|
Going for 31! 1. The Fly (1958) The evergreen sci-fi story of scientific hubris. The Fly has no less than three intense and memorable special effects-driven reveals showing off the horror of what David Hedison has done to himself with his sci-fi experiments. Most movies would be lucky to have one! There's a great suspense build from him wearing a black towel over his head like a hangman's cowl and communicating by thumping the table - despite Patricia Owens trying to be the good caring wife, you just know it's gonna be awful when his new face is revealed. And it sure fuckin' is, whew!! Did I mention that Owens is a terrific classic movie screamer? The high points are really high but there's so much dull talky flab around them. The Fly has the plodding pacing that's common to '50s flicks; a whole low-energy murder investigation is dragged out before we even get to the flashback where the real story begins, and the dialogue is too flat to sustain interest. There was a point in the movie where I was more excited by Hedison's huge goofy outdoor lounger than anything the characters were chattering about. I do admire the clever work leveraging the premise so that a scene of people trying to catch a fly in a living room becomes tense action, but it's only mundane filler when you want to see more of what's lurking in that lab!  / 5
|
#
¿
Oct 1, 2022 18:40
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 18, 2024 19:50 |
|
|
 2. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) A serial killer investigation story told with an unnerving, subjective point of view, shrouded in dead ends and dreamlike ambiance, given a tinkling score by Ennio Morricone with breathy "la la la" singing and bells and plucked guitar strings. It's really hard to put into words why The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is so engrossing when its plot synopsis is so higgledy-piggledy. But if you put it on long enough to see the inciting incident you'll know: an assaulted woman bleeding on the floor of an art gallery made of white marble, Tony Musante rushing to help but trapped behind a wall of glass from her, both exposed and helpless and flooded with light. You can feel why the puzzle keeps on preying on his mind in abrupt intercuts. Deep eerie vibes, and a great indulgence in using shots of driving gloves and a looming silhouette at the edge of the frame to build the creepy anticipation.  / 5.jpg)
Vanilla Bison fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Oct 10, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Oct 2, 2022 02:35
|
|
|
 3. The Purge (2013) Props to casting, it legitimately took me a moment to realize Rhys Wakefield wasn't wearing one of the creepy masks, his evil grin just looks that way. The Purge is a mess. Its fundamental sin is that it wants to do blunt social commentary, but it's too cowardly to really bite in on that. So we get the setup of the infamous "for 12 hours all crime is legal" premise, and we get to see how it actually funnels all the violence and exploitation towards the people without the resources to protect themselves, personified in a homeless Black man running screaming for help down the streets of a barricaded upper class neighborhood (a pointed update of Jamie Lee Curtis banging uselessly on people's doors in John Carpenter's Halloween)... but then the primary antagonists of the picture are weirdos intentionally doing horror movie cosplay? The Purge tries way too hard to make them scary, overplaying its hand with stupid tropes like a bad guy casually murdering one of his friends. It makes them feel like pure screenwriting contrivance rather than a credible threat, and worse, it loses the metaphor! Rich douchebags who understand class dynamics don't prey on their own. It's a little weird to use a big high concept just to support a small scale home invasion story, but I wouldn't mind that if it was at least a good home invasion story. It ain't. It starts out as a funny joke that these rich idiots have a McMansion so big that the family can lose each other as they stumble through the hallways. But it repeats endlessly until it's straight up boring watching a nervous Ethan Hawke meander aimlessly in the dark with his gun out. Everyone makes awful decisions, no one can communicate or react properly, and even the catharsis of seeing awful people get violently owned is more perfunctory than satisfying.  .5 / 5
|
|
#
¿
Oct 2, 2022 05:33
|
|
|
 4. Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) I didn't know color could look this good all the way back in 1933! Mystery of the Wax Museum was the last hoorah of two-color Technicolor, which is why everything is some shade of pink or green. It looks tolerably good in mundane interior scenes and then looks fantastic in the waxworking lair of the sinister Ivan Eigor, which has the huge unhinged angular shapes of a German expressionist picture, all cast in malevolent emerald hues. I nearly thought this was a bust as a horror film until the climax pops off. Most of the runtime is Glenda Farrell doing a relentless sassy girl reporter routine (turns out another similar role of hers was a direct inspiration on Lois Lane) as she tries to fish out a scoop from why a murdered woman's body was stolen from the morgue. Farrell is really drat entertaining, it's good fun watching her lay down a whole screwball comedy's worth of savage banter, but her sparring with her newspaper editor just doesn't have any spook factor. That is, until her roommate Fay Wray gets lured into Eigor's wax museum alone. From the shot where Max Betz as a creepy mute lifts his head up from a row of wax faces, the horror factor drastically escalates, through a terrifying reveal that caught me totally off guard and a truly ghastly death that looms over Wray as a mob of policemen try to batter the doors open and save her! It's an hour's worth of classic horror packed into five minutes of action! Just don't even try to wrap your head around the insane romantic decisions of the epilogue.  / 5
|
|
#
¿
Oct 2, 2022 07:49
|
|
|
 5. The Blob (1958) I can't recommend The Blob as a feature but you owe it to yourself to watch the opening titles and enjoy the groovy Burt Bacharach theme music. It even charted, #33 on Billboard! It creeps, and leaps! The Blob flirts in places with more campy delight of that kind, and I wish it was willing to plunge all-in into the ridiculous. A slow red jiggling goop ball is inherently a funny threat. The film understands the comic potential of a dumbass poking it with a stick, or a great cut from "We've got to get him to the doctor! Hope the doc's in!" to the doctor announcing "Time for my trip, hope no one needs me for the next few days!" But most of the film is a 28-year old Steve McQueen playing an inarticulate teenager and failing to convince any grown-ups that the town is in danger. That's a lot of snoresville and not a lot of wrecking poo poo. If you enjoy the twit cop in Killer Klowns from Outer Space, you'll smirk at his equally skeptical pappy here. There's also a genuinely sweet moment where the high-strung high school principal jumps in a teen hot rodder's car, finally bridging the generation gap to help out. But that's about it for interesting character moments or dialogue. Aneta Corsaut's character in particular gets absolutely gently caress all to do besides stand next to McQueen and look concerned. The Blob did leave me with a huge smile due to its ending, which wasn't intended as a joke but now in 2022 comes off as the funniest long-game sequel hook of all time: "At least we've got it stopped." "Yeah... as long as the Arctic stays cold!" THE END...???  / 5
|
|
#
¿
Oct 2, 2022 19:38
|
|
|
 6. The Black Hole (1979) Hell yes, time for that 1979 sci-fi horror classic where a spaceship crew explores a space derelict only to make a terrifying discovery... The Black Hole! What a weird project. This is a Walt Disney picture that set out to be a disaster adventure movie like The Poseidon Adventure in space, pivoted to rip off Star Wars when that flavor of sci-fi became a mega-hit during The Black Hole's development process, and somewhere along the way picked up such a macabre atmosphere that it became a horror story about Dr. Frankenstein's haunted spaceship as much as anything else in the mix. Does the film end up a muddle? Definitely. Is it worth watching? Definitely. The production design and John Barry's score make the opening magical. The U.S.S. Cygnus spaceship is one part oil rig, two parts Gothic cathedral, an absolutely superb feat of miniature craftsmanship that summons all the right dread as circumstances force the protagonist crew of the Palomino to draw close and dock with the massive space hulk as it perches on the event horizon of a black hole. The interior is perhaps a little less imaginative and more airport terminal in its vibe, but the control room reveal makes up for it! The "crew" of mindless robots with their "medieval" robes and reflective Daft Punk facemasks are just an exquisite pairing of ancient Dracula energy and techno-wizardry for how simple they are. And that makes Maximilian Schell the techno-wizard, a classic mad scientist archetype who clearly has secrets on board beyond his mad ambition to traverse the black hole and achieve immortality in a universe beyond physical laws on the other side. Without spoilers, it's an interesting question whether he gets his wish; the ending is a gobsmacking piece of ambiguity that steals from 2001: A Space Odyssey and throws in some heady religious symbolism of its own. I could gush longer about the cool stuff, but I gotta pump the brakes and talk about the goofy Star Wars space adventure scenes. They are not very good. Pretty much anything involving the pseudo-Stormtrooper robots is bad, particularly a huge dumb blaster fight on a bridge. The score kicks into a brassy John Williams imitation that totally kills the dark and menacing energy of the piece. Fortunately the pew-pew recedes and we get back to a vortex that looks like red swirling gases around the mouth of hell itself. Oddly though, despite him being a cuddly R2-D2 knockoff with big square googly eyes and thus part of the picture's sillier side, Vincent the robot won me over. He drops a lot of timely aphorisms, he's brave, he gets poo poo done, he blows things away with lasers and brawls with the big bad robot with the buzzsaw hands! All the other Star Wars derivative crap can go but he can stay, and be my friend.  .5 / 5   Super pumped that Spooky Bingo is live!! The Black Hole is set in space, qualifying for Spaced Invaders. 
