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gey muckle mowser posted:FYI everyone challenges will be going up tonight, I originally wanted to do it by noon today but I’m getting sucked into some stuff for work and will be busy until the evening. Good, after last time's bollocks I'm not watching anything until the challenges are up.
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May 2, 2022 18:13
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1) Viy (1967) Challenge: Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched I had been looking for an opportunity to watch this, and it's come to Shudder since the last challenge so I thought "why not". Well, despite the short run time I was definitely feeling very bored by the hour mark and was wondering why goons had been raving about it. But then i figured out that while prima facie it's a typical dour Russian movie about the gloomy trousers of Uncle Vanya, it's actually about the last fifteen minutes. I can't say I was particularly surprised by the revelation as everything had been escalating towards it, but it was at least pleasant to see some ingenuity on display. I'd still rather read the original Gogol story, though; the movie feels like it would be better as a tale told at the fire. Overall I'd give it 3/5.
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May 3, 2022 00:23
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twernt posted:Thanks for this! I'd add Dachra from Tunisia to the list. I watched it for this challenge last time it came up.
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May 5, 2022 08:33
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Count Thrashula posted:I'm almost certain I've never seen a movie that's explicitly Welsh, and DEFINITELY haven't seen one with 100% spoken Welsh, so this was a fun one! First we would have to find it. I'm having a bit of trouble with Scream, Queen as I've seen most of the obvious gay director contenders and I'm not really interested in LGBAT themes. I have one I could use, but it's a bit of a stretch. However, I heard that Frank Henenlotter is gay - can anyone confirm?
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May 6, 2022 09:30
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2) Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) Challenge: Scream, Queen! The LGBT themes come from America Chavez, who was the first acknowledged non-binary character in the Marvel Universe. While this isn't explored in any depth in the movie - which is fair as there's no time for it, nor any real need - it is brought across that Chavez is the child of two mothers and she spends the whole movie prominently wearing a Pride Progress flag pin. So she's indubitably meant to be the first enby in the MCU as well. As previously stated this is a bit of a stretch, and if I find anything better for the challenge I'll amend this to Rated PG (it's 12A in the UK, which is equivalent to PG-13). So: is this a horror movie? It has the usual share of Marvel's people flying around shooting lights at each other, of course. However, it shouldn't be judged by that. This is a Sam Raimi joint and you can tell. There's body horror. There's a book of evil spells that should never be read. There's the snap zooms, Dutch angles and first-person-prop shots that we all know and love. There's even someone having a fight with their evil double, reanimated corpses, and Bruce Campbell punching himself in the face then breaking the fourth wall. In a nutshell, Sam Raimi persuaded Disney to give him $200m to make Doctor Strange Versus The Evil Dead and to borrow a word from Ash Williams, it's groovy.
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May 6, 2022 18:25
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3) The Abominable Snowman (1957) Challenge: Rated PG A classic Hammer Horror movie from the Quatermass team of Val Guest and Nigel Kneale. Peter Cushing plays the scientist Rollason, reprising his role from a TV adaptation made two years previously, hunting for the Yeti in the mountains of Nepal. I've had this on my list for a while now and decided to watch it now to celebrate Kneale's centenary. It also won't be the last Kneale I watch this month. It doesn't feel sparkly at first, and it never reaches the heights of The Stone Tape or Quatermass and the Pit, but as it gets towards the end there are some extremely effective scenes. As with many of Kneale's scientific horror scripts it likes to ask questions and get you to think about the possible answers. Cushing is of course the standout actor in the piece, but Forrest Tucker is serviceable as the seedy American explorer Tom Friend and the supporting cast has no weak spots. Overall I'd give this a recommend, although I don't think I'll hasten back to it.
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May 7, 2022 16:32
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PKMN Trainer Red posted:12/13 - Maniac (1932) I don't think this qualifies for the challenge, as it's only 51 minutes long.
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May 10, 2022 18:43
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13. Sins of the Past
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ruddiger posted:I was internally debating if the Wild Things and Cruel Intentions franchises could be classified as horror or not. There's a case to be made for saying they're distaff cousins of giallo. Anyway: 4) Anna and the Apocalypse (2018) Challenge: Music of the Night I'd rather have failed. This movie is absolute garbage. It's not funny, the acting is cringeworthy, and the singing gave me a splitting headache so I'm going to bed.
