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gently caress yes! For some reason I thought this was in April and was bummed about missing it, but I'm definitely in! Aiming for 15 movies, and once again aiming to see movies I haven't watched before to fill in blanks in my pitifully small horror movie experience. I also bought some really cheesy looking movies from the local second hand movie store in preparation for this: - Flesh Eater - Thankskilling - Ice Cream Man - Savage Weekend - Saturday Morning Massacre
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May 4, 2022 08:21
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MOVIE #1: Saturday Morning Mystery There's no such thing as ghosts. Just cruddy old perverts, politicians and real estate developers. "Hey guys, what if Scooby Doo was like ... REAL" isn't exactly a groundbreaking idea. Countless books, comics, TV shows and movies have explored the idea, and I'm willing to take a leap and say most of them did it better than Saturday Morning Mystery. The basic idea is exactly what you'd expect: a group of young adults have been running a ghost hunting business, but in reality they're just a detective agency that keeps busting criminals, child pornographers and other scum because as everyone knows, ghosts aren't real. The business isn't doing so hot, so the team take a case from a bank they owe a lot of money to. If they can solve the mystery of a seemingly haunted building, the bank can lend them a hand. But it turns out that this house ... is REALLY HAUNTED! This would all be very well and good, but Saturday Morning Mystery has a couple of big problems. First of all, the movie is insanely amateurish. Again, not throwing shade at all movies with amateur casts and limited equipment, people have made good movies with limited tools, but Saturday Morning Mystery is not one of them. The acting is awful, the direction is bland and flat and the movie keeps trying for a "natural" style, which just means that everyone is constantly talking all over each other. Second, the movie is trying to be far too loving cute and clever. Multiple references to Scooby Doo, and not clever references: just people saying "hey this is pretty Scooby Doo, right?" or imitating characters from the show. gently caress you, movie. You're not as clever as you think. The end result is a movie that thinks it's awesome and groundbreaking and fourth wall breaking and clever and smart and funny, while being none of those things. One of the worst things a horror movie can do is bore you, and that's pretty much all Saturday Morning Mystery did. Don't waste your time with this movie. Watch the Supernatural episode "Scoobynatural" instead.  / 5
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May 7, 2022 19:37
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MOVIE 2: Ghostbusters Afterlife (3. Rated PG) Who ya gonna call? Cards on the table: Ghostbusters is my favourite movie of all time. This means that I am exactly the guy Ghostbusters Afterlife was actually made for. I severely disliked Ghostbusters 2016, in large part because it felt like the movie was ashamed to be a Ghostbusters movie, and was trying to distance itself as much as possible. Afterlife is the polar opposite: even if you didn't know the movie was made by Jason Reitman, you could tell that the people making the movie love Ghostbusters. I'm sure you can enjoy the movie just fine if you've never seen the original movies, but if you grew up with them back in the 80s, it hits you much harder and I'm not afraid to admit I was ugly crying during the ending. They got all the guys! Even Janine and Dana! And they all seemed happy to be there! I'm not going to stand here and claim that Afterlife is as good as the original, but it's a drat fine horror comedy. Phoebe is excellent as Egon's grand-daughter, Paul Rudd is Paul Rudd as the stand-in for the Ghostbuster nerds in the audience, and the movie nails the balance of references, spooky stuff and comedy pretty well. I could've done without the miniature Marshmallow Men, but overall I super liked the movie. It would be interesting to hear what people who weren't super Ghostbuster fans and who didn't get misty-eyed when the Ecto-1's siren started going off, thought about the movie. I wonder if my hypothesis of the film still being enjoyable as a newbie is accurate or not? / 5My May 2022 Movies: 1. Saturday Morning Mystery, 2. Ghostbusters: Afterlife (Rated PG)
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May 8, 2022 17:10
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The Berzerker posted:A classic horror premise where some folks move into a house that was built on top of the execution site of a witch ~200 years previously. It's a bit slow and the score was getting on my nerves, but it has some really great death scenes, nobody is safe, and the finale makes it worth watching. Plus, an all-timer of a poster. I watched this movie as an 8 year old with some older kids and it hosed me up for WEEKS, even though I ducked out after about 10 or 15 minutes. I think that's when my decades long aversion to horror movies started, in fact. Maybe it would be worthwhile to track down now and see if I can't exorcise some daemons? Or give myself nightmares for a month again, I suppose. Would it count for this challenge, considering I've seen a small bit of the movie?