Vanilla Bison fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Oct 24, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Oct 2, 2022 22:55
|
|
|
 7. The Vigil (2019) A pure, rock solid haunting story, told nearly to perfection. Dave Davis plays a man who's recently left an Orthodox Jewish community in New York. He's in an awkward spot between two worlds, not socialized enough to the basics of talking to girls and submitting resumes due to his closed-off religious upbringing, struggling to make rent. So he accepts a request to serve as a paid shomer, a watchman to keep a vigil through the night and say psalms over the body of a recently deceased recluse. It's short notice, because of course the last guy they tried to hire mysteriously ran off into the night. But what's so scary about spending five hours in a room with a dead body? What was that about a Mazzik demon this guy thought he was being tormented by? Say, are those mysterious creaking noises I hear?? It's scary enough being in your own home when something creepy is going down, but it's so much worse to be trapped in someone else's. The Vigil makes the sparse light sources and close confines of an apartment after hours feel absolutely suffocating. Writer-director Keith Thomas is patient to let you stew in that atmosphere and let the tension build. Lots of long, effective shots of a shadowed stairway or unlit dining room, while the soundtrack builds a merciless electronic drone. Your eyes burrow into the background that hangs conspicuously in the frame, just waiting for something awful to come, practically feeding yourself up to the pit in your stomach. Worn tropes like phantom phone messages and movement underneath sheets feel restored to their full power by meticulous, understated filming. It is simply a fantastic creepy buildup and when things pop off the manifestations of an evil spirit are taut and effective (and impressively low budget for how much punch they pack). The final confrontation is a stunner that will linger on my mind for a long time. Come for the novelty of The Vigil's Jewish mythology, stay for the workshop on how to make all these classic elements scary again for all that we've seen them a hundred times.  .5 / 5 For Spooky Bingo, I cannot overstate the Jewishness of The Vigil, it absolutely hits the religious themes for checking off The Devil Made Me Do It. 
Vanilla Bison fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Oct 10, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Oct 3, 2022 05:24
|
|
|
Finishing the weekend blitz with some relaxing Halloween specials for Spooky Bingo! It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966, 25 minutes) A mellow slice of pumpkin pie, sweetness with just a little ginger kick of that adult dry wit that makes Charlie Brown material work. I didn't grow up with much respect for good ol' Charlie Brown, because even though I was an eager reader of the funny pages, by the time of my youth Charles Schulz was in his long late creative slump. Those late Peanuts strips were emotionally muted and always ended with a weak observational statement for a punchline, never any sting. So it was refreshing to watch this and enjoy people being smug, upset, miserable, full of feeling, with punchlines that still have some wry crackle to them. And Vince Guaraldi's gentle piano jazz is a perfect fit for cool autumn nostalgia.  .5 / 5  Muppets Haunted Mansion (2021, 52 minutes) "Don't worry folks, we're not going to be explaining ALL the jokes." LMAO, John Stamos baited me into that goddamn jump scare. Chock-a-block with rapid-fire cameos, meta jokes, and general satisfying silliness. The premise is that Gonzo and Pepe are doing a House on Haunted Hill survive-the-night challenge at Disney's haunted mansion, and it's a good choice, they deliver a nice double act between Gonzo's fearless Goth enthusiasm and Pepe's, uh... skirt-chasing Taraji P. Henson? Look, it works! A bunch of people hated Matt Vogel's Kermit voice, the CG floating ghost effects are a cheat that dodges the need for any creative blocking with the puppeteering, but I don't mind. This special exists to provide an hour's worth of constant joke patter and it's got the goods, even finding time for a surprisingly touching moment with Gonzo realizing his one true fear amidst the fluff. I'll hold out hope for more legit Muppet movies but if more specials like this are the future for these characters, I can roll with it! "Gee, nobody says goodbye here, they just ghost you."   / 5 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 3, 2022 06:48
|
|
|
Crescent Wrench posted:I'm working on a game plan for the SPOOKY Bingo board, and I'm hoping to work in some of the Universal horror classics that went up on Criterion Channel this month. Obviously I have a broad idea about these movies, but of course by the nature of their challenge I haven't seen them. If anyone can think of good ways I might be able to sneak these into SPOOKY Bingo square, it would be greatly appreciated! I'm really eyeing any of Dracula, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, and Creature from the Black Lagoon. I know Golden Years applies across the board, Paperbacks From Hell for most, Masters of Horror could cover a James Whale selection, presumably H20 for Creature, but please let me know if I'm overlooking any. Bride of Frankenstein is a good tragic fit for Zombie Honeymoon. The Invisible Man has been remade a few times and so counts for They Always Come Back. Dracula should qualify for A Perfect Getaway - it's a vacation gone wrong, if you look at it from Dracula's perspective! 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 4, 2022 00:49
|
|
|
 8. Harpoon (2019) Is there a genre term for people trapping themselves in disastrous situations of their own making? Nitwit thrillers, maybe? Inept survival? Harpoon is one of those. Munro Chambers plays a loser, Chris Gray plays a prick, and Emily Tyra plays a woman dumb enough to be involved with these awful guys. Gray has "one of his many" rage fits and beats up Chambers because he thinks Tyra slept with him, then apologizes by bringing them on an impromptu day trip in his boat, only for the fight to flare up again with even more violence when Gray realizes he had it right the first time. Chekhov's spear gun is fired and disposed of when we're barely out of the first act, and once everyone is injured and miserable and ready to set for shore and put this deeply stupid incident behind them, the boat's engine fails to turn over. So now everyone hates each other and they're stranded at sea. Whoops. Harpoon is mostly played as comedy, and it... sort of works. The characters are unpleasant buffoons and Brett Gelman gives a snide voiceover narration throughout most of the opening that does a fairly entertaining job mocking them. The single best part of the movie is probably Gelman's rapid-fire listing of every nautical superstition they violated to bring bad luck on themselves. I can't think of another comedy that gives the best jokes to a narrator besides, uh, Arrested Development maybe? It's weird because in between the narration, the actors themselves don't bring nearly enough comedy energy, so the relationship conversations feel awkwardly serious while also being impossible to invest in. Eventually things get properly dark and the laughs vanish altogether. The horror beats are a mixed bag again, some genuinely grody stuff with an infected wound leading to sepsis when they're utterly without the tools to even amputate, but also some extremely uninspired "people going loony and yelling at each other" material that seems to be common for super low budget films that can't go bigger beyond dialogue in a single location. Some comedy-by-idiocy returns in the ending, fortunately, but it feels like the film is whipsawing between tones rather than serving a smooth blend. Maybe I'm more down on Harpoon than it deserves. It's a quick little film that made me both laugh and squirm. But the cinematography is unimaginative, conspicuously so when it tries to do some kind of flourish and settles for That '70s Show by doing whip-pans around a conversation circle, so I'll let that be my mental tiebreaker for a thumbs down.  .5 / 5 For Spooky Bingo, this movie is all about a supposedly romantic relationship triangle, strained and loveless though it seems to be, so I'm counting it for Zombie Honeymoon. 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 4, 2022 06:00
|
|
|
 9. The Brain (1988) "Words are the tools of any fool! I WANT ACTION!!!" Fun junk food horror. A local Dianetics-style pseudo-psychology television show (amusingly titled "Independent Thinking") is a cover for a freaky alien brain to broadcast its brainwaves and take over people's minds! Tom Bresnahan is a smart teen with an attitude problem and a knack for chemistry-based pranks, and when it turns out he's resistant to the brain's mind control, he gets framed for murder and has to go on the run from the entire brainwashed town. The acting and editing aren't very sharp, but don't worry, because The Brain is the rare low budget horror film that lives the dream and delivers on its poster! The film goes all in on that goopy big-toothed monstrosity and it's constantly showing up to growl and chow down on people! Even in its weakest form as a literal brain and spinal cord, it's not shy about lunging on the nearest leggy lab assistant and mauling her. And "minor" kills from people in its thrall are good fun too, like George Buza delivering a roundhouse axe chop that takes a cop's whole dang head off! It's a perfectly pleasing package of weightless popcorn goofery.  / 5 This one's about evil taking people over through the television, so it fits TerrorVision for Spooky Bingo. 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 5, 2022 04:11
