his demeanour as he approaches the cell. It seems to me that the demon might just keep on killing people; the only thing Kinderman has accomplished is freeing Karras from the torment of being its vessel. Personally, he may still be hosed: earlier, the movie makes a point that the Gemini killer's victims all have names beginning with K. It's stark and upsetting, a totally different texture from the movie that led up to it. I think it'll stick with me for a while. Can't recommend it enough. edit: added pics Kazzah fucked around with this message at 12:36 on Apr 7, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Apr 6, 2020 05:31
|
|
|
You repeated the word Pooka so much, it feels like it's lost all meaning!
|
|
#
¿
Apr 6, 2020 13:07
|
|
|
03. The Eyes of My Mother (2016) 2020/04/06  Shot in black and white, this movie depicts Francisca at three points in her life: as a girl, when her mother is murdered; as an adult, when her father passes; and several years after that, when the mutilated woman she's kept in the barn for years escapes, and brings the cops in to take back the child Francisca stole. I have no interest in any of those French ultraviolent horror movies of the past decade. Still, I decided to branch out a little and watch this, and I'm glad I did. Maybe the lack of colours took the edge off of it. This movie is cold and harrowing, and without humour. It's a character study of Francisca, this monstrous person, across her life. It tries to find a cause as to why she is the way she is-- is it a response to trauma, or was she just born bad? Is she cruel, or just totally amoral? While she's totally willing to murder and mutilate people, you can see the ways she's motivated by ordinary human wants and needs: for companionship, closeness, purpose. It's also visually striking, and very leanly-paced. Would recommend. 04. Friday the 13th (1980) 2020/04/07  I'd never seen it. Though I felt like I had. What can I say, that hasn't been said before? It's creepy and well-paced, and does a lot to instill the ordinary setting with menace. It'd probably have more of an effect on me if summer camp were a thing in my country. I knew about the twist already, but still, Betsy Palmer does a good job alternating between dangerous and absurd. There's a couple of nice shots in there, and I found myself really absorbed by the kids just going about their business setting up the camp; it's nice that the movie takes its time to establish normality first. I'm gonna keep watching these, although I'm not sure if I'll count them towards the challenge.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 10, 2020 08:59
|
|
|
05. The Evil Dead (2013) 2020/04/10  Saw the originals a few years back, but didn't get around to this one 'til now. I had a great time-- in some ways, I prefer the remake. There's this force to it, where the characters don't even have a moment to think they've got things under control. It's not as overtly comedic as Evil Dead 2, but there's a certain cartoonish aspect to the ridiculous damage everyone endures. The defibrillation scene, for instance: the actor plays it straight, and the music plays it up as a big emotional moment, but the home-made defib is so gross and the way Mia jolts each time push it around to being funny. This is for the best, because there's a lot of serious bodily trauma in this, and I couldn't watch it if it were played straight. Hands, tongues, eyes, knees, and hands. Poor Eric. In some ways he gets it worse than the girls, even though the demon clearly wants them first. Amazing ending; it just goes full death-metal cover art.  06. 28 Days Later (2002) 2020/04/11  This is a rewatch, but it's been a few years. I somehow didn't know who Brendan Gleeson was last time. Watching this, I was shocked at how similar it was to Sunshine, which I also rewatched a couple months back. Obviously they're by the same director, same lead actor, and so on. But I remember a lot of people making a big deal out of the genre shift in the third act of Sunshine (usually as a negative). This movie sort of pulls the same trick. It's not as severe, of course-- I mean, this is overtly a horror movie from the word go, whereas Sunshine starts out as a creepy, unsettling sci-fi-- but there's a similar shift between the middle of the movie, where the characters travel through the mostly-peaceful countryside, and the end, when they're running around an unlit mansion on a dark and stormy night.  There's something going on there; leaving the dangerous city for the idyllic farmlands and manor houses, only to find a worse danger there. (Though in the end, things turn out fine once the infection burns through them as well). I love the small amount of characterisation given to the infected. They're not mindless creatures that can somehow walk forever without running out of energy; they're just extremely angry people, and are still bound by the same limitations as healthy people. There are indications that they're still conscious in there (one boy shouts "I hate you!" at Cillian Murphy); merely crazy. Also, I'd forgotten how immediately prickish the soldiers were; feels like they just reused the same actors for Children of Men.  I disliked some parts of it; the action scenes have tons of quick shots that make it hard to parse what's happening, and the whole movie is noticeably blurry, as you can see from the screenshots. I didn't get a lovely copy; it really does look like that. I know the cuts are to evoke a certain mood, and the cheap cameras are a side-effect of filming "abandoned London" quickly in the small hours, but I don't like it. Still, glad I rewatched it. I'm starting to get a better picture of how influential this thing is, and I love its strain of grimy 2000s paranoia. Kazzah fucked around with this message at 09:48 on Apr 13, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Apr 13, 2020 09:38