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May 8, 2022 20:37
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Movie 3: Superstition This is about as far as I got the last time. So like I posted earlier, Superstition and I have some history. Back when I was 8 or 9 years old, I tried to watch the movie with some older kids. I made it about 20 minutes in before literally running out of the room and didn't sleep properly for weeks. Now, over 30 years later, we meet again. Superstition is the story of a priest trying to renovate a run-down old house... with spooky consequences. Turns out a witch was put to death on the spot 300 years ago, and her spirit is now haunting the building and murdering the ever living poo poo out of people. The official story claims that the witch is murdering the descendants of the people who put her to death 300 years ago, but she's definitely just killing everyone she can. I can definitely see why Superstition was so traumatic to a super-empathic kid, especially since we were Jehovah's Witnesses back then, and adult authority figures I had been brought up to trust unquestioningly had filled my head with "true stories" of demons and spirits. On my first attempt back in the day I checked out after the witch causes a circular saw blade jump to off its moorings and saw its way clean through an elderly priest, but even before then there were some gnarly kills. Some of them are comic, like a dude's decapitated head in a microwave, but some are also uncomfortably "realistic". A guy gets cut in half by a window pane and then we see shots of his separated body halves twitching as he's gasping for breath. A young girl gets a huge wooden stake hammered through her head and into the ground. It's loving brutal. The true star of the movie is Albert Salmi as a bizarrely hostile detective who seems to be personally offended by everything and everyone. He communicates exclusively through angry growls and shouting. He thinks the house's caretaker should be locked up for the crime of being mute. He is constantly sassing the movie's main character, a painfully 70s style groovy youth pastor who seems to be about two seconds away from sitting down on a reversed chair for a "rap session". He's leering at the scantily clad young daughters of the family who moved into the murder house. He's a real shitbag. Overall the movie is still pretty atmospheric and spooky. I wouldn't say this is a classic horror movie or anything, and I'm definitely not in any huge hurry to watch it again, largely because honestly the movie feels heavily padded at times. Like they had 2/3 of a great movie, and then had to somehow fill it out to feature length with ... stuff. That being said, it's still a perfectly serviceable 80s style haunted house movie. Ominous foreshadowing, oppressive soundtrack, brutal kills and a cop who clearly thinks he's the angry black captain in a bad 70s cop movie. That's a pretty good time in my books! Now let's see if I lose several weeks of sleep again. / 5.My May 2022 Movies: 1. Saturday Morning Mystery, 2. Ghostbusters: Afterlife (Rated PG), 3. Superstition Shaman Tank Spec fucked around with this message at 16:20 on May 9, 2022 |
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May 9, 2022 16:07
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Movie 4: Vampyr (9. Hidden Gems) The blood! The blood! Vampyr is one of the coolest horror movies I have ever seen, and definitely the most unique. Part of the charm probably comes from the movie being 90 years old, because everything is kind of poorly lit, heavily contrasted, dark, grungy and foreboding. But it goes beyond even that. The movie has a wonderful dreamlike quality. A young man is wandering through the German countryside and comes upon a lonely inn. He's barely had time to settle in when strange doins start a-transpirin'. A weird man pops into his room to give cryptic warnings of impending doom, before the man is lured to a run down house by a strange premonition. As he drifts from place to place he encounters strange and supernatural things, all of which seem to be connected to a vampire lurking in the area. Vampyr isn't a silent film, but it almost might as well be. Large parts of the story are told through static text screens. The minimal dialogue we do have adds to the dreamlike quality, because conversations are stilted and repetitive like they might be in a dream. Peep this poo poo when our wandering young man encounters a strange man in the haunted castle: Marc: The child! Nikolas: Yes. Marc: There is no child here. Nikolas: But ... the dogs... Marc: There is no child here, and no dogs either. Nikolas: No? Marc: No. Our main character spends most of the movie kind of drifting from one place to another in a daze, almost like he was drawn from scene to scene like he was trapped in a dream he didn't really understand the logic of himself. I don't think this is just shoddy early film making or acting, but the director intentionally trying to make a movie that feels off-putting and strange, because overall the movie is anything but amateurish. Many of the shots feel extremely modern, and at times you could think you were watching a modern art film. And also, consider the insanely inventive and impressive special effects. Some scenes have the film running backwards, they play with transparency through double exposure etc. Early on our main character watches a river with a path running alongside it. In the water's reflection we see someone running on the path, but the path itself is empty. Shortly afterwards we explore a haunted house where disembodied shadows move by themselves or out of sync with their human bodies, including a sequence where the shadow of a one-legged soldier is climbing up the shadow of a ladder, while the ladder itself is completely empty. I want to know how they did all this in the early 1930s! As a story Vampyr isn't anything special, but as an experience it's cool as hell, and everyone who is interested in horror movies or just unique movie experiences should definitely watch it. / 5My May 2022 Movies: 1. Saturday Morning Mystery, 2. Ghostbusters: Afterlife (Rated PG), 3. Superstition, 4. Vampyr (Hidden Gems)
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May 9, 2022 17:43
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Movie 5: The People Under the Stairs (Horror Noire) You thought he was white before? You should see the sucker now! The People Under the Stairs has been on my list since my first marathon, but somehow I just didn't get around to it until now. Better late than never because this movie kinda owns bones. I can easily see why The People Under the Stairs is considered one of the most important Black horror movies of all time, and why Jordan Peele is remaking it, because this is one movie with things to say about society and the racial politics of 1990s America. It's also a movie where the subtext is the text, written in 144 point font, with glitter effects and blink tags. The movie is the story of Fool, a young boy who lives in the last apartment of a crack den with his mother and remaining siblings (the rest being either dead or in jail for crimes they didn't commit). When Fool's family is facing eviction he allows himself to be talked into pulling a heist on a local rich white guy by Leroy, a small time crook. The consequences, obviously, are spooky. Turns out the rich white guy is Leroy's landlord, and he's like a cartoonish stereotype rich white republican (except honestly I bet you could find a bunch of white dudes who are like 95% of the way there in real life just by going through republican donor lists), living in what is basically a very on the nose metaphor for how rich white republican assholes view the world: his house is a fortress of whiteness and goodness in a sea of blackness and filth, where he lives with his