|
|
|
 10. Penda's Fen "I am nothing pure!" Penda's Fen is intellectual, dry, talky, on the stodgy side of things. It's also incredible, a magnificent rumination on orthodoxy and rebellion and finding the world more complex than you wanted it to be. It's calm and understated and uses that to speak about coming of age in a way that I found deeply moving. It's such an eloquent screenplay, every dialogue hums with poetic richness in the language. And in its own peculiar way Penda's Fen has a firecracker of a finale. Basically if you thought folk horror like The Wicker Man or Midsommar were cool but they would have been improved by way less stuff happening and more long discussions of Christian theology, Joan of Arc, and English national identity, you need to see Penda's Fen immediately!! Spencer Banks plays Stephen Franklin, an uptight teen boy growing up as the son of a parson in the village of Pinvin. His passions are classical music, protestantism, and being an insufferable young prig; after his Marxist neighbor speaks in defense of strikers at a town meeting, Banks later sneers at home how fortunate it is that God has prevented them from having children and spreading their terrible values. Ugh! I'm sure all of you have known (or have been) young adults who were overbearingly self-righteous for how little they've fathomed the world. Banks nails it. And smartly, the film opens with his best side rather than his worst: a transcendent scene where Banks narrates an explanation of the narrative ideas of composer Edward Elgar's "The Dream of Gerontious," expertly intercut with beautiful wind-rustled fields and brief shots of sheet music that suggest the power of specific notes strongly enough that it even got through to a musical blockhead to me. If this kid can see beauty in a moment of dissonance before the divine, there's hope for him. And it's exactly that thread that's pulled throughout Penda's Fen. The screenplay tugs apart his compact and simplistic worldview as he comes of age and to a new understanding of his religious values, ethnic heritage, nationalist participation, sexual identity. It starts with Banks chirping a bit too enthusiastically about a dream of his and what he knows about Manicheanism in the classroom. As a young absolutist he clearly relates to the idea of existence as a cosmic struggle between light and dark, and he later has to sheepishly ask his father why it's a heresy. But it is a heresy, and that's the first crack that widens (ultimately into a later magnetic image of a fissure tearing through the church floor as he plays the organ) - the subtle rebellion of preferring a cosmology that makes sense to him personally rather than towing the doctrinal line of what he is told. Soon his dreams are heating up too, with visions of his hand caressing the chest of a classmate who mocked his rugby performance, and waking up into the shock of a smiling stone devil squatting on his chest. It's a literalization of a night terror, but it's also the crushing weight of pagan strangeness that's come upon him. Penda's Fen is explicitly queer. There's no ambiguity about the way Banks look on the male form lustfully, first as charged fantasy where a billow of hellfire rises to meet his hand as it creeps down his dream Adonis' belly, then in his lingering embrace of the young milkman when he's helped up from the roadside after a bike accident. What's much more ambiguous is how to interpret the expressions of queerness from 1974 in 2022. Banks identifies with an "otherworldly" angel who is male but sings with a female voice; when the other schoolboys bully him by forcing a pink ribbon in his hair he leaves it in and stares them down one by one until they are unnerved; by the end he explicitly says he is "neither man nor woman" in a speech rejecting binary dichotomies. Is Banks' character an egg hatching into trans nonbinary? I think it's a valid reading but not a dominant one. Discourse on gender identity and sexuality has changed tremendously in 50 years, and there is definitely a long tradition in art and literature of presenting gay men's sexual interest in men as being an interior "womanly" quality in a way that would be at least mildly offensive if reused thoughtlessly today. So these aspects could have been intended by writer David Rudkin as homosexual signifiers rather than trans. But ultimately it's almost besides the point. Penda's Fen is anything but thoughtless: rebellion against heteronormativity is the point, thematically linked with half a dozen other rebellions against orthodoxy that inform the ultimate transformation of Banks into something that a supernatural vision anoints as a revolutionary messiah to keep the flame of a true, chaotic England alive. TL;DR: Be gay, do witchcraft. "There's one hope for man only. When the great concrete megacity chokes the globe from pole to pole, it shall already have bedded in some hidden crack the sacred seed of its own disintegration and collapse."  .5 / 5 Available for free on YouTube. Absolutely terrific recommendation from A True Jar Jar Fan, thank you for this one. For the reasons I discussed, Penda's Fen checks off Scream, Queen! for Spooky Bingo. 
Vanilla Bison fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Oct 5, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Oct 5, 2022 07:21
|
|
|
 11. An American Werewolf in London (1981) Movies like this are much weirder to me than films that deliberately set out to be cryptic and obscure. An American Werewolf in London is perfectly approachable, good-natured even, with easygoing charm radiating from its leads. John Landis seems to have been drinking from the same water from which Ghostbusters would later sprout: ordinary Joes coping with the supernatural with a humorous practicality. Some horror beats are disarmingly goofy: a first person shot of running through the forest just like The Evil Dead footage but which pulls back to reveal a prancing naked David Naughton, a dream in which werewolves in Nazi outfits bust into a home and start machinegunning everybody, a meeting with undead victims of the werewolf where they cheerfully suggest how Naughton should off himself. Yet for all the buddy comedy joshing, when An American Werewolf in London pops off it's brutal. Creedence Clearwater Revival tunes can't make light of that agonizing transformation sequence with Naughton's whole body stretching and warping as he screams!! The wolf design and effects are stupendous, every scene with the wolf unleashed kicks rear end, especially when he rampages through Piccadilly Circus with a destructive ferocity on a scale I'm not used to seeing in horror movies - it feels like a disaster movie all of a sudden. I love it but then the ending is so absurdly abrupt (a doo-wop version of "Blue Moon" over the credits? seriously??) that you can't make out what to feel about the whole thing. It's not quite tragedy or comedy, Jenny Agutter's character seems to be missing another scene that would cement her relation to Naughton's weird problems, and come to think of it the English guys on the moors feel like a dropped subplot as well. A weird entertaining flick that isn't quite like anything else I've seen!  .5 / 5 I was going to put this down for a werewolf movie, but I realized I've got more wolf stuff lined up to watch. An American Werewolf in London kicks off with two buddies taking a scenic vacation in sunny north England before a monster tears them up, so as a vacation gone wrong it qualifies for A Perfect Getaway. 
Vanilla Bison fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Oct 7, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Oct 7, 2022 04:02
|
|
|
 12. Breakdown (1997) "You really want me to stop!? Because I bet this baby stops on a loving dime!!" Yuppie Kurt Russell battling rednecks in the desert to get his wife back! It made me smile seeing Russell in a baby blue Ralph Lauren polo tucked into his khakis, brandishing a cell phone the size of a shoebox. Breakdown has a juicy thriller premise, too: Russell is traveling with his wife Kathleen Quinlan, and when their car breaks down, a friendly trucker gives her a lift to the next rest stop while Russell waits with the car. Except after Russell gets the car going, wifey's nowhere to be found, no one's seen her, including the trucker who act likes he doesn't know Russell from Adam, and all the locals have quite the stinkeye for this agitated city boy who won't stop poking around. I love that story phase where Russell has no leads and she might as well have spontaneously turned to sand and blown away into the desert. There's one of those classic pans across a bunch of indifferent locals at a diner where every sullen face seems to be saying "What you lookin' at, ya fancy Mass-ee-choozits boy?" But even when the truth of what's happened comes out, things stay good. Lots of grounded action with a nice seasoning of pissed off Kurt Russell; tight chases with lovely cars, mulitple tense standoffs, and one of the more satisfying kills in genre history. It ain't Shakespeare but it's more than good enough!  .5 / 5 Breakdown is on the Spooky Bingo list for Yuppie Nightmare! 