|
|
|
Man, this thread slowed the gently caress down after people finished posting about their Easter binges. Anyway, 07. Suspiria (2018) 2020/04/12  A remake of this excellent giallo from 1977; both movies are about an American girl inducted into an exclusive German dance academy in the 1970s, run by a coven of witches who want her for their own purposes. The original is moody, bathed in rich colours, dreamlike, kind of plotless. It's set in Germany, but I can't tell why; everyone just speaks Italian all the time anyway. The remake makes a point of its setting: it's in west Berlin, in the midst of the unrest and terrorism of 1977. This, and the character of Klemperer, give me the impression that you need a stronger grasp of the history of that era to completely get what they're going for. The main thing I know about Berlin is that it's cheap and lively, that political events have sort of shielded it from the economic forces that have exploded rent and eliminated all "unnecessary" expenses everywhere else. Hey, the academy also lets you live there for free, cool. Fortunately for me, this movie has a lot in it, beyond the significance of its setting.  The dance academy is an interesting setting; this secluded space run by women. The only times we see a man in there are when some cops come to investigate, and get hypnotised and, uh, emasculated by the witches. The only major male character is an old man, Klemperer, who takes an interest in a missing dancer-- and he's played by Tilda Swinton (very convincingly, I might add). The movie does not depict the women's academy as an innately good thing: the conveners after all are killing their students. Of course, the protagonist Susie isn't an especially good person either; she is revealed to be an agent of one of the coven's mothers, sent to kill off the witches on the wrong side of a dispute, which she does with relish. The whole narrative of the first movie, of the innocent corrupted and subverted, is just an act here. The missing dancer Klemperer is trying to find died (at the start of the movie) because he would not listen to her, so he is trying to assuage his guilt; no-one in this movie is wholly good.  The dance scenes are stunning, and the only time when things get colourful. They take that one soundtrack element of the original, the rhythmic gasps and sighs, and do more with them. The act of breathing is connected to the act of dancing, which itself is some sort of communal ritual to the dark gods. When I watched the original, I thought it sounded good, but here it's entrancing. This movie is dense, and I need to watch it again in a few months. 08. Excision (2012) 2020/04/13  I was planning on doing this one later, but since I've been posting these in pairs I decided it would make a neat partner to Suspiria. I watched this when it came out, liked it a lot, but hadn't seen it since. The name is in reference to Repulsion; this is a horror movie about madness. Teenager Pauline is a misfit, obsessed with death and surgery and always at odds with her mum. Over the course of the movie, she experiences a lot of friction with her parents and classmates, has morbid dreams, prays halfheartedly, and occasionally claims to be mentally ill. In the end, it becomes clear that she's not just making excuses when she murders her sister and a neighbour in an attempt to give her sister a life-saving lung transplant.  I've got to say, it's a very different experience if you go in knowing the ending. You can see The Plan forming quite early, and a lot of Pauline's actions and smart-rear end remarks take on new weight. Her relationships with her family are interesting. Her mum wavers between an unbelievable bitch, and a flawed person who is trying their best; her dad is perpetually on the edge of saying something but never does; her sister sucks up to Mom, but is kind and loving the rest of the time. Eight years on, I found Pauline's dreams-- colourful grotesque sequences of sex, blood, and death-- to be kind of boring, and was much more interested in the day-to-day angsty teen melodrama. There's this one scene towards the end where Pauline overhears her parents talking about her that's genuinely heartbreaking. There's a line midway through, when she's confronted by the principal over something: "It's not my fault I was born with a chemical imbalance"; at first glance you might write it off as a smart-rear end kid repeating something they read in a book, but as her behaviour ramps up it becomes clear she's just describing reality. In a hundred other movies the Unreasonable Adults are a source of frustration; here it's tragedy. I enjoyed this movie the first time I saw it. This time, I loved it. I found it totally gripping, even compared to the other April movies I enjoyed. I'm really glad I gave this one another go-around. drat, I forgot Ray Wise was in this.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 19, 2020 08:11