wife and daughter, and his large collection of guns. The husband and wife call each other "Father" and "Mother", use racial slurs like normal people use punctuation, love fondling their guns and take obscene delight in the opportunity to gun Leroy down like a dog when they discover him in their house during a non-violent robbery attempt. In a pretty bold decision for a 1991 movie, these rich white assholes are the true evil monsters of the movie. They've turned their house into a bizarre death fortress, where they are keeping their young daughter permanently locked up under the guise of protecting her from the black predators in the neighbourhood. Except of course Father beats and possibly sexually abuses her, with Mother's knowledge and approval. And then Mother scrubs her clean in almost boiling water because even though the water is hot, the flames of hell are hotter. But it's OK, see, they have to do it to protect her from the world and save her. That's not to say there aren't literal monsters in the movie as well. The "people under the stairs" are a bunch of people who were trapped in the basement by Father, and forced to become cannibals; the people trapped in the basement are white, the people trapped in their ghetto shitholes are black, all of them are in the same loving prison. They do horrible things, but not by choice: they were forced to by the man and the society they live in, in yet another metaphor that's pretty on the nose but also pretty apt. This is also a fun reversal of the "inbred family of cannibal hillbillies slaughter innocents" routine, because this time the inbred monsters are rich white people with Pepsodent smiles; for generations they've been living in their death shack, marrying their siblings, getting crazier by the generation, but also getting richer and richer through simply being rich white people. And of course the cops won't help our victims. Instead they nod along sagely as Mother laments that it's almost like the decent people are prisoners in their own homes, while the criminals roam free. The message is again clear: the system won't save you, you have to blow the whole loving thing up or the horror will never end. The People Under the Stairs is great. The message is worth hearing, and is told with a good mixture of tension, horror and comedy. The movie knows exactly what it wants to do and what kind of movie it is, and then executes drat near perfectly. / 5My May 2022 Movies: 1. Saturday Morning Mystery, 2. Ghostbusters Afterlife (Rated PG), 3. Superstition, 4. Vampyr (Hidden Gems), 5. The People Under the Stairs (Horror Noire) Shaman Tank Spec fucked around with this message at 17:35 on May 10, 2022 |
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May 10, 2022 17:28
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Basebf555 posted:I actually think The People Under the Stairs may be Craven's best film. I suppose it's a hot take to say it would be anything other than Nightmare on Elm Street but for me it's really a decision between The People Under the Stairs and Scream, with NOES the clear #3. I wouldn't argue. All three movies are amazing and are definitely way up on my all-time list of horror movies. E: I was also torn over my quote for the movie, because god drat there were so many good lines in this one. "No wonder there's no money in the ghetto" was a close second. E2: I need to rewatch Scream. I think I've only seen it once, when it was new. I bet I'd enjoy it on a whole other level now that I've seen a bunch of the tropes it was subverting. Shaman Tank Spec fucked around with this message at 17:41 on May 10, 2022 |
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May 10, 2022 17:34
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Movie 6: Rock & Roll Nightmare (Music of the Night) ~ We accept the challenge ~ Rock & Roll Nightmare is either one of the worst horror movies I have ever seen, or one of the best. It 'stars' Canada's own Jon Mikl Thor as Jon Mikl Thor, a hugely popular rock star who retreats with his band to a lonely farm to record their new album... with spooky consequences (or so Jon Mikl Thor wishes). The movie is TRYING to be a horror movie, but it's all so loving inept and awful. We're treated to sleazy and creepy nudity, including some of the least sexy sex scenes of all time. In one of the worst scenes ever filmed one of the couples goes down to the stick & stone filled shore of a tiny lake in the middle of loving winter to have comically bad fake sex while pretending they're in some romantic getaway spot. And then a rubber monster possessing the man (REMEMBER THIS) eats the woman. One by one the band members and their girlfriends / spouses keep getting killed off by monsters that make the Muppets look realistic, until only Jon Mikl Thor remains. He is shown seemingly accidentally avoiding the big bad's attempts at killing him, until the frustrated devil finally makes an appearance in all his rubbery glory. He yells at Jon Mikl Thor (echoing the audiences frustrations), before the tables are turned on him. You see, it was all fake: Jon Mikl Thor is actually an archangel who put on an elaborate psychic act to make the devil think he was killing unappealing musicians and their groupies out in the Canadian boonies. So... what the gently caress were the scenes with the devil possessing various members of the band and entourage about? Wouldn't Satan have noticed he was possessing a psychic hallucination? Why am I nitpicking a god drat Jon Mikl Thor movie? Our hero did all of this to lure the devil out of hiding (???) so he could force a final confrontation to punish the devil for overstepping his boundaries, which largely consists of crew members throwing rubber throwing star demons at Jon Mikl Thor, and him holding various rubber appendages against his body while writhing in agony. The movie is frankly amazing. Sure, it's amazingly bad, but it's also amazing. It tries to be clever and self-aware, while actually being a completely clueless ripoff of movies that were bad ripoffs to begin with. It's a masturbatory vehicle for Jon Mikl Thor and his muscles, and that's a sentence I didn't think I'd ever be writing. Because of this, 100% of the movie's soundtrack consists of Thor songs (many of the diegetic, even) and while most of them are just generic 80s dick rock, the song that plays during the final confrontation ("We Accept the Challenge" / "The Challenge") is genuinely catchy and kinda rad. I love a good bad movie, and one of the criteria is that people seriously had to be trying their best while failing in amazing and hilarious ways. This movie easily passes that bar, and god bless Jon Mikl Thor and his spiky, furry codpiece for giving us this wonderful gift. Definitely recommended for any bad movie night, and I think I'm also gonna pick up the Rifftrax commentary track even if it's hard to imagine it making the experience that much more funny. My only regret is watching this alone instead of with some friends. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdwGSbsrivg / 5 but also  / 5My May 2022 Movies: 1. Saturday Morning Mystery, 2. Ghostbusters Afterlife (Rated PG), 3. Superstition, 4. Vampyr (Hidden Gems), 5. The People Under the Stairs (Horror Noire), 6. Rock & Roll Nightmare (Music of the Night) Shaman Tank Spec fucked around with this message at 20:13 on May 10, 2022 |
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May 10, 2022 20:06
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Franchescanado posted:Like BF said, the tone is all over the place, but it's always engaging. I think it's a selling point, not a detractor. It definitely was for me. Like I said, The People Under the Stairs knows exactly what kind of movie it wants to be and nails it pretty drat perfectly. The mixture of corny black humor, genuine tension and good horror works amazingly well.