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May 11, 2022 00:33
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Planning ahead, can someone spec me a movie from before 1950 that is freely available with the assumption that if it's well known, I've seen it?
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May 11, 2022 18:41
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Basebf555 posted:I actually haven't seen it myself but I intend to watch it at some point, The Most Dangerous Game is on HBOMAX. HBO Max isn't free, but thanks for the rec.
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May 11, 2022 20:13
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Basebf555 posted:Ah, sorry when you said freely I took it to mean widely available on the major streaming services Yeah, I've got Shudder UK but that's it - no Hulu, no Netflix, etc. Apologies for the confusion.
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May 11, 2022 20:18
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5) Boris Karloff: The Man Behind The Monster (2021) Challenge: Behind the Screams An interesting documentary on the life and career of Karloff, focusing as much as possible on his work away from Universal. Most of the first half is narrative or interviews with the filmmakers who were inspired by Karloff; having been gone for more than 50 years now there is nobody left to talk to about those times. In the second half, though, there are many more personal stories from people who worked with him including Dick Miller, Christopher Plummer, Ian Ogilvy and Peter Bogdanovic. All of them paint a portrait of Karloff that matches the description of him given by Stephen King in Danse Macabre - a consummate professional who went out as he came in, as a gentleman. A strong recommend.
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May 12, 2022 01:01
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6) The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tearsz (2013) Challenge: The King in Yellow There are four things you should expect to find in a typical giallo: stylistic shooting, a killer with a knife, naked women and no discernible plot. This French giallo homage has all of them in spades. It's so cut up as to be incomprehensible, not just as a movie but even within individual scenes as the DP masturbates over his own cleverness. There is no character development, no logic nor any attempt to apply any. There is, however, copious amounts of stabbing and gratuitous nudity. Anyone who doesn't like giallo will hate this movie; anyone who does will find it an inferior and shoddy copy of the genre's hits. Avoid.
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May 13, 2022 00:55
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FreudianSlippers posted:implied negrophilic coroner Post/username combo, or did you really mean to say that the coroner is sexually attracted to black people?
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May 16, 2022 17:48
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Shaman Tank Spec posted:Any suggestions for LGBTQ horror movies? Don Mancini is gay, if you haven't seen one of the Chucky movies yet. Let The Right One In is also definitely a gay horror movie, but the Hammer remake isn't.
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May 17, 2022 00:36
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7) Challenge: Short Cuts The Backrooms (48:32) Elevated (19:26) The Backrooms by Kane Pixels has been getting a fair amount of interest in the main thread, so I thought they'd be a good pick for this challenge. I watched them on the Kane Pixels YT channel in playlist order. The ten (so far) shorts cover goings on surrounding a scientific experiment that has created - or granted access to - a strange series of rooms that look a little like an empty open plan office. Over the next three years (according to video timestamps) a group of anonymous scientists in full NBC suits investigate the Backrooms, delving deeper into what becomes an increasingly strange world. The final movie, which was the original short, takes place five years later and is found footage from a young guerrilla filmmaker's camera after he finds himself in the Backrooms. I can't imagine watching these in the order of release. If you do, the most strictly horrific of the stories come at the end and the remainder of the run just provides backstory. It's better watched on the playlist, where even if you know a bit more about what's going on you don't necessarily understand it. It also adds a deeper level of horror to the original short. I had actually thought that The Backrooms would cover the whole hour, but it turned out to come a bit short. As a big fan of Vincenzo Natali I grabbed the link to his early short Elevated that someone gave elsewhere in the thread - thank you. It was a proof of concept piece made to convince people to invest in Cube, and it shares some small resemblances with that movie: an enclosed space, a character who comes in out of nowhere, a small group of people who neither know nor trust each other but may need each other to survive. David Hewlett is on form (of course) and guides the story through a couple of twists in believable ways. It's far from perfect, but it works as well as anything made for tuppence ha'penny ever will.
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May 18, 2022 00:48
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I may need someone to spec me a film for A Perfect Getaway. I already burned Tunisia and Ethiopia as options.
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May 18, 2022 14:56
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Hmmm. I've done Croatia, but this is Serbian. Is it streaming anywhere easily accessible?
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May 18, 2022 15:26
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FreudianSlippers posted:It's on Thanks, but unfortunately that site only has the first ten minutes of the movie. I'll have to keep looking.
