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I'm gonna renominate my "Chucky & His Pals" team from the last bracket. Tom Holland Child's Play (1988) Fright Night (1985) Thinner (1996) John Lafia Child's Play 2 Man's Best Friend (1993) Ronny Yu Bride of Chucky Freddy vs. Jason Don Mancini Seed of Chucky Curse of Chucky Cult of Chucky
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Nov 28, 2022 17:28
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STAC Goat posted:Carpenter is down to 8 films so if he doesn't make a run this year... or makes half a run... this might be it for him as a solo artist. Kind of lends more credence to the idea that we should be allowing previously used films back into contention, no? Otherwise, we're gonna run out of solo directors, and then the teams are probably barely gonna be able to support whatever's left from their catalogs anyway.
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Nov 29, 2022 15:39
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I use my straggler bye vote on the Steve's Monster Blockbusters team that Basebf555 put together.
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Dec 14, 2022 21:49
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Basebf555 posted:Heyyyyy alright! A few popcorn blockbusters never hurt anybody! It probably woulda been fine in the actual voting, but I couldn't say no to a team that had Jaws and Jurassic Park and Duel on it.
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Dec 14, 2022 22:22
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Dec 14, 2022 23:14
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On the whole, I think Terence Fisher is a lot more consistent than James Wan is, even if I would rate very few of his films at major stand-out successes or anything like that. I think there is a certain value in having/being a reliable base-hitter, which is what I would characterize Fisher as being; a consistent, workman-like performer who you can rely on for a solid base hit or double, but usually not much more than that. On the other hand, I would say that Wan is a showboat who always goes swinging wildly after every pitch, so he is not a consistent performer at all. But sometimes, he manages to snag the perfect pitch and blasts it out of the park, and that's what Malignant ended up being. It's just way too much fun and too engaging for me to vote against it for Fisher's deeper roster of solid-if-unassuming performers. (And this is before we consider that really gross and unnecessary rape scene in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, which had no bearing on the story and goes against the way that Cushing had been playing the character as too dedicated to his work to bother with more humanistic concerns, at least since Hammer moved away from the source material past Curse of Frankenstein.) I haven't seen Loft yet, but I'm not going to have time to do so this week, and Japanese ghost stories are so not my jam, so I don't believe that it would have swayed my vote away from Malignant no matter what. I don't know that I'd expect Wan to go much further than the next round, or possibly the one after that, since he played his best card so early, but I just can't vote against it.
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Jan 2, 2023 16:25
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I've seen 3 out of 4 films this week, and not been all that impressed with any of them. The one holdout (Lunacy) just isn't going to be my cup of tea, I can already tell from the trailer. So, I think this week I'll be voting for Vampires and The Orphanage, not out of any positive appreciation of these particular films themselves, but as a way to get more Carpenter and del Toro films to revisit in later rounds.
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Feb 6, 2023 16:49
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Servoret posted:I don’t want to revisit any of his films here (especially since I have the feeling that what he’s got left in the tank is not good), but you’ve inspired me to order Elvis and The Ward from the library so I can finally say I’ve seen every John Carpenter film. According to GOAT's spreadsheet, it looks like Carpenter still has Halloween, They Live and Assault on Precinct 13 still in reserve (along with Village of the Damned, The Ward, and Someone's Watching Me), so he still has some pretty big hitters left to play. The only thing left on the "Czech This Out" team to play that's of interest to me, personally, is The Cremator. And while I've heard that movie is incredible, I don't think that one film is gonna be able to match all 3 of the films Carpenter could still play, so if we wanna play the long game here, Carpenter should still get the vote.
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Feb 7, 2023 15:47
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STAC Goat posted:So I gotta find a bear image too... drat it...  