Vanilla Bison fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Oct 7, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Oct 7, 2022 06:20
|
|
|
 13. Hellraiser (2022) Dutifully checks the checkboxes but never finds a satisfying note of its own. The 2022 Hellraiser hits all the visual touchstones: chains, new Cenobites, skin flaying, shifting walls. It does a good enough job with all of the gory business to keep me hooked (hyuk hyuk) for the next ritual torture. My vote for coolest act of violence goes to the abduction from the back of a van, which features a memorable in-body view of puncturing needles. But all the characters here are dishwater dull. Odessa A'zion is given a very loose addiction journey where the people around her getting used up and replaced by pushers of bad sensations is prooobably supposed to track as metaphor for her hitting her lowest point? She ultimately faces a choice that might as well be between chasing the dragon forever and swallowing the bitter pill of acknowledging her own fuckups. But you can't just hang an analogy on top of the horror movie story structure, you need to write it. Aside from a few great lines from Jamie Clayton as Pinhead, this Hellraiser is almost void of juicy dialogue or interesting dramatic moments. In the climax where the stakes are biggest, all the remaining characters just come off as exhausted instead of selling the horror. So the whole picture unwinds itself with the dull ticking consistency of a clock.  .5 / 5 For Spooky Bingo, this Hellraiser reboot satisfies They Always Come Back. 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 8, 2022 05:20
|
|
|
 14. Bulbbul (2020) "Where did the sweet little girl I knew go?" "I gobbled her up." A period melodrama about a woman married off to a rich family as a child being broken emotionally and physically by patriarchy; quite a bit like Raise the Red Lantern but with a demon witch woman floating through the treetops and massacring misogynists! Tripti Dimri is really sharp as the lead here. In flashbacks she's an innocent girl who falls in love with her awful husband's much kinder (and much more age-appropriate) younger brother and is devastated when her one companion is maneuvered away from her, and then in present day we see her hardened into the catty lady of the manor who has learned the painful lessons of power and now enjoys sending barbed remarks everyone's way while fanning herself with peacock feathers. The supernatural elements unfortunately take a long backseat in the midsection so we can stew in her suffering, which I warn you includes a really horrendous rape. But the worst of the to-be-woman-is-pain weepiness is smartly tempered by the flashback structure allowing us to have seen evidence of romantic happiness and revenge both in her future. And I love the big enthusiastic horror energy when the supernatural does pop up, like that great shot of the backwards feet of the witch as she drags a victim away, and the way a bloodshot moon saturates the forest shots in red or orange.  .5 / 5  Spooky Bingo: Bulbbul is directed by the female Anvita Dutt, qualifying for Femme Fatale. 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 8, 2022 08:06
|
|
|
 15. Hocus Pocus (1993) "You know, I always wanted a child, and now I think I'll have one. ON TOAST!!" The joy of camp. The daffy clowning of the witch trio is so ludicrous and hammy that I can't help but smile. Even the dumbest comedy is elevated by enthusiasm and there's a couple high quality zingers in here too (the "It is a prison for children!!" joke about school slew me), a broader and zanier update on the fish-out-of-water antics of Warlock. Also surprisingly horny for a Disney flick? '90s family movie material normally bores me silly, and granted most minutes without Midler, Parker and Najimy onscreen are minutes wasted, but this is a fun fizzy Halloween-flavored soda pop. .5 / 5 For Spooky Bingo, a big dose of witching sews up Something Wicked This Way Comes. 
Vanilla Bison fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Oct 24, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Oct 8, 2022 18:56
|
|
|
 16. Village of the Damned (1960) Way more chilling than I expected. Most creepy children in horror movies cross the line and feel like they're trying too hard to scare you. Even in The Shining, Danny's stupid little finger and croaky voice gimmick grate on me. But here in Village of the Damned the creepy balance is perfected, these weirdo psychic blondes don't just have a flat affect, they legitimately don't care about the humans around them. They don't stare for the sake of ominous foreshadowing, they stare when they're actively doing something, and once their target is dead or mentally stunned it's a quick heel turn and on about their business. Overall, Village of the Damned has a detached, scientifically-minded and almost lecturing tone, which it uses to strong effect. The contemporary reviewer Dilys Powell of the Sunday Times described it as a "frightening matter-of-factness" and I think that's bang on. Everyone in an entire village abruptly falling asleep is a spooky phenomenon, and sometimes storytellers are afraid that probing at the rules and boundaries of the supernatural will diminish its creepiness, but in fact it gets much more spooky when teams of army men arrive and divine zero answers as they test the invisible wall of sleep with canaries and gas masks. That sense of unease never abates, even after the mysterious superintelligent children are born and many of the villagers begin to fear them. George Sanders tries to hold off the hostile forces that see the unknown with fear, and almost to the very end, it's hard to tell whether his mission to teach the children humanity is a doomed folly or whether he's the only hope to prevent a Frankenstein-esque tragedy of creating a monster by your own fearful act of rejection. Really good stuff for how simple this picture is. Also, a special Dumbest Horror Decision award to the military genius who orders a pilot to fly a plane into the insta-knockout zone. Maybe think that one through for five seconds, my dude!?  .5 / 5 For obvious psychic child murder reasons, this one checks off Children of the Damned on Spooky Bingo. 
Vanilla Bison fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Oct 8, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Oct 8, 2022 22:44
|
|
|
Watching a bunch of specials and miscellaneous poo poo that ain't moving the needle on any Spooky Bingo I haven't already crossed off, but is still a good time! Werewolf by Night (2022, 55 minutes) A playful, affectionate tribute to old Universal monster movies as told through the MCU lens. Werewolf by Night's black-and-white photography doesn't measure up to that era by a long shot but it still has a lot of fun trying on some stylish feats of presentation and polished takes on throwback VFX - any fan of old movie magic will enjoy the homage to old school drawn-on-the-frame lightning effects, and the way a monster's supernatural annihilation of its prey looks like the best 1950s atomic disintegration effect ever. The story is a tad sparse. This could easily have been a feature with more development for the monster hunters and more for Laura Donnelly to do besides play "exasperated with all this bullshit." Her role is pretty bog standard Marvel tough gal, right down to her very first move being the leaping-twisty-leg takedown from the Black Widow playbook. Gael Garcia Bernal is given a way meatier part as a reluctant empathetic monster hunter and he kills it. Fun watching him treat Donnelly's bristling jerk like a horse whose nerves need to be soothed. The script was careful to call out "longevity" as one of the magical Bloodstone's gifts, so here's to seeing these people show up for supporting roles in the upcoming Blade or whatever sword-thing they were trying to set up Kit Harington for at the end of Eternals.  .5 / 5  A Sinister Halloween Scary Opposites Solar Special (2022, ~22 minutes) A holiday nugget of Solar Opposites gold. The show in general is Justin Roiland's aggro dumbfuck salvo of recycled pop culture detritus, meta-sitcom jokes and improv-loose riffing, and this special is exactly all of that. I have a fondness for stupid Crypt Keeper puns so this one had me from "hell-o," and then I lost it at the cheap Tim Burton crack.  / 5  17. All My Friends Hate Me (2021) Social anxiety cranked up to such a paranoid, suffering extreme that it becomes horror: trapped in an emotional torture chamber where you can't distinguish what's real and what's in your head. But with some funny needle drops. Tom Stourton and Dustin Demri-Burns both do superb acting here. Stourton sells the journey from confusion into anxiety into a breakdown that's just barely being held together by a thin flap of social nicety, while Demri-Burns does a great job with a motte-and-bailey demeanor as he rains an unending stream of jabs and putdowns. The insults are serious but every time Stourton reacts, Demri-Burns feigns a shield of confusion: what, it's just a joke, isn't it mate? Absolutely maddening. A reunion party with college friends is a perfectly chosen atmosphere for making people endure that kind of awkwardness long beyond rational boundaries for the sake of politeness, but even my awkward rear end would be throwing down or bailing. Which becomes a problem for me with the movie. The whole picture is like an "Am I the rear end in a top hat?" post on Reddit writ large, with only enough emotional intelligence to identify the grievance and not to resolve it. The title and much of the content of All My Friends Hate Me suggest it's a portrayal of social drift, with Stourton agonizing over whether the new friction in old relationships is his fault. Are they being dicks? Can he just not take a joke? Stourton drops references to his work with refugees so conspicuously in conversation that it's hard not to come to the conclusion that he's changed from the fun party guy he used to be. But some of the conduct of his friends is so heinous that misunderstanding seems almost impossible over malice. These people loving suck yet the climax gives them a pass in order to drill in further on Stourton's failings, as if he hasn't been flayed enough by inches already. Or to put it more simply, anyone who thinks a roast is an appropriate way to celebrate a reunion with university friends you haven't seen in years deserves some loving buckshot, and that seems to include the writers.  / 3
Vanilla Bison fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Oct 10, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2022 05:57