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May 18, 2022 21:53
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8) Blue My Mind (2017) Challenge: A Perfect Getaway While trawling through what I had available I realised that I don't think I've ever seen a horror movie from Switzerland. Plotwise it's a fairly standard teen drama that uses the common horror trope of combining "your body is changing" with "into what?" On the whole it's not badly presented and acted, but the most disturbing scenes in the movie don't involve main character Mia's transformation at all. I have no real urge to watch it again, but I'd give it a cautious recommend.
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May 19, 2022 00:06
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Eggnogium posted:9. Men I stopped thinking that Men was going to have anything profound to say when I saw the poster is composited to have an abstract skull on it. Skull composite poster movies are never profound, and rarely good.
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May 20, 2022 08:54
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9) Castle Freak (1995) Challenge: Hidden Gems And they're still hidden. I'll be blunt: Stuart Gordon was not a good director. He was a hack who got lucky with Re-Animator and spent most of the rest of his career trying to recapture the "magic" of adding tits and sexual assault to a classic horror story. Castle Freak is a particularly dire example, with poor acting even from Combs and Crampton, lousy pacing, risible attempts at scares and lacking even the slightest trace of charm or humour to mitigate any of its flaws. Especial credit goes to Jessica Dollarhyde - who never worked again - as the blind daughter who at one point skins her knee and looks at it to assess the damage.
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May 21, 2022 01:15
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10) The Bat (1959) Challenge: The Price is Right I've seen most of the readily available Price movies, but I found this remake of a 1926 movie that was part of Bob Kane's inspiration for Batman and the uncredited debut of legendary cinematographer Gregg Toland. Unfortunately the remake is quite pedestrian, with little to recommend it beyond steady performances from Price and co-star Agnes Moorehead. You could do far worse if you need a deep cut, though.
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May 23, 2022 00:51
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Samfucius posted:
That's rather ironic, considering the film was released during Prohibition. Simply put: it was 1932. Americans, being obsessed with propriety and decency, were happy for people with deformities and differences to make a living by working in human menageries because then they were safely hidden away where nobody had to think about them or look at them if they didn't want to. Browning caused outrage by putting them in the public eye. And that outrage was stoked even further because the normal people - people like you! - were cruel exploiters and villains while the freaks were the friendly good-hearted community. And the price Cleopatra pays is to have the ugliness inside her made manifest. Freaks was a reflection on and of America, showing up the callousness behind the mask of neighbourliness. And you'd better believe that there is nothing the self-righteous hate more than being shown themselves.
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May 23, 2022 11:36
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The Berzerker posted:Have you seen any Estonian horror? I used Kratt (2020) for the challenge. I've used Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway before. It's an Ethiopian/Estonian co-production so it can count for either. Also there's Dachra on Shudder, which is reportedly Tunisia's first horror movie.
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May 23, 2022 19:36
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11) Candyman (2021) Challenge: Horror Noire I wasn't sure about this remake-cum-sequel when I first heard about it. It felt like they were trying to dip in someone else's well, and I was worried that they might completely miss the point. These fears turned out to be not completely unfounded. There's multiple scenes where someone with no reason to summon Candyman does so for the pure purpose of giving the script an excuse to kill them, and it's greatly to the detriment of the movie as a whole because it leads to the central core of the movie not being explored. It feels like an episode of TV pushed out to feature length - the bones are solid, but not strong enough to carry all the fat. Still, I appreciated it a lot more than I thought I would. It's got solid central performances, the core conceit is good, and it respects the original movie while still knowing when and where to go beyond it. I just wish they hadn't tried to turn it into a slasher movie, because that's something the original wasn't.