Class3KillStorm fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Feb 17, 2023 |
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Feb 17, 2023 20:18
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Basebf555 posted:I'm really excited to check out Return to Oz. Not sure why I haven't before now, I grew up watching Wizard of Oz like once a year. I used to love Return to Oz when I was a kid, far more than the original Wizard of Oz. I haven't rewatched it in years, so I'm curious if it still holds up. I'm also curious what everyone's reactions to Curse of Chucky will be - I enjoyed it a lot, but I also found it funny that, even if you don't think that re-centering the franchise as a haunted house film works, it's not like it forgets that "hey, we're actually the big 25th anniversary special" either. If anything, I'm interested if people are taken aback by that hard swerve away from what felt like a standalone story back into something that is so intrinsically tied into a quarter century's worth of lore for the series.
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Feb 27, 2023 18:27
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The first matchup is interesting, in that both films are kind of a mess, but I feel like Return to Oz gets a lot more mileage out of the images and ideas its putting out there. Too much of Space Amoeba feels like a rough first draft, and I feel like Toho's ambitions with the various creature designs were higher than their ability to execute, so they all feel really clunky and unwieldy. Plus the fight scene at the end feels super perfunctory, like the studio was expected to include a fight scene where the script wouldn't otherwise support it, so they just threw it in and did the bare minimum to make it appear interesting. Couple that with the dreadfully boring human element, and it's not a good enough showing for Honda to justify a vote. On the second matchup, Sorority House Massacre is similarly unwieldy, dull and not well executed. I liked the idea of the main character being psychically linked to the brother, but the actress was never good enough to pull anything from it, nor was that really anything that the film justified in its inclusion. It felt more like padding by the end then anything else. You could make an argument that Curse of Chucky was, by contrast, overstuffed in its second half, but that's at least partially justified by all of the series connections being brought back into play, since this is the 25th anniversary film. Even saying that, though, it at least is always interesting and fun, in a way that SHM simply is not. Voting for Oz and Chucky here, and neither were particularly hard calls.
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Mar 2, 2023 20:27
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Basebf555 posted:If Marvel can do it then Chucky can do it Chucky has more epilogues than Peter Jackson's Return of the King, and twice the lore of "The Silmarillion".
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Mar 3, 2023 21:01
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Now I wanna see John Waters react to the name "Teleporno," though.
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Mar 3, 2023 21:05
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So I watched Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon after watching Only Lovers Left Alive a few weeks ago, and it struck me that, in many ways, Ana Lily Amirpour is mirroring Jim Jarmusch, in terms of tone and stylistic choices. Simple plots, more focus on character than story, very specific musical choices, a very specific detached tone, etc. It seems like they're both making movies more as a vibe than as a vehicle for storytelling, which can be a divisive approach. Fortunately, I do vibe with that (at least most of the time), and I enjoyed Mona Lisa a fair amount. Don't know if I'll have time to fit in a viewing of Solomon Kane this week, but based on the trailer I don't know that I would end up being able to vote against Amirpour here. As for Piranha vs. Fright Night, I watched the former for one of the April/May challenges a year or so ago, as an option to celebrate Earth Day. And what struck me then was that, while Piranha was a fine film on its own merits, it also didn't really have any hallmarks of Joe Dante's stylistic conceits and everything from his later career. And that's fine and all - not everyone can be Steven Spielberg and hit the ground already running fully - but I can't deny that I was disappointed by what I got, when you pitch this film as "Joe Dante does a Jaws ripoff." You can just feel that it should be funnier than it is, should be bigger or broader than it is, etc. (That's not necessarily a bad thing. The downbeat ending of Piranha works so well, where everyone is just so beaten down and depressed by their failure to corral these animals and protect the kids under their charge, while Karen Black gets to skate with a smile into the camera while her secret bioweapon project gets out into open water. Failure all around, but there's still a mordantly funny anti-authority charge to it.) It's not a bad film at all, and you can definitely see the very early beginnings of where Joe Dante will end up in it. But I just feel like Fright Night is a bit more assured, and feels more in-line with Tom Holland's career, so I'm more inclined to vote for it.