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May 10, 2022 20:24
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Movie 7: Nosferatu (Sins of the Past) Is this your wife? What a lovely neck. How do you review a movie like Nosferatu? Obviously I can't put myself in the shoes of someone sitting through the movie in 1922, seeing what would have been fairly groundbreaking stuff at the time. Yet I feel this is what is needed if you want the experience to be anything but kind of comical at times. This is a fascinating experience, because I watched Vampyr a few days ago, and despite being only 10 years newer than Nosferatu, it felt a lot more ambitious, competent and modern. The acting is on a whole other level, the shots are more complicated and layered, the team used a lot of really neat tricks to pull off some frankly amazing special effects etc. But of course this is a bit unfair to Nosferatu, because those 10 years were extremely important in advancing the technology and art of movie making. It is also cool to see where so many of the archetypes, cliches and conventions of vampire movies come from. And I do stress the "movies" part, because Nosferatu is really Dracula with the serial numbers filed off. Instead of count Dracula, we have count Orlock. Instead of Jonathan Harker, we have Thomas Hutter. Apparently this wasn't so much an effort to plagiarize Bram Stoker's work, but rather to localize the movie for German audiences. Neat! But as a vampire movie Nosferatu really is groundbreaking, and establishes so much of the visual shorthand used in the genre for literally a hundred years. And honestly, Max Schreck is amazing as count Orlock. It helps that the movie has that not-quite-steady-framerate, wildly flickering and heavily contrasted look of early movies, but he is still insanely creepy in so many scenes. The way he barely animates his body as he walks, while his huge eyes eerily stare out of their black sockets, wildly rotating from side to side. It's awesome, especially when vampires in movies haven't been spooky in loving decades. And holy poo poo that shot of him rising out of his coffin on the ship. I have to say I did very much enjoy the movie's version of a werewolf -- obviously a confused and cute hyena someone chucked in the forest and aimed a camera at. You can keep pretending all you want, movie, but we both know what you're doing.   So at the very least Nosferatu is a hugely important movie, and is still definitely worth watching as a cultural and historical artifact. If you do, I would recommend watching it as a double feature with Vampyr, and preferably starting with Nosferatu, because then you'll probably be impressed by the progress movies made in 10 years, instead of bummed out by it like me.  / 5My May 2022 Movies: 1. Saturday Morning Mystery, 2. Ghostbusters Afterlife (Rated PG), 3. Superstition, 4. Vampyr (Hidden Gems), 5. The People Under the Stairs (Horror Noire), 6. Rock & Roll Nightmare (Music of the Night), 7. Nosferatu (Sins of the Past) Shaman Tank Spec fucked around with this message at 17:01 on May 11, 2022 |
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May 11, 2022 16:47
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Movie 8: Shadow of the Vampire (Behind the Screams) You monster! We had an arrangement! Shadow of the Vampire is a fun movie with a brilliant idea. On the surface it's a retelling of the filming of Nosferatu, the first ever vampire movie. Doctor Murnau is a bold visionary who wants to film a horror movie like no other, and initially it seems like this is just going to be a movie documenting the conflicts and problems faced by the production team as they tried to cater to their directors whims and fancies. But then things get spooky.  If you haven't watched the movie, stop reading here. Apparently Murnau has found his Count Orlock from some forgotten little talent agency, some minor Moscow method weirdo named Max Schreck nobody's ever heard of. Schreck, he says, has gone ahead to Czechoslovakia to absorb the local flavor. The will only be addressed as Count Orlock and while his methods may seem a bit strange, they are crucial to his art. And then people start dropping off. Is Max Schreck just a bit too deep in his role or is there something even worse going on? It's a great idea! I watched Nosferatu just the other day, and my big takeaway was that Max Schreck was amazing as Count Orlock. The way he carried his body, his expressions, his eyes wildly rotating in their sockets... he didn't seem human half the time, so this movie takes that idea and runs with it: what if he WASN'T human? What if he was just some thing Murnau found and made a bargain with? Much like with the original, once again Nosferatu himself is the real attraction here, and I wasn't surprised to see after the fact that he was played by Willem Dafoe. He really runs wild with the role, even though he doesn't look as creepy and otherworldly as the original. Possibly my favourite scene in the movie is a quiet night time scene where two of the crew are out drinking when Orlock stumbles upon them. They discuss the book "Dracula" and Orlock recounts his view of the book, using small insignificant things most people wouldn't have even paid attention to, to illustrate what it's like to live for so long that you forget most things we take for granted. Cary Elwes is also fun as the manic and possibly doped to the gills camera visionary with probably the worst German accent in movie history (beating several other candidates from this very movie). I also enjoyed how they recreated many of Nosferatu's iconic scenes with the movie's actors, possibly using period equipment or at least nailing the look really well. Definitely worth a watch! It's not a masterpiece or anything, but it's a really fun take on the "let's make a movie about the magic of making movies" take. E: Holy poo poo, Eddie Izzard was Hatter?! ,5 / 5My May 2022 Movies: 1. Saturday Morning Mystery, 2. Ghostbusters Afterlife (Rated PG), 3. Superstition, 4. Vampyr (Hidden Gems), 5. The People Under the Stairs (Horror Noire), 6. Rock & Roll Nightmare (Music of the Night), 7. Nosferatu (Sins of the Past), 8. Shadow of the Vampire (Behind the Screams) Shaman Tank Spec fucked around with this message at 13:19 on May 14, 2022 |
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May 14, 2022 13:07
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Movie 9: Witchfinder General (The Price is Right) The law is with me, remember. The thing that makes Witchfinder General work is that even though it's not based in true events, it might as well be. Matthe Hopkins was a real guy, and there's no doubt that witchfinders and inquisitors did get up to all kinds of shady poo poo and murdered a lot of innocent people for supposedly being witches and in in league with Satan. The movie is a good old fashioned revenge tale. A cornet in Cromwell's army goes after the Witchfinder General and his sadistic second in command after they brutalize and hang the uncle of his bride and rape her. Vincent Price is the eponymous Witchfinder General, and he's pretty drat good in the movie. He's extremely Vincent Price but brings a lot of dignified menace to the role. A lot of the movie is extremely, insanely, profoundly 1960s British. The fight scenes especially are some Captain Kirk level theater fighting bullshit, which is kind of a shame, because when the movie isn't attempting action, it's pretty drat effective. Price has perfected the act of standing by impassively threateningly, while people are subjected to torture or cruel murder. This is all helped a great deal by again remembering that the movie's horror is grounded in history and dumb poo poo like tying people up and throwing them in water to see if they'd drown and be proven innocent actually happened. I can see why the movie ended up on British shitlists for years, because some of the torture and violence is brutal as hell even though the blood is extremely fake. Plus if you can't get behind a dude just loving whaling on Vincent Price with a loving hatchet, what can you get behind? One scene that's going to stick in my head for a while is one where a bunch of kids are happily baking potatoes in the ashes of three innocent people who they just watched getting burned at the stake. Normal everyday things becoming twisted and nightmarish is a staple of good horror. / 5My May 2022 Movies: 1. Saturday Morning Mystery, 2. Ghostbusters Afterlife (Rated PG), 3. Superstition, 4. Vampyr (Hidden Gems), 5. The People Under the Stairs (Horror Noire), 6. Rock & Roll Nightmare (Music of the Night), 7. Nosferatu (Sins of the Past), 8. Shadow of the Vampire (Behind the Screams), 9. Witchfinder General (The Price is Right)
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May 14, 2022 15:31
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I've been meaning to do the shorts challenge for a few marathons now but never got around to finding good horror shorts to watch. Recommendations would be appreciated, preferably stuff that's available online!