|
|
|
 18. Carnival of Souls (1962) An artful eerie spine-tingler with a terrific organ score. Carnival of Souls is all about vibes rather than literal meaning. Horror genre enthusiasts will quickly form a hypothesis about why a creepy man that no one else sees keeps appearing to Candace Hilligoss after she mysteriously survives a car crash into a river, but there's no textual, "factual" explanation for her magnetic draw to an abandoned fairground, nor the uncanny episodes where the world falls into silence and she realizes she cannot be seen or heard as life carries on indifferently to her. It's astonishing that this was Herk Harvey's only feature and shot on a nothing budget - this film is a haunted beauty, full of arresting compositions. Carnival of Souls also strikes me as a powerful piece of feminist fiction, standing taller in that department in 1962 than some of the contemporary the-evil-is-patriarchy films we get today (I haven't watched Alex Garland's Men but I've read some scathing reviews). All Hilligoss wants is to play the organ like she studied and get paid, but almost every man she meets tries in some way to exert his will upon her life and bend it into a shape he thinks is more fitting: the priest who rejects her music as "profane" and fires her and then in the next breath tries to have her accept the church's "help," the doctor who physically takes hold of her on the street after a moment of terror and verbally forces her to submit to his theory about her psychological condition, and of course Sidney Berger as her lecherous neighbor who intrudes into her physical space over and over as he tries to get her on a date (and later complains about her being a cold fish when she isn't drinking enough to be easier prey for his advances). Like the world that falls silent, there's an illusion of a community's worth of companionship and support, but it's all a ghostly unreal facade for an independent woman who won't yield to society's duress. Instead she's cursed to wander a hostile and unearthly realm, alone.  / 5  Carnival of Souls is spine #63 in the Criterion Collection, making it Highbrow Horror. 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2022 18:05
|
|
|
 19. Savageland (2015) A faux documentary presentation of a zombie attack and the aftermath in which a migrant Mexican is scapegoated for the massacre of a rural town. The word "zombie" is never mentioned but the moment you see a flash of forensics paperwork mentioning bite marks, come on, we all know what's up. Savageland hones in on the presentation of a very specific documentary format: the slightly trashy commercial docs that you'd find on the History Channel or Discovery. Not a full bore Ancient Aliens level of stupid cash-in, but definitely a juiced-up and one-sided telling of what in-universe is a conspiracy theory. If you don't know what I mean, believe me you'll recognize the style once that scratchy typewriter font shows up for title cards and a bunch of quick flash-ins and intense zoom-ins are used on the already dramatic photographs taken on the night of the incident. It's a clever exercise executed well, with only a few missteps (a voicemail message from a preacher way oversteps with too-spooky bullshit, and the film sails past a perfect documentary ending for a more predictable found footage one). I especially liked the talking head interviews with Len Wein as a Vietnam war photographer, who gave a really good and earnest explanation for why a man in the middle of hell on earth would still be snapping photos. Yet even at its best Savageland never convinced me this format was the most effective way you could tell this story. When Noe Montes' character's journey through the town is being laid out in a CG diagram, I was into it, and I started wanting to actually see this zombie movie instead of being told how it went down with repetitive visual aids. This could have been awesome as the Fire in the Sky of zombie movies. Probably a lot cheaper to get made this way, though! Available for free on YouTube.  / 5 Savageland's conceit leans on a ton of found footage, so I'm marking it for V/H/S. 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2022 01:20
|
|
|
 20. Cat People (1942) Gorgeous black and white with such sumptuous shadows, and thank god for the visual interest because this is a slo-o-ow burn of romance being soured by unresolved psychological damage, slash ancient Eastern European curse. Simone Simon is a Serb who believes she's inherited the burden of her ancestors' crimes against Christian decency. Which means she's going to turn into a panther and kill people if she makes out with them, obviously! Or if she's just unhappy in general. Which makes her jealousy of her new husband's lady friend at the office a bit more dangerous than your average lover's quarrel! Not to mention when Tom Conway as the most unprofessional psychologist in the world starts macking on her!? Cat People is really into this battle between clean, earnest American psychology versus the superstitious baggage of the old world. Simon has an introverted, repressed energy where her own fear of herself is a curse as much as anything supernatural going on - you can see all the joy drain out of her at her own engagement party just from a mere word reminding her of her ancestry. But it just takes sooo looong to get to the good stuff where Simon starts prowling behind Jane Randolph through nighttime streets and around the edge of a swimming pool. Let the panther out of the cage!!  / 5  21. Last Night in Soho (2021) Edgar Wright throws an energetic maximalist approach at giallo ideas and comes up with a pretty mess. Last Night in Soho does a twisted Midnight in Paris routine and has Thomas McKenzie supernaturally journey into the 1960s London scene she idolizes only to get a nasty reality check about glamorizing the past. The colorful light shows and dance routines are delicious, I admire the visualization of male abuse as a composite form with the features from multiple men overlaying until they form a hideous distorted blur, and that's just getting started on the list of slick aesthetic tricks. But this one extremely suffered from my having viewed Carnival of Souls in the same day, being an actual artwork from the 1960s about a woman seeing visions and having her life interfered with by male presence, but which was much stronger and confident enough to leave some things to the imagination. In comparison Last Night in Soho feels like it simultaneously belabors the point and convolutes things with an over-stuffed last act. Very funny seeing the mean girls squad dress up like The Craft for a Halloween party, though. And credit to Michael Ajao in a small but meaningful "not all men" part, he really radiates a sweetness and willingness to listen. / 5 For Spooky Bingo, Cat People was released in 1942 and so scratches off Golden Years. Last Night in Soho is like 50% a period film and is heavily about its period elements so I'm gonna round up and count it for Picnic at Hanging Rock. 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2022 06:09
|
|
|
For anyone who has yet to do Dead and Buried on their Spooky Bingo card, IMDB has a sortable search that can be filtered by date of death which I find more helpful than searching through lists of recently passed celebrities from multiple fields. Here are some notables and some of the horror films they've worked on: Louise Fletcher: Firestarter (1984), Exorcist II: The Heretic, Invaders from Mars (1986) Coolio: Leprechaun in the Hood, The Convent, Dracula 3000 Ray Liotta: Hubie Halloween, Hannibal, Identity Dean Stockwell: The Dunwich Horror (1970) Anne Heche: I Know What You Did Last Summer, Psycho (1998) William Hurt: Altered States Venetia Stevenson: The City of the Dead (and nothing else) Fred Ward: Tremors, Tremors 2: Aftershocks, Cast A Deadly Spell Meat Loaf: The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Stage Fright James Caan: Misery (unlisted for horror on Letterboxd), The Good Neighbor, Santa's Slay, Lady in a Cage Betty White: Lake Placid (and nothing else) Henry Silva: Alligator, Virus David Warner: Scream 2, In the Mouth of Madness, The Omen, Body Bags, The Company of Wolves, Black Death, Waxwork, The Man with Two Brains, Ice Cream Man, Cast A Deadly Spell, and over a dozen more, what a legend. Philip Baker Hall: The Amityville Horror (2005), Psycho (1998), Coma Marsha Hunt: Two obscure mid-century horror titles, Fear No Evil (1969), Back From the Dead (1957) Tony Sirico: Innocent Blood Sally Kellerman: The Boston Strangler, Doppelganger Irene Papas: Don't Torture A Duckling Paul Sorvino: The Stuff, Repo! The Genetic Opera Gaspard Ulliel: Brotherhood of the Wolf Yvette Mimieux: The Black Hole (unlisted for horror by Letterboxd), Snowbeast Gilbert Gottfried: Highway to Hell L.Q. Jones: The Beast Within, The Brotherhood of Satan Clu Gulager: A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge, The Return of the Living Dead, The Hidden Joe Turkel: The Shining Nehemiah Persoff: Psychic Killer (and nothing else) Veronica Carlson: Dracula Has Risen From the Grave, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, Horror of Frankenstein, Vampira, The Ghoul Anne Rice: writer of Interview with the Vampire, Queen of the Damned Dennis Waterman: Scars of Dracula Kenneth Welsh: The Void, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Psycho Goreman Stephen Sondheim: composer of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street Vanilla Bison fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Oct 19, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2022 06:46
|
|
|
Gripweed posted:[b]#17: Savageland This stood out to me too because all the dumbass political cartoons were on point for an incident like this becoming a national flashpoint for anti-immigrant sentiment. Might have been a script revision issue where in a previous draft they played up a coverup and burying the evidence of what happened more.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 11, 2022 01:34
|
|
|