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May 23, 2022 23:43
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12) Room 237 Challenge: All Hail The King Finding a new King movie is a trial for me. I've seen pretty much all the good adaptations down the years, and the ones I haven't seen are either trash or not accessible. But this documentary about Kubrick's movie of The Shining has been on my radar for a bit, and I think it's close enough to qualify. The concept of the documentary is sound: look at nine elements of the film and have five people explain how they fit into their competing theories. But there are two main problems with the execution. First, it's not really executed as a documentary; it's more like a film studies lecture, with the theorists imposing their view on the material rather than trying to analyse it. Second, most of the theories are plain drivel and the filmic elements are shoehorned in to the detriment of the intelligent things being said. The theorist who thinks it all comes back to mazes, for example; she makes some excellent observations about the geometry and frequent impossibility of the sets, but spoils it by trying to interpret everything as mazes and minotaurs. The only one of the five theories that actually does make sense is the one about the movie being about the genocide of the First Peoples, which is not a particularly profound observation when it's explicit text that the Overlook was built on native burial ground - the theorist just takes it beyond that to be about all native Americans. This puts him closer to the other theorist who dismisses the whole First Peoples element and claims it's about the Holocaust instead. But they're still both comparatively sane compared to the other two. One is a moon landing conspiracy theorist who claims Room 237 is the Moon Room because the key says "ROOM No 237" and the only words you can make from the capital letters are "MOON" and "ROOM". (He's wrong, of course - you can make another, more appropriate word that even uses all five letters: "MORON".) And the other is the seemingly obligatory Freudian who thinks the whole movie is about sex and comes off sounding like Jean-Pierre the Pervert in the Not The Nine O'Clock News sketch. "It is not the Overlook Hotel. It is the Overlook Willy!" Overall, this is not an especially profitable use of your time if you want to learn anything about the film or the book. It will remind you of how good the movie is, though.
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May 25, 2022 01:21
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Basebf555 posted:If you look at the span of time that Harryhausen dominated for, and how many iconic filmmakers claim him as one of their biggest influences, there's very few people who you can say made more of an impact on American film. Now, maybe some people would argue that impact wasn't all positive if you consider the state of modern blockbuster films but I just think Harryhausen is overlooked pretty often for a guy who is on the same level as a Spielberg or George Lucas in terms of how influential he was. People overlook Harryhausen because he stopped making movies at the same time Spielberg and Lucas began to define the blockbuster. Every film buff knows him, though - he learned his craft at the feet of Willis O'Brien, the master who created Kong, and ultimately far surpassed his teacher.
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May 25, 2022 23:38
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Shaman Tank Spec posted:That's cool, I've always been into that. If I'm reading the list correctly, Clash of the Titans was his last movie? Yes. He was 61 when he finished it and as each movie required two or three years of tough work he felt it was time to retire. Also modelwork had moved on and there were easier ways than stop motion to do it.
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May 26, 2022 10:54
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Basebf555 posted:Clash of the Titans was one of the biggest hits of that year yea, but it also was a bit unlucky because it came out on the same day as Raiders of the Lost Ark. No, it didn't. Clash came out the start of July, Raiders came out at the end. I know because I went to see Clash for my 7th birthday, and we went to see Raiders for my stepdad's birthday a month later. (And he spent the rest of the day complaining about the inaccuracies in the German military vehicles.)
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May 26, 2022 14:31
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13) A Page of Madness (1926) Challenge: Sins of the Past Unfortunately I can't go into much detail on this early Japanese feature, as it had neither intertitles nor the original accompanying reading. What's left is more of a fantasmagoria than a coherent narrative. Much of the movie follows a janitor at an asylum, but as he too begins to experience strange visions of madness the question is raised as to whether he is himself an inmate. The final scene where he puts smiling masks on all the inmates then dons a mask himself - not smiling - promotes the question rather than resolve it. The movie also suffers from feeling dated by comparison to American or European films of the same vintage. Still, it's an interesting study of a nation learning and exploring the language of film, if you like such things. E: and that's my 13 films done and 13 challenges completed in order. I have a couple of cheap, probably terrible movies picked up from the £3 bin at HMV that I might watch before month's end.
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May 26, 2022 18:26
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Decided not to watch any more past my 13, because Stranger Things 4 dropped. Summary: 1) Viy 2) Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness 3) The Abominable Snowman 4) Anna and the Apocalypse 5) Boris Karloff: The Man Behind The Monster 6) The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears 7) The Backrooms and Elevated 8) Blue My Mind 9) Castle Freak 10) The Bat 11) Candyman (2021) 12) Room 237 13) A Page of Madness I did the 13 challenges in order, so all movies also fill the challenge of the same number. Jedit fucked around with this message at 18:19 on May 31, 2022 |
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May 31, 2022 18:10
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 14:14 |
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married but discreet posted:
A few that I don't recall being done, at least not in the last few years: Screaming With Laughter: Watch a horror comedy movie. Danse Macabre: Watch an adaptation of a horror novel written between 1950 and 1980 by someone other than Stephen King. What's In A Name?: Watch a movie that begins with the same letter as your SA user name. I'm Down With That: Watch a movie principally set underground. The Award For Best Victim: Watch a movie with a star or director who had won an Oscar.
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Jun 8, 2022 15:09
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