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May 14, 2022 20:27
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Movie 10: SHORTS (Short Cuts) I picked a lot of these from Crescent Wrench and PKMN Trainer Red's lists of recommended shorts, so a big thanks to them and everyone else who gave recommendations. I'll definitely keep watching more of these later outside the challenge. These were a lot of fun to watch! I've always enjoyed short horror stories because they let their authors play with neat ideas without having them overstay their welcome. Turns out the same thing is true for short horror films as well! Evil Demon Golf Ball From Hell (8 minutes) From a technical perspective this was an extremely student film. The acting is very amateurish, and Rian Johnson does the beginner director thing of trying to cram in all the weird shots he's ever seen somewhere. But the end result is a lot of fun and feels a bit like Rian Johnson's take on Evil Dead II, specifically the surreal scene where Ash is tormented by the laughing hunting trophies and evil spirits. Except in this case it's an evil(?) golf ball. Elevated (19 minutes) Yeah, this definitely feels like Vincenzo Natali had his formula figured out from the very beginning of his career. We don't get any setup, just a handful of people we don't know at all thrust into a strange and deadly situation and then we get to find out more about it as they do, kinda like a proto-Cube or In the Tall Grass. The similarities don't end there; they run on to the types of shots and angles he'd later use and hell, even two of the three actors, so it's easy to see the path from here to Cube. That's really neat. Definitely recommended for anyone who enjoyed Natali's later work! Other Side of the Box (15 minutes) A young couple is cooking dinner when the doorbell rings. It's a man who they clearly have some unpleasant history with. He's come to give them a gift in a box, insisting they open it and then everything would make sense. But instead things just get spooky. It's got atmosphere and some neat ideas, but Doctor Who did it better with the Weeping Angels. Honestly it feels like there's too much setup for too little payoff, which I know is a weird thing to say with a 15 minute short, but this might have worked better if the ending sequence had been a bit longer. Also it appears there's a cottage industry of "X reacts to Other Side of the Box" YouTube videos because now my recommendations are full of that poo poo and god damnit all anyway. Box Fort (15 minutes) A group of friends build a box fort, with spooky consequences. At first things are all laughter and games, but not for long, as things start disappearing in the fort. A very professional production. Well acted, well directed, well everythinged. This was definitely the spookiest movie of the bunch, and the crew did a really good job building a lot of tension and an almost palpale sense of dread with very little. Guest (11 minutes) A blinded and deafened woman in bandages wakes up in a stranger's bedroom with neither party having any idea of how she ended up there or what the hell has happened to her. As the stranger asks the woman questions we get flashbacks to what happened the night before, and sure enough, it's spooky. Another very unsettling and creepy movie. These are all on YouTube. My May 2022 Movies: 1. Saturday Morning Mystery, 2. Ghostbusters Afterlife (Rated PG), 3. Superstition, 4. Vampyr (Hidden Gems), 5. The People Under the Stairs (Horror Noire), 6. Rock & Roll Nightmare (Music of the Night), 7. Nosferatu (Sins of the Past), 8. Shadow of the Vampire (Behind the Screams), 9. Witchfinder General (The Price is Right), 10. Shorts (Short Cuts)
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May 15, 2022 13:36
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Movie 11: Creepshow (Hail to the King) It may be on some subjects that I'm not entirely sane. All this time I thought I had seen Creepshow, but nope: it must've been one of the Tales from the Crypt movies instead, because this was all new to me. And great! It's a five movie anthology by George Romero, written by Stephen King. The whole thing delights in being campy as all hell. If you need any proof, just look at the second short, where Stephen King plays an extremely stupid farmer who finds a space meteor and turns into a swamp thing. His acting would make the Three Stooges look subtle and nuanced, but it's fine. Creepshow is at least equal parts comedy and horror, with the exact mixture varying story by story. For instance while the "yokel becomes swamp thing" story is almost pure comedy, there's also a story where Leslie Nielsen, as an insanely jealous husband, lures Ted Danson out to a secluded beach so he can very slowly drown him in the rising tide. Not many laughs in that one! It's not all gold. The fourth short story is a bit of a turd. It's about 80% faculty drama and 20% monkey monster biting people. We could've done with much less dumb faculty bullshit and more monkey mayhem. Yeah I get that it was setup for one professor's plot to have his loutish wife killed by the monkey but come on movie. But the good massively outweighs the bad. In the fifth and final story we have a rich old bastard in his supposedly germ-proof apartment fighting a losing battle against bugs. It's great, surreal, weird. It was also extremely hard to watch as someone who doesn't exactly deal well with bugs. Overall definitely worth the watch! A bunch of good actors and fun cameos like Tom Savini as a garbageman .The stories are inventive and good comedy horror always works for me. / 5My May 2022 Movies: 1. Saturday Morning Mystery, 2. Ghostbusters Afterlife (Rated PG), 3. Superstition, 4. Vampyr (Hidden Gems), 5. The People Under the Stairs (Horror Noire), 6. Rock & Roll Nightmare (Music of the Night), 7. Nosferatu (Sins of the Past), 8. Shadow of the Vampire (Behind the Screams), 9. Witchfinder General (The Price is Right), 10. Shorts (Short Cuts), 11. Creepshow (Hail to the King)
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May 16, 2022 20:13
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Looks like I still need these challenges to have completed the bunch: Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (thinking either Apostle or Lair of the White Worm for this one) A Perfect Getaway (The Queen of Black Magic or November maybe?) Scream, Queen! (No idea what to watch for this one) The King in Yellow (No idea) Any suggestions for LGBTQ horror movies or Giallo-inspired movies? Elm Street 2 might've been a good shout for Scream, Queen, but I watched it already last fall. Shaman Tank Spec fucked around with this message at 20:51 on May 16, 2022 |
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May 16, 2022 20:49