 22. Hunter Hunter (2020) A perplexing film to evaluate. I suspect that Hunter Hunter is a love-it-or-hate-it flick, which will impress some people with its unpredictability and gasp-worthy ending and will piss off others as a bait-and-switch. It's bleak in a way that tempted me to throw up my hands and say "What the gently caress was the point of all that then??" but I can't deny the power of an outrageously gory capstone image that twists this one from wilderness survival thriller into revenge exploitation. The first act sets up a family living as subsistence trappers in a forest, coming into town only to sell furs and buy essentials. Dad Devon Sawa is philosophically committed to the survivalist lifestyle and is teaching daughter Summer Howell useful skills for teenaged girls like animal skinning and how to identify critters by their scat. Mom Camille Sullivan is more ambivalent, frustrated with their furs selling for less as costs go up, conscious that her daughter didn't freely choose to opt out of school and society the way her parents did. The pressures of their marginal living increase when a fearless lone wolf is attracted to easy meat caught in the family's traps and starts stalking the territory. Sawa goes hunting to put the predator down, but stumbles across a foreboding scene in the wilderness and doesn't make it back home that night... Hunter Hunter is attractive, doing a good job staging the wilds as a foreboding place (backed up by a solid score packed with ominous resonant tones). But it's conspicuous how closely writer-director Shawn Linden plays his cards close to his chest, to the point of distraction. Is this a slow burn or withholding the main points of interest? With all the room I was given to pick at the details I briefly thought the movie was going to reveal a twist that the daughter was actually being raised by her kidnappers, based on Sullivan lying to a local official about the kid's gender while in frame with a billboard of "MISSING" posters. Some of my "something's not right here" suspicion was also because I didn't find the writing credible of characters who should be experienced outdoorsmen. A wolf in your space is scary poo poo to my city rear end, but for people who've spent over a decade living in bear country and killing animals to survive? An armed Howell huddling behind a log and hyperventilating at the sound of a wolf howl seems like an odd overreaction in that context, something that would maybe track for a 12-year-old but not Howell's 16. Combined with her squeamishness over eating meat from a baby deer and the way she's shut up in her room whenever the adults have a serious conversation, it suggests a dynamic of her being sheltered that doesn't jibe well with the values of rugged independence that her dad espouses. Which could make for an interesting character study but Hunter Hunter simply isn't that movie, it moves instead in some brutal directions that don't even suggest "nature is a harsh mistress" so much as "your life can be torn apart at any moment." The ending rocks and it tracks with the mood of the piece even if it's not at all where I expected man vs. wolf to go. I guess now I'm the one being hella coy, but trust me that when one character has lost everything, they get their revenge in a big hideous gently caress you to the acts of predation that preceded it.  / 5 For Spooky Bingo, Hunter Hunter ticks off Goodnight Mommy for its focus on a mother trying to keep her family safe in a hostile world. Actually because mom becomes scary as all gently caress and avenges her family by skinning their murderer alive. 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 11, 2022 06:12
|
|
|
It's an all-animated spooky shorts spectacular! Betty Boop's Hallowe'en Party (1933) 6:25, on YouTube. / 5Betty Boop throws a pretty dull Halloween party for her animal friends, then a gorilla (I think?) crashes the party and Betty summons the powers of darkness to drive the jerk out. I'm partial to the music and rubber style of these cartoons from the swingin' Jazz Age, but this is a low wattage trifle.  Swing You Sinners! (1930) 8:16, on YouTube. / 5Bimbo the dog tries to steal a chicken, and when he runs from a cop, the karmic fury of the universe unleashes upon him for his sins. Watch this cartoon, folks, it's wild. Very inventive gags and it just keeps escalating the chaos once Bimbo gets trapped in a cemetery and everything from skeletons, gravestones, and trees to the goddamn sod on the ground starts sing-roasting him. I full-on hooted when the cemetery gate locked him in, swallowed the key, and then transformed into a drat wall. You're hosed now, Bimbo!! There's booty-slapping dancing ghosts and some of the most demented loosey-goosey monstrosities you've ever seen in wholesome entertainment for the whole family!  Vincent (1982) 5:54, on YouTube. / 5A charming, stylish bit of make-believe with the gothiest boy there ever was. Many people have soured on Tim Burton's aesthetic impulses in recent years but here they're in their purest and most delightful form. And what a catch that this affectionate ode to spooky storytelling of all stripes is narrated by the man himself, Vincent Price.  Winston (2017) 6:23, on YouTube. .5 / 5Stellar animation meets top notch vocal work from Matt Kelly as a man descending into madness in a snowy cabin. The art direction here is fantastic, it wields strong shapes and big blocks of color or brightness that make for really clean, intense compositions but while also penning in the details with a rough-edged line. In several places it made me think of the style of Hellboy artist Mike Mignola, not in a derivative way, just Aram Sarkisian hitting some of the same techniques to produce cartooned horror. Winston is amazing to me as a short film because of all the shorts I've seen, most are trying to do one thing well in their runtime and often struggle. In six and a half minutes, Winston nails the vibe of menacing instability from something like The Telltale Heart, nails an unsettling ambiguous ending, and also finds time to be extremely funny as the narrator spirals into an unhinged rant about his dopey cheerful neighbor. Kelly snarling out insults about the neighbor's "blank stare" as his own character gives the eyes of death through a window is loving great.  Death Buy Lemonade (2010) 2:00, on YouTube. / 5The cutest little lemon-flavored slice of the macabre, short and tart. And all the better that it was cutesy enough to sucker my expectations and land that punchline.  Juliette (2016) 6:30, on YouTube. / 5An intensely sexual short that comes off less like an artistic statement on the subject and more like the animator's prurient interest in drawing huge-chested women pursing their lips and talking about cocks and buttfucking before they make out with each other and get mutilated. Pretty gross. Not redeemed by using the horror cliché of "Did the protagonist actually do the violence!?! Makes you think!!" I actually really like the use of color palette here, a muted gray car ride that shifts towards darkness spiked with dangerous oranges and pinks. But I also despise the lazy use of a filtered photograph of a birch forest for an early establishing shot. Come on, you're trying to set the mood, you can use whatever still image you want to start weaving a spell on the audience, and you choose a stock photo? A shortcut that misses the medium's strengths.  Lonesome Ghosts (1937) ~9 minutes, on Disney+. / 5Yo, not to question their expertise, but what the hell kind of ghosts were Mickey and friends exterminating before that they brought an axe, a butterfly net, and a shotgun? Were they at the Resident Evil mansion before this?? Classic cartoon foolery with fun ghost pranks and a great unexpected ending. Mickey looks a little creepy when everyone else has eyes with whites and pupils and he just has black dots.  The Surrogate (2020) 5:59, on YouTube. .5 / 5Textural painted shading immediately makes the animation style on this short leap out, and the ugly gremlinized character design with their wrinkles and too-few fingers compounds it (I love how everyone here looks a bit like an ugly character from J.G. Quintel's Regular Show). The Surrogate is a really strong work of craftsmanship but not a great story. Despite some great squirmy sound design, the initial horror story of a parasitic creature in the woods is presented with such rapidity that the atmospherics erode and a grisly fate becomes matter-of-fact, and then a whole second horror story unfolds, which leaves the first one with barely a resolution while it speedruns through its own ending so fast that it doesn't have any room to linger on your mind. But The Surrogate does have some of the best nudge-it-with-my-foot animation I've seen anywhere. I'm definitely interested in watching more shorts from Stas Santimov, although unfortunately it seems like his considerable artistic talent is tied up in NFTs.  La Noria (2018) 12:54, on YouTube. .5 / 5Sentimental past the point of being saccharine. A boy tries to assemble a toy ferris wheel from a construction set, but gets frustrated, probably because of that box full of photos of his dad that looks suspiciously like a memorial keepsake. Then some monsters start tearing up the house until we get the necessary emotional breakthrough with a big sad score. The story's a yawn for me but the 3D animation technicals are on point. Carlos Baena and team make terrific use of lighting to bring out the most in the designs of the ghoulies, giving them an awful wet sheen, backlighting that makes their shapes pop out like silhouettes even against the gloom, pale gleams that catch on their protruding spikes like broken glass. I wish the story lingered on them more instead of using the supernatural as a quick spooky whirlwind to get from A to B.  The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, from Disney's The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949) ~30 minutes, on Disney+. / 5The fundamental flaw with this story will always be that it's a seemingly spooky tale where the guy believing in the supernatural is the butt of the joke. The classic version deserves a coda where smug ol' Brom Bones gets a visit from the real Headless Horseman to gently caress him up! The Disney take kind of avoids the problem by animating the Horseman with such intense ghastly energy that he might as well be the real deal, Chernabog's younger nephew come to decapitate some fools in the forest. It feels more than a little weird how hard the horseback chase segment goes in comparison to the deeply goofy, deeply horny girl-chasing slapstick that precedes it. It's mostly good fun watching the absurdly lanky Ichabod's limbs windmill around, but I was less charmed by Katrina the buxom sexpot who literally exists only to be claimed. Bit dated, that, as is Bing Crosby's crooning in the songs. Not bad on the whole but if I want this as a Halloweener in the future, I'll probably only watch the last ten minutes.  And with Short Cuts completed, that's a first Spooky Bingo for me!