|
|
|
09. Arachnophobia (1990) 2020/04/14  After Excision, I decided to watch something to take the edge off. Arachnophobia is a big wet dog of a movie about a doctor in a small town beset by extremely venomous spiders. The whole thing begins when this one James Bond-type spider kills a nature photographer and then stows itself away in his coffin so it can sneak into the US. Once in California, it breeds with a local spider, and starts an ant colony (but with spiders) in the barn of the house that Jeff Daniels has just moved into. It was fine. It wasn't particularly scary, and I'm not normally blase about spiders. At some points the technical limitations were clear; they used models sparingly, and there's only so many things you can make a real spider do on camera. At other times it was pretty impressive, like the shot with the spider running from the flame-thrower, or the one where an (actual) spider runs straight at a cat. I liked how whole-heartedly it embraces the dumb premise. The spiders all collectively decide early on that their mission is to hide inside shoes and light-fixtures, and kill people when they're least expecting it. The characters wise up to this; there's this fun scene midway through where Daniels and his accomplices are searching a house for spiders, and they start checking in mugs and birthday cards, places where no spider would ever actually hide, but where a paranoid person might feel nervous about. There are some odd little scenes where the movie draws a comparison between its spiders and its humans: the Special Agent mates with the local spider at the same time Jeff Daniels and his wife do it, and in the first half of the movie the spiders and humans kill each other at an exact 1:1 ratio. The spiders are often shown making eye contact with humans, and when they run into humans in open ground they'll square up instead of scurrying away like normal.  Anyway, it was fun, though it wasn't much of a horror movie. The characters wind up moving back to the big city, and complain about their dreary lives and their Christmas Bonuses (not a joke). The end credits play to the song Don't Bug Me, by Jimmy Buffett, which gave me a laugh. 10. The Company of Wolves (1984) 2020/04/18  I went in knowing nothing except it's got werewolves. I have to say, it was a whole lot weirder than I expected. This movie has a complicated not-quite-an-anthology narrative. A teenage girl in the modern day, Rosaline, has a dream in which a fictionalised version of her family lives a few hundred years back, in a village in the deep dark woods. Within the dream, Rosaline has various supernatural experiences, in what evolves into a loose retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. Also in the dream, there are four extended sequences where a character tells someone a story (with the characters in the story often played by the people who are in the main narrative).  I was kind of bored at first; I don't like dreams as a narrative device, and I'm not fond of movies where everyone's wrapped in like five layers of grimy white swaddling. Still, it gradually cast its spell on me. There's a series of neat interrelations between the stories the characters tell each other and their influences and desires, and the influences and desires of the girl dreaming the whole thing up.  I can't figure out whether the movie thinks being a werewolf is awful or great. To an extent this is clearly intentional, as the wolves depicted in the stories show a gradual shift in time with the changing characters. In one story, being a werewolf is associated with innate beastliness; in the next, it's a curse from the devil; in the next, it's the work of a vengeful witch; in the next, it's a romantic fantasy. I think this is made complicated by the decision to use a bunch of dyed German Shepherds in the place of wolves in most scenes, which completely undercuts any menace they might give off. I know you've got to suspend belief in any movie, but I just can't be afraid of a bunch of dogs grinning like idiots while they run around a camera crew. Still, they manage to get some mileage out of the werewolf transformations, which are uniformly gross and gory as hell.  This is clearly just a very good boy being rowdy
|
|
#
¿
Apr 20, 2020 13:52
|
|
|