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Movie 12: The Queen of Black Magic (Ratu Ilmu Hitam) (Perfect Getaway) Why didn't we go to Bali? The Queen of Black Magic is the first Indonesian movie I've ever seen, and it makes the place look pretty wild. Not just because, if the movie is to be believed, the place is lousy with witches and haunted orphanages. Indonesia as a place seems to be a melting pot of different cultures and influences, which are reflected in the movie. It's cool to see, even if it's a bit strange when the cast drop in English or other foreign loan words like it wasn't a thing, or just suddenly switch to English for a couple of sentences at a time. The movie itself is also a strange mix of influences. The style of the movie is distinctly Hollywood, albeit with Indonesian actors. But the story is full of elements from Indonesian folklore and stories of witches and witchcraft. It's cool, even if it is a bit of a bummer not to see a more uniquely local cinematic language, if that's a thing anyone understands. Things take a while to get going. A man is traveling with his family to visit his childhood home, an isolated orphanage. The man who ran the orphanage is dying, and so the group is gathering to see the place one last time. And then things get spooky as people start dropping off, vomiting clumps of bloody centipedes and getting possessed. I'm gonna say that as someone with serious trypophobia and general issues with bugs, the movie was frequently very difficult to watch, which wasn't cool exactly but it is neat to see that a movie can have that effect on me. As a movie The Queen of Black Magic isn't going to break any new ground or blow any minds, but it's not bad by any means. It's a perfectly serviceable horror movie with some genuinely unsettling imagery, and worth checking out, even if it never gets as wild as movies like Mystics in Bali seem to do. But obviously even now they're drawing on a lot of the same heritage. / 5My May 2022 Movies: 1. Saturday Morning Mystery, 2. Ghostbusters Afterlife (Rated PG), 3. Superstition, 4. Vampyr (Hidden Gems), 5. The People Under the Stairs (Horror Noire), 6. Rock & Roll Nightmare (Music of the Night), 7. Nosferatu (Sins of the Past), 8. Shadow of the Vampire (Behind the Screams), 9. Witchfinder General (The Price is Right), 10. Shorts (Short Cuts), 11. Creepshow (Hail to the King), 12. The Queen of Black Magic (Perfect Getaway)
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May 20, 2022 18:30
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Movie 13: Child's Play (Scream, Queen) We're friends 'til the end, remember? Child's Play is kind of a ridiculous movie, isn't it? We have a serial killer who transfers his soul into a doll after he's shot during a police chase. The doll then proceeds to start killing the poo poo out of people, both innocent bystanders and former accomplices. The movie features numerous scenes of the camera holding on a goofy looking doll while ominous horror music plays, and if that isn't ridiculous then I don't know what is. None of this is to say that Child's Play is a bad movie. I can see why it has the reputation it does, because the movie doesn't lean away from its ridiculousness. It revels in it. It's from that old new school of 80s horror movies that were a mixture of comedy and horror, kind of like Gremlins or A Nightmare on Elm Street. I've always had a soft spot for that stuff, being an 80s kid myself. The movie has it all: bumbling cops trying to solve the crime wave in Chucky's spree, laughing off an increasing number of people insisting it's a possessed doll that's doing the killing. Psychologists insisting it's all the work of a troubled kid, a budding romance between the mom and our bumbling detective. The explanation for Chucky's powers being that he knew some voodoo guy who taught him (and whom Chucky then tortures with a voodoo doll he made). Some truly memorable acting from various people, and of course a lot of extremely 80s haircuts. It's awesome! It's also kinda neat to watch the first movie in a long-running series that's become a staple of pop culture. Since it's the first movie, a lot of the concepts are still fresh and the movie's trying to play its cards close to its chest. It's quite a bit into the movie before we outright see Chucky doing anything, for a long stretch in the movie it's just blurry shapes flashing past in the background and the aforementioned ominous shots of a goofy-rear end doll. Child's Play is the kind of movie you'd love to randomly catch late night on the TV, and if I'd seen it when I was younger, it definitely would've become a classic with me like Gremlins, the Goonies and other 80s movies I still love. All in all a good time! ,5 / 5 My May 2022 Movies: 1. Saturday Morning Mystery, 2. Ghostbusters Afterlife (Rated PG), 3. Superstition, 4. Vampyr (Hidden Gems), 5. The People Under the Stairs (Horror Noire), 6. Rock & Roll Nightmare (Music of the Night), 7. Nosferatu (Sins of the Past), 8. Shadow of the Vampire (Behind the Screams), 9. Witchfinder General (The Price is Right), 10. Shorts (Short Cuts), 11. Creepshow (Hail to the King), 12. The Queen of Black Magic (Perfect Getaway), 13. Child's Play (Scream, Queen) Shaman Tank Spec fucked around with this message at 13:56 on May 21, 2022 |
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May 21, 2022 13:31
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Movie 14: The Ritual (Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched) My old scoutmaster used to say 'If the shortcut was a shortcut, it wouldn't be called a shortcut, it would be called a route'. After experiencing a traumatic event, a group of four friends decide to go hiking in the backwoods of Sweden... with spooky consequences. The Ritual is a pretty drat atmospheric horror movie that draws on Nordic folklore and pagan traditions. The film takes place almost entirely within an old forest, which made me as a Finn immediately feel at home, even though the movie was apparently shot in Romania. I guess their old forests are a lot like ours. If you're a weirdo like me who enjoys mossy boulders and huge trees, you'll also probably think the movie is beautiful. As every Finn knows, when you go poking around in deep dark forests, there's a chance you might find something that would've been best left forgotten. In this case that something is a bunch of creepy runes and stick effigies, and we all know nothing good ever came from that poo poo. I've always been a fan of movies that focus on building tension over jump scares or gross-out stuff, and The Ritual definitely belongs in that camp, even though it has some of the latter two as well. Large parts of the movie are spent with something stalking our hapless hikers, and usually all we see are maybe small glimpses of something in the background, or hear unnerving sounds. There's of course a bunch of death in the movie as well, but we don't really see it. We just hear it, and see the aftermath, which makes it all the worse. I dunno, the movie got to me big time. I haven't been affected like a horror movie like this in a while, and that alone makes The Ritual pretty special in my books. It's very much not a fun movie, but not all horror movies have to be. / 5 My May 2022 Movies: 1. Saturday Morning Mystery, 2. Ghostbusters Afterlife (Rated PG), 3. Superstition, 4. Vampyr (Hidden Gems), 5. The People Under the Stairs (Horror Noire), 6. Rock & Roll Nightmare (Music of the Night), 7. Nosferatu (Sins of the Past), 8. Shadow of the Vampire (Behind the Screams), 9. Witchfinder General (The Price is Right), 10. Shorts (Short Cuts), 11. Creepshow (Hail to the King), 12. The Queen of Black Magic (Perfect Getaway), 13. Child's Play (Scream, Queen), 14. The Ritual (Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched)