|
|
#
¿
Oct 13, 2022 04:31
|
|
|
 23. Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) I was flummoxed as to why this has such a negative reputation until I realized it's been over a decade since I saw The Exorcist, plenty of time for me to lose any expectations of tone or focus for the sequel. Taken on its own Exorcist II: The Heretic is a good eerie dream ramble. Little in the way of outright scares but lots of uneasiness, a sense of blurred boundaries from the sci-fi shared hypnosis sequences and the excellent use of fade-ins and superpositions. And another vein that emerges as the story pushes past its strange strobing recap of the first film: a fascination with the exotic, where spaced-out flights across supernaturally charged African scenes of cities, chasms and plains become a visual metaphor for how Richard Burton is succumbing to admiration for the power and entrancing strangeness of evil. The writing gets stupid by the end. It doesn't make much sense why the house from the first movie would matter to the demon Pazuzu, two characters are weirdly dropped, it's goofy watching Burton physically grappling with a possessed Linda Blair while everyone yells random poo poo. But the effects work on the house tearing apart is hella cool, and the building dread of the parallel journeys to the location for the finale is great, a whole universe of evil out to delay Louise Fletcher while a raspy-voiced, agitated Burton, in the thrall of the demon, is able to bark out orders and have them obeyed. The big picture of Exorcist II is maybe a bit wonky but I really like the details and points of interest along the way.  .5 / 5  Dead and Buried: R.I.P. Louise Fletcher. 
Vanilla Bison fucked around with this message at 05:31 on Oct 14, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2022 03:42
|
|
|
 24. Coma (1978) "Who knows better about murder than a pathologist?" "It sure keeps my wife in line." A medical conspiracy thriller with a sizzle of that classic "Oh honey, you're being hysterical" misogyny to magnify the paranoia. I'm squeamish about medical stuff so this movie's high level of plausible detail in its hospital setting and medical writing really magnified the intensity for me, but I think objectively this is a cracker of a suspense film. Geneviève Bujold makes a terrific terrified-but-resourceful protagonist, and the script gives her a bunch of cunning moves to stay one step ahead of an assassin and security enforcers at a sinister medical institute. Michael Crichton directed this and he claims he held back to avoid scaring people off of medical care, but I dunno, man! A dude taking brain sections by running someone's head through what looks like a deli slicer!? The "real" morgue with its hanging bagged cadavers is freakier than the made-up sci-fi body storage that shows up! Unsurprisingly for a story written by a doctor and adapted by another doctor, Coma isn't directly anti-technology but it's afraid of what technology enables. There is always going to be a grody side to the practice of medicine that the public would prefer not to know or see. But the automation and reduction of the human element leads to that hideous purple room where comatose bodies are just meat slabs managed at scale by computers, and critically, where there aren't any doctors like Bujold on site to advocate for these patients and prevent them from being used for grotesque ends by whoever has their hands on the controls. The worst flaw of Coma is simply its predictability. Modern viewers will probably suss out most of the plot reveals long before they land. But it's executed well, and it still has some entertaining surprises and quirks. The bored banter of doctors is A+, and I laughed when the mere sight of brutalist architecture was enough to get the spooky discordant piano notes a-janglin'.  / 5 For Spooky Bingo, there's just enough fear about the dangers of technology in Coma to qualify for Glitches. 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2022 06:18
|
|
|
 25. Evil Dead Trap (1988) A kooky, gruesome flick with razor sharp editing that maximizes both the frantic wriggling kills and the long, downbeat pauses to find a rhythm all its own. Miyuki Ono stars as the host of a late night slot-filler TV show that's so starved for content it takes viewer submissions. One day a snuff film shows up, complete with directions to where the victim was cut up. Naturally Ono rounds up her show crew to drive over to the creepy abandoned military base and Scooby Doo their way to the bottom of this thing by splitting up and getting murdered! Evil Dead Trap starts off sleazy and dumb, with boobs and limp dialogue and lame jump scares in a sprawling industrial setting, and gets remarkably stronger as it goes. First there's a barrage of women getting impaled, strangled and cut up in enthusiastic slasher style, and then suddenly the mood-building kicks in, building a much eerier and grander tone while also giving Ono a lot of breathing room to convey the fear of the situation even as she gathers her strength and pushes through. Eventually the film unleashes a full-on Malignant level of extravagant surprise in its final act. Fun gnarly special effects and violence, right to the end! Man if only the score was as good as the other pieces, it's a weak synth melody that's repeated until you dread it like a drill into your brain. .5 / 5  1988 is my birth year so Evil Dead Trap checks off Origin of Evil and a second Spooky Bingo! 
Vanilla Bison fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Oct 15, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Oct 15, 2022 05:09
|
|
|
 26. Tales of Terror (1962) Hokey in the most charming way. Guaranteed to please if you love stuffy 19th century manor sets, old-fashioned outfits, and the timbre of Vincent Price's voice. It also helps if you find it amusing when cheapo distortion effects are used to imply horror is occurring without doing much else to sell the moment. The first and third stories are both strong, simple Edgar Allan Poe concepts that flourish with the stagey presentation and the vibe of aristocracy sinking into decrepitude. The middle one is a bit stranger, being outright comedy despite its horror edge, but it still works fairly well despite going on a bit too long with the gags of Peter Lorre being drunk out of his mind. The plot is a mash-up of "The Black Cat" and "The Cask of Amontillado," which is a pretty savvy combination, given that they both involve bricking people up in walls! Price plays a dandy wine connoisseur and his scandalized expression when Lorre challenges his wine cred is the best moment in the whole picture, pure live action cartooning, beating out even the very funny hallucinatory sequence of Price and Joyce Jameson playing catch with Lorre's severed head.  .5 / 5  For Spooky Bingo, this quite naturally crosses off Tales of Terror. 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 15, 2022 18:29
|
|
|
 27. Night of the Living Dead (1968) Variety magazine, 1968: quote:In a mere 90 minutes this horror film casts serious aspersions on the integrity and social responsibility of its Pittsburgh-based makers, distributor Walter Reade, the film industry as a whole and exhibitors who book the picture, as well as raising doubts about the future of the regional cinema movement and about the moral health of film goers who cheerfully opt for this unrelieved orgy of sadism... The surest sign that Night of the Living Dead is a classic is, for all that its gore and shock value now seem tame, no matter the comparison to all the dozens of great subsequent horror flicks that have absorbed its best ideas and iterated upon them, in spite of having to compete against the shadow of its own reputation for anyone coming to it with fresh eyes... this film still fuckin' rips. Great entertainment served through a grim tone that must have astonished audiences expecting a monster movie in the vein of atomic age camp. Duane Jones is such a badass of composure under fire. And that cold-as-ice ending holds up amazingly over the years. It's unsettling seeing the photographs flickering across the credits like the ghosts of old lynching photos. .5 / 5  For Spooky Bingo, this was the first picture of George Romero, obviously one of the Masters of Horror. 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 15, 2022 22:02
|
|
|
 28. This Is the End (2013) Still a very funny horror comedy, with actors playing selfish idiot versions of themselves as the left-behinds during an apocalyptic rapture. Even includes a very good The Exorcist parody scene to suit the spooky season. Rewatched with a commentary track featuring Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. Not a necessary listen but pleasant to hang out with. Mostly consists of mildly funny behind-the-scenes banter, with a couple really good laughs* and some interesting insight into just how fluid scenes could be with a talented improv cast. Jay's "welcome back" smorgasboard being a same-day whip-up by the props team to meet an on-the-day rewrite is a fun detail. Not surprised Danny McBride is the guy getting other comedians to break on set. *"Franco was like, 'That's not how arms come off. I was in 127 Hours, I know how arms come off.'"  / 5  The commentary viewing checks off Whispers in the Dark. 