11. Idi i Smotri (Come and See) (1985) 2020/04/20 happy birthday hitler  This is a movie about the apocalypse, which happens to be set in occupied Belarus in 1943. A boy, Fliora, attempts to join the local partisans, and the world ends. It's a sad, angry, haunting movie.The noise is relentless: distant engines, tinny Mozart, even the birdsong is made to feel overwhelming. Scenes, even single shots, just go on and on, as the characters struggle through mud, thick grass, tightly-packed crowds; the movie refuses to give you any relief from the moment. The characters are stuck, and so are you. When the mood isn't claustrophobic, it's the opposite, as the characters are pinned on open ground, running from gunfire (or just the thought of it) when the nearest trees are two hundred yards away. There are times when the characters are cheerful, laughing and clowning around, but the movie doesn't play along, doesn't take any joy in their fun, which makes them come off as a little deranged.   The Germans are absent for the first 90 minutes (of 140). You see a plane, stationary and ominous like a comet. A forest is torn apart by explosions, but you never see the bombs. Spectral figures stroll through the haze. Gunfire comes from a nearby hill. The partisans hide at the sound of engines; it passes, and you're never sure what direction it came from. Most of the film is taken up by Fliora and the other partisans scrounging for food. They try to raid a warehouse, but it's too well-defended, so they instead go rob a local collaborator, but the cow they take is killed on the journey back. After all these failures, Fliora winds up in a local village, and finally the Germans enter the film properly, rounding up and slaughtering the inhabitants. They leave Fliora alive, on a whim, and wander off on foot, drunk, carrying loot and torches like an ancient warband. It's the second massacre of the film, but the first one happens off-camera. This scene goes on forever. It's loud, chaotic, introducing new characters and discarding them constantly. It's viscerally unpleasant to watch.  The movie's characters are pretty thin. Fliora doesn't feel like a person; he feels like a stand-in for Innocence. I wouldn't call this a failure. Come and See doesn't want you to identify with any character. It wants you to pity them in the face of otherworldly horror. It works.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 21, 2020 04:51
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 18, 2024 22:48 |
|
|
12. House of 1000 Corpses (2003) 2020/04/24  After a couple of not-very-scary movies, and one that was a creative interpretation of "horror", I decided to get back to something clearly, obviously in the genre. Honestly, I didn't think much of it. This movie follows four young people as they drive through some nameless southern town, get taken in by a family of evil rednecks, and get horrifically murdered. It's nasty and cruel. Not exactly scary, but deeply unpleasant to think about too much. No moral, no lesson, no justice or vindication. There's something in here that's hard to define. The movie is filled with these short clips of ancient horror movies (I think real ones, though they could be skits just for this movie). Many of the characters have this familiarity with these movies, and classic Hollywood in general. The movie's total avoidance of any moral is clearly calculated; the Fireflies are unbelievably evil, and everyone else is too stupid to stop them. They're also the most interesting part of the movie, awful as they are; I felt kind of let down when they were just not in the movie for the whole climax. I probably would have disliked it more if I hadn't watched Terrifier last year. Now THAT was a piece of poo poo. Similar tone to this movie but without any art and barely any sense of humour. 13. The Devil's Rejects (2005) 2020/04/26  I guess the director also though the family was the most interesting part of the first movie. Anyway, this time around the Fireflies (and local weirdo Captain Spaulding, who it turns out is one of them) go on the run from the law, personified by Sheriff Wydell. I spent the first half of the movie wondering why I was watching it. The escaped Fireflies, Baby and Otis, flee from their home and take shelter in a motel, where they rape, torture, and murder all the inhabitants, laughing at their inability to protect themselves. From hearing people talk about it I'd gotten the vibe that they were the protagonists, and I couldn't possibly see how the movie could pull this off.  Somehow, it did. Sheriff Wydell is a jackass in a really interesting way. The main distinction between him and the Fireflies is how self-serious he is. There's this great scene midway through where he's privately rehearsing the prayer he'll speak when he finally kills them, trying out different inflections for when he explains the Thin Blue Line to God. He's been waiting his whole life for an occasion to kill a bunch of people in a righteous and justified way, and it would be easy to write him off, if not for the fact that it honestly is justified. The movie ends with him chasing Baby with an axe through the woods at night; somehow, she's become the Final Girl. All hope seems lost until that weirdo our heroes wrote off earlier in the movie shows up to kill the baddie. It's just an illusion, of course; the murderous sheriff hasn't actually killed the others yet, and the friendly weirdo isn't even a stranger-- but the whole scene plays like a conventional slasher, with the roles reversed. Honestly, the whole thing won me over by the end, and I particularly loved the last scene. I don't think I'll watch 3 From Hell, though. I'm happy with the ending I got.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 27, 2020 13:08
|
|