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May 24, 2022 17:08
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Movie 15: Knife + Heart (The King in Yellow) It was all shadows and blood and death! Knife + Heart opens with possibly the gayest nightclub in the history of gay nightclubs, then immediately moves on to a young man being murdered by a masked killer with a dildo that's actually a giant switchblade, all set to a thumping vaporwave soundtrack by M83. That's one hell of an opening statement. The movie's absolutely gorgeous, in a grimy kind of way. Considering the subject matter -- a psycho slashing their way through the late 70's gay porn scene of France -- it's undoubtedly intentional, but the movie looks like someone set out to make a 70s euro slasher with modern technology. I don't know if it's a giallo thing or just the film's aesthetic, but it also makes heavy use of coloured lighting. Some scenes are given almost sepia tones with sunlight, while the many night time scenes are naturally lit with strongly contrasting neon lights. It looks awesome and reminded me of Suspiria. The plot itself is ... well, not nonsense but intensely theatrical? Almost dreamlike at times. Symbolism on top of symbolism on top of symbolism. I don't know if I was really in the mood for that right now, but that may be more on me than the movie. I did enjoy how openly and even flagrantly queer the movie was, and I did really like many of the shots. Like for instance in the forest when the camera spins around really fast around the woman, and every time we see past her, the killer has crept a little bit closer to her until it's stabbin' time. And I liked the small subplot of Anne making a cheesy porn version of the real life murders, and how the movie kept cutting back and forth between the porn movie and reality really smoothly. It was fun! I'm not a giallo expert by any means so I can't say if the film's tone and atmosphere are just typical giallo fare or more unique to this film, but they are easily worth the price of admission even if the story doesn't hit you very hard, like it didn't me. And I really can't praise the soundtrack enough. M83's Hurry Up, We're Dreaming is still in my regular rotation, so I super appreciated their music and the mood it gave to the movie. / 5And that's 13/13 challenges completed. I think I'll try to squeeze in a couple more old favourites, like Army of Darkness, and I'm still open to suggestions for cool movies I might not have seen. My May 2022 Movies: 1. Saturday Morning Mystery, 2. Ghostbusters Afterlife (Rated PG), 3. Superstition, 4. Vampyr (Hidden Gems), 5. The People Under the Stairs (Horror Noire), 6. Rock & Roll Nightmare (Music of the Night), 7. Nosferatu (Sins of the Past), 8. Shadow of the Vampire (Behind the Screams), 9. Witchfinder General (The Price is Right), 10. Shorts (Short Cuts), 11. Creepshow (Hail to the King), 12. The Queen of Black Magic (Perfect Getaway), 13. Child's Play (Scream, Queen), 14. The Ritual (Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched), 15. Knife+Heart (The King in Yellow Shaman Tank Spec fucked around with this message at 20:29 on May 24, 2022 |
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May 24, 2022 20:23
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TheMopeSquad posted:
I absolutely loved this one. In my books it's the best Lovecraft filmation of all time. I really should pick up the 4K Blu-ray because as you say, it's visually stunning.
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May 24, 2022 20:32
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Movie 16: Army of Darkness https://i.imgur.com/vO92s0N.mp4 Good. Bad. I'm the guy with the gun. When I was younger, I thought the Army of Darkness was the perfect movie. And you know, I still kinda do. I think this movie is to be blamed for my life-long obsession with the undead, my increasingly large Warhammer undead army and why to this day I absolutely love any game that lets me fight grimy and dusty skeletons. Time hasn't been super kind to the movie, nor has the 1080P Blu-ray transfer. You can now see the human eyes inside some of the undead eye sockets, and a lot of the more mobile undead are obviously just guys in rubber suits now. But at the same time, the Raimis did a smart thing by using stop-motion for so many of the skeletons. That still looks as good (or bad?) as it ever did and I loving love it. And holy hell I love the skeletons. Both Evil Dead II and the Army of Darkness are full of silly slapstick, and the skeletons are the embodiment of this. So many fun little gags and jokes with these guys, and I'll never get tired of Ash just picking one up by the shoulders and legs, and breaking it in half against his knee. It's been ages since I last saw the movie, but apparently whatever version I saw back in the day didn't have the original theatrical ending, because I swear to god I have never seen the ending where Ash ends up fighting the possessed lady in modern day S-Mart. But at the same time, how would I have had the alternate ending in early-to-mid-90s Finland? Maybe my memory's just going bad! Either way, the Army of Darkness owns bones and is still easily one of my favourite movies. It's fun to see that it's still as entertaining as it ever was. I absolutely love Sam Raimi's sense of humor and the wonderful and inventive shots he throws in his movies, I love Bruce Campbell's corny performance, I love how quotable the movie is, I love the skeleton having a coughing fit while getting out of his coffin, I absolutely love the angry dooting skeleton flutist, and I still 100% love that Ash's master plan was to pretend he had a coughing fit while stealing the Necronomicon. Hail to the king, baby. / 5My May 2022 Movies: 1. Saturday Morning Mystery, 2. Ghostbusters Afterlife (Rated PG), 3. Superstition, 4. Vampyr (Hidden Gems), 5. The People Under the Stairs (Horror Noire), 6. Rock & Roll Nightmare (Music of the Night), 7. Nosferatu (Sins of the Past), 8. Shadow of the Vampire (Behind the Screams), 9. Witchfinder General (The Price is Right), 10. Shorts (Short Cuts), 11. Creepshow (Hail to the King), 12. The Queen of Black Magic (Perfect Getaway), 13. Child's Play (Scream, Queen), 14. The Ritual (Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched), 15. Knife+Heart (The King in Yellow), 16. Army of Darkness Movies watched: 16/15 Challenges completed: 13/13
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May 25, 2022 20:07
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Basebf555 posted:Just curious, have you seen some of the classic Ray Harryhausen stuff from the 50s, 60s and 70s? Jason and the Argonauts, 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Clash of the Titans, etc. I'm guessing you have but I just wanted to bring it up because obviously Harryhausen is the go-to place if you're in the mood for classic stop-motion creatures. You know, I don't think I have! Other than some random clips and maybe back in the day as a kid. But that definitely sounds like a good idea to revisit!