Vanilla Bison fucked around with this message at 06:05 on Oct 16, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2022 01:43
|
|
|
 29. Planet of the Vampires (1965) Feels almost exactly like watching an episode of the original Star Trek, except somehow with less plot stretched over more runtime. The good of that is the production design - Planet of the Vampires makes wonderful use of colored lighting and fog to make a couple rubber rocks and sparse sets feel like an immersive alien world for our heroic leather-suited spacemen to traverse. The bad of it is the writing, total snoozeville where nothing exciting happens for scene after scene after scene of the dull, interchangeable characters either bumbling about or standing on guard duty. Later productions like Star Trek and Alien happily pillaged all of this film's cool ideas, so chuck this one on the skip pile.  / 5  Planet of the Vampires is based on Renato Pestriniero's Italian short story "One Night of 21 Hours," thus qualifying for Paperbacks from Hell. 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2022 05:24
|
|
|
 30. Berberian Sound Studio (2012) A permanent simmer. Sets up Toby Jones with workplace friction as the meek English sound engineer on a '70s Italian giallo production, presents a feast of noises and the visual stimulus of tapes and sliders and violently smashed vegetables in the foley room, seems to be teeing up a sonic descent into madness... and then just kind of gets stuck in third gear. Berberian Sound Studio ends up being a delicate, tightly restrained statement about soaking up and perpetuating the cruelty in your surrounding atmosphere. A very small and specific film. Which should be enough, every artwork is its own animal, but I confess I find it terribly disappointing when Berberian Sound Studio naturally positions itself against the huge, vibrant expressions of Italian horror. We're invited to picture appalling images in our mind because we don't see the implied footage of a hot poker being applied to someone's genitals, we only see Jones making the accompanying sizzling noises in a frying pan, but Jones keeps coming back to the same mild awkwardness and discomfort rather than widening it into a psychological breakdown. It feels almost like the peculiar petty anxieties that turn up in H.P. Lovecraft stories, in a bad way, that so much sturm und drang would be conjured around what ultimately seems to be the horror of becoming a rude Italian.  / 5.jpg) For Spooky Bingo, Berberian Sound Studio is a film featuring filmmaking for Behind the Screams. 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2022 09:51
|
|
|
  31. Night Tide (1961) Which has two great posters that feel like tonal opposites. A proto-mumblecore film spiced with an atmosphere of cryptic unease that reminded me of Carnival of Souls. It's not as artful as Carnival but it also was shot on a nothing budget, lingers on the mind, and even has a prominent fairground pier! One big difference is that Night Tide is a male perspective: Dennis Hopper plays a lonely sailor who, unsoothed by the jazz flute of Paul Horn at a beatnik joint, pushes himself into the life of Linda Lawson. She works as a mermaid for the carnival, feels a deep connection with the sea, and may or may not be a siren of the depths for real. But what's definitely for real is that her last boyfriends drowned mysteriously, and that Hopper don't care because Lawson is a smokeshow! Young Dennis Hopper caught me by surprise, I don't think I've ever seen him in a role this soft-spoken and uncertain. Avoid Night Tide if you're looking for horror fireworks, this story does end up in a shocking place but it's a slow, soft journey getting there. I would call the movie laidback or relaxed except that there's always the faintest tingle of something unspoken and unresolved in the air, never dozing off into mere romance but not especially creepy either. Yet it does hold together and it slips a strange fishy something into the back of your mind, a little haunted loneliness that feels all the more real because there's no bombast in the presentation. "I guess we're all a little afraid of what we love."  .5 / 5  For Spooky Bingo, the mermaid focus checks off H2O.  That's 31 films down, I've met my target for the month, and I'm still hungry for more. Gonna keep going for blackout bingo.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2022 19:56
|
|
|
 32. Ritual (2012) Godawful writing and a godawful premise. This is tedious, eye-rolling trash that is way more disappointing and aggravating than bargain basement splatter garbage because director Joko Anwar has a good eye and the handcam work is solid, so you can see the talent being wasted. When Rio Dewanto claws himself out of a shallow grave to start the film, there's a brief sense that you're in for something cool, and then he reveals that he has amnesia, and it's like the roller coaster shamefully reverses back into the station. Gee, I loving wonder if pre-amnesia Dewanto might not entirely be the victim in this hunted-in-the-woods scenario? Huh, who might that masked figure be stabbing a pregnant woman in a "PLAY ME" video?? If your story is actually loving interesting you don't have to do this puzzlebox drip. Every long segment stumbling through the woods is just another excruciatingly dragged-out delay for the reveal, which itself doesn't offer anything more satisfying than "Because psycho killers like doing psycho poo poo!" Dewanto's performance of fear is so-so and his English language acting is outright bad so there's nothing to hang onto. Just the most obnoxious, hackneyed substitution of confusion for suspense. 0.5 / 5  Ritual is an Indonesian film that checks off Thrilla in Manila. Please do yourself a favor and watch anything else for this challenge. 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2022 23:36
|
|
|
 33. The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021) The flagship of the "Conjuring Universe" continues to slowly degrade, transitioning fully here from theme park ride hauntings to Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as superheroic God Warriors, who battle an evil witch straight from a Dungeons & Dragons module. It has more than a whiff of MCU storytelling, where the peril is underdeveloped and the meat of the script is watching the fun characters we already know do their thing with each other - the witch even uses Loki-style mind control powers to make Wilson and Farmiga fight! The jump scares are getting creakier, there's no fig leaf of plausibility remaining to anything, there's a dubious attempt to give us the warm and fuzzies about a manslaughter conviction. But the biggest failing is simply that this entry's finale does not have any of the hurricane action intensity of the previous two films. If they ain't gonna crank that dial to the max, what are we here for? / 5 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 17, 2022 04:01
|
|
|
   34. House (1977) The record-winning movie for inspiring the most sick-rear end posters to be made? Fever dream fantasy. A colorful madcap spree, ridiculous and enthusiastic, bursting with imagination and silly joy. House plays with framerate, animation, cutout and transition effects, all with the same giggling energy as a middle schooler making a Powerpoint presentation into their plaything. All that plus a cute cat and high-flying kung fu kicks. I wouldn't recommend House to anyone looking to be horrified, but it demands to be watched if you want to have a good time.  .5 / 5.jpg)  This is the titular film for the Hausu category, which gives me another Spooky Bingo! 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 18, 2022 05:10
|
|
|
 35. The Devil's Backbone (2001) A sad tale set during the Spanish Civil War that positively reeks of allegory. Though the story takes place at an orphanage remote from any battles, the increasingly brutish Eduardo Noriega is an obvious stand-in for the fascists and all the worst of mankind in general. He goes from inhabitant to assailant of the strange orphanage community, populated entirely by tragic souls, leftist adults scarred from complex pasts and the flock of boys who are sometimes innocents and sometimes Lord of the Flies monsters to each other. The Devil's Backbone is also a ghost story but with less success than the historical drama. The ghost's past is significant, but the ghost's ongoing presence is irrelevant; there's no misjudged insistence on jump scares or anything, but the haunting scenes contribute only a minor moodiness on top of the pessimistic melancholy that was already shaping the picture. It would take the most minor of rewrites to expunge the supernatural completely, unlike Guillermo del Toro's later Pan's Labyrinth, which was a more extravagant and deservedly more admired take on subject matter within the same ballpark. The Devil's Backbone is smartly crafted and it finds some poetry in all its ill-fated sadness, but it never really moved me beyond its single most compelling image: a disarmed bomb still protruding from the earth in the middle of the orphanage courtyard, a potent symbol of the moment of destruction that has been extended indefinitely. At one point the young Fernando Tielve prays to the "still living" bomb for guidance like a Catholic saint, and in a beautiful pique of magical realism, one of the ribbons tied incongruously to the bomb's tailfins flutters loose and gives him an answer.  / 5 .jpg?bwg=1547463771) For Spooky Bingo, The Devil's Backbone checks off Osteology. 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 21, 2022 06:37
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 18, 2024 19:50 |
|
|
 36. Trick or Treat Scooby Doo! (2022) A goofy self-aware romp that, by giving lively contemporary animation to the original Hanna-Barbera character designs while poking plenty of fun at the ridiculousness of their adventures, comes across like the most affectionate episode ever of Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. If you have a lot of nostalgia for the original show, or if the thought of the Mystery Inc. gang driving past "Employee Parking" and "Visitor Parking" to pull into the "Meddler Parking" lot tickles your funny bone, I can whole-heartedly recommend Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo! to you. Personally, I'm a little worn out on this style of meta-quipping, but I still had a good time with this and it's obvious the writers have sincere appreciation for the characters - they may be silly, but they're never dunces just for the sake of easier riffing. Not quite sure what to make of the Coco Diablo character, though. It's a fantastic concept adding someone in the vein of The Incredibles' Edna Mode to the Scooby Doo universe as the supplier for all these costumed lunatics with real estate investment schemes, and Myrna Velasco gives her a fun smug vocal performance. But she feels almost... over-animated? With the way she's constantly swaying and shifting her hair, hands, and hips, I kind of wonder if someone was a little too enthusiastic about the subplot of Velma crushing on her. Regardless, I wish she had more time as supervillain mastermind instead of assistant investigator, anyone who uses a gigantic devil head as their office can take as much screentime as they want.  / 5 
Vanilla Bison fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Oct 24, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Oct 22, 2022 05:56
|
|