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May 25, 2022 20:45
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Franchescanado posted:Clash of the Titans is wild. It's the perfect 60's fantasy movie, down to fuzzy dreamy cinematography, costume designs, animations, sets, plotting and pacing, and it was released in 1981. That's cool, I've always been into that. If I'm reading the list correctly, Clash of the Titans was his last movie?
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May 26, 2022 10:38
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Jedit posted: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. Yeah that makes sense. And hell, the guy went out on top at least I guess?
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May 26, 2022 12:50
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Movie 17: A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) The power of Heaven and Earth is limitless! Oh no, my powers of Heaven and Earth ran out! A Chinese Ghost Story is a fantastic romantic horror comedy, which I randomly saw on Finnish TV as a young man and finally remembered to track down again now in adulthood. I'm glad to see it still holds up very well. At the center of the story is a hapless tax collector who is the Superman of having bad luck. Everything that can go wrong, does, until he finds himself sheltering from the rain in an abandoned temple. A taoist monk warns him that within the temple lies great evil, but the man doesn't believe the warning and soon everyone is up to their ears in ghosts, zombies and other monsters. This would be bad enough, but our tax collector has also fallen in love with one of the ghosts, an innocent young woman who is being forced to lure men to their deaths to feed her evil mistress. The movie is a really fun mixture of goofy comedy, genuinely touching romantic drama, and plenty of over the top wuxia action as the hapless goon and his old monk friend battle the forces of hell. It also features a lot of really cool practical effects and stop motion creatures. I'm not well enough versed in Chinese mythology to know how true to the origins the stuff is, but in any case it's refreshingly different from normal ghost and monster stuff. And who can't get into huge walls of skulls and soup bowls full of decapitated heads in a haunted inn? Reading up on the movie now, apparently it enjoys a cult status in Hong Kong, Japan and other parts of Asia, and I can totally understand why. It's just a uniquely goofy, charming and fun, and occasionally also really beautiful and quite touching movie. What a weird combination! My only gripe is that the subtitles on the Blu-ray version I bought were really crap and left about 30% of the movie just randomly untranslated, which would've meant missing a bunch of jokes and context clues if I didn't remember them from the Finnish subtitles from back in the day. /5My May 2022 Movies: 1. Saturday Morning Mystery, 2. Ghostbusters Afterlife (Rated PG), 3. Superstition, 4. Vampyr (Hidden Gems), 5. The People Under the Stairs (Horror Noire), 6. Rock & Roll Nightmare (Music of the Night), 7. Nosferatu (Sins of the Past), 8. Shadow of the Vampire (Behind the Screams), 9. Witchfinder General (The Price is Right), 10. Shorts (Short Cuts), 11. Creepshow (Hail to the King), 12. The Queen of Black Magic (Perfect Getaway), 13. Child's Play (Scream, Queen), 14. The Ritual (Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched), 15. Knife+Heart (The King in Yellow), 16. Army of Darkness, 17. A Chinese Ghost Story Movies watched: 17/15 Challenges completed: 13/13 Shaman Tank Spec fucked around with this message at 18:29 on May 31, 2022 |
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May 31, 2022 18:25
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My wrap-up: As always, big thanks for organizing this, gey muckle mowser. The challenges are cool and it's fun to be pushed out of my comfort zone and take the time to watch, for instance, 100 year old horror movies. Not all of the challenges produced movies I ended up loving but hey, they were still experiences. And ultimately I did discover some truly great movies this way, like Vampyr, which I would definitely list as one of this year's highlights. My biggest regret is not having people to watch movies with anymore, because cheesy horror movies just aren't terribly fun to watch alone which meant that some of the trashy movies I'd picked out ahead of the time ended up sitting on the shelf collecting dust, while I tried to find movies that were interesting solo and sober. But still, as always, a very fun experience. I'll definitely be down for round four in October. Movies watched: 17/15 Challenges completed: 13/13 Challenge movies: Ghostbusters Afterlife (Rated PG) Vampyr (Hidden Gems) The People Under the Stairs (Horror Noire) Rock & Roll Nightmare (Music of the Night) Nosferatu (Sins of the Past) Shadow of the Vampire (Behind the Screams) Witchfinder General (The Price is Right) Shorts (Short Cuts) Creepshow (Hail to the King) The Queen of Black Magic (Perfect Getaway) Child's Play (Scream, Queen) The Ritual (Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched) Knife+Heart (The King in Yellow)
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Jun 1, 2022 20:13
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Jedit posted:A few that I don't recall being done, at least not in the last few years: These are a lot of fun! dorium posted:A challenge I always wanted to put forth was doing themed triple features. I sit around sometimes and just make up triple features for myself to do and a lot of course are horror themed anyways: This is also a cool idea, especially if it counts for extra. Otherwise it may be hard to get time or energy for three horror movies in one sitting. But that may just be my ADHD talking.
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Jun 10, 2022 11:33
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