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Mar 30, 2023 16:10
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Samfucius posted:Well then, good news. We just watched Hellraiser and it's a 3.5 out of 5, which for Hellraiser sequels makes it a phenomenon. It ain't a modern classic, but it's an actual sequel to the first movie when so many aren't. It's also unique in that it's actually taking the "mythos" of the Hellraiser universe seriously and trying to advance it in very different and potentially interesting ways. I don't think it quite nails the landing, and changing the mythos introduces an element or two that I think actually outright contradict what the original pair of films were saying. But it's a drat sight better than everyone just cramming Pinhead and the puzzle box into unrelated spec scripts and rushing poo poo out the door to keep the IP on hand. Meanwhile, I respect that Blacula actually has a sense of pathos and gravitas to the whole thing, that makes it better than the pop culture shorthand joke its name would suggest. But on the other hand, while I can understand the film being a product of its time and place, I can't condone its attempt to shore up its standing by punching further down, trying to build itself a foundation for the dignity of its black characters by sneering at gay ones. I get that its a film that is now over half a century old, but that's an attitude we can leave in the past, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if that ends up underming the film's chances with at least a couple of people.
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May 8, 2023 15:16
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deety posted:Uncle Sam is one of those movies I always wish I liked more than I do. The suburban setting feels flat, the nephew is annoying, and the blend of horror and dark comedy doesn't hit the right balance for me. Who didn't love that lenticular VHS box art back in the day? Uncle Sam is fun and all as a concept - I watch it pretty much every July 4th - but as a movie it is fairly weak. Normally I'd expect to give it a pity/nostalgia vote, but that all depends on how I feel about Man Bites Dog and if I'll be able to work that in this week.
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Jun 5, 2023 14:58
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MacheteZombie posted:Uncle Sam: the scene with Isaac Hayes at 30 minutes trying to tell the kid to avoid enlisting is good Anyone own the Uncle Sam DVD put out by Blue Underground back in the day? There's an Easter Egg where they recut that scene to make a sex joke hidden on a selectable highlight (I forget which screen it was hidden on), which was both ridiculous and in poor taste. Which was fairly common in the early-mid 2000s when that disc was made. I don't know if that's a point for or against it in this competition, but it's the first thing that popped into my head after MZ's comment.
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Jun 7, 2023 18:29
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Basebf555 posted:I'm having some second thoughts about the They Live/Mummy matchup, just in the sense that when I watch They Live I really don't feel like I'm getting any spooky vibes whereas The Mummy is classic Universal monster stuff. Is it the best of that era? No not by a long shot, but it's still Karloff and it has the great spooky atmosphere that I always look for. They Live is more like a sci-fi action movie. In this case, I think you're voting for future rounds as much as anything. Do you want more John Carpenter spookiness, which is (I agree) much more likely in a different movie than They Live? Or are you banking on more gloomy 1930s/1940s Universal b&w spookiness? The choice is yours, and yours alone... I voted for Carpenter, FWIW.
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Aug 4, 2023 17:07
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Godzilla vs Kong is fine and all, but I feel like it's one of the weakest films in the whole series, story-wise, because of the nonsensical reliance on all that "Hollow Earth theory" garbage in the middle half and keeping all of the leads separated into different storylines that don't really feel like they gel together at the end. It survives on the spectacle, but the all the stuff when there isn't a giant monkey punching a fire-breathing dinosaur in the face makes it harder and harder to wait for those bits. I remember really liking Watcher when I watched it for one of the Challenges a few years ago, but I don't remember much of it besides Maika Monroe being great in it and the very end of it. But what I do remember of it makes it an easier vote than the Godzilla movie. I don't think I'll get a chance to watch the films for the other match this week, but I'm throwing The Rats a vote. Mostly a pity one for my own team, because I'm fully expecting that the other film is gonna be more in line with thread sensibility and end up taking the W. My consolation here is that a) the team actually got through a round or two this time, as opposed to being blown out immediately in the first round like last year, and b) if we do this again next year (and considering Goat's sanity that may be a big if) and I get a chance to field this team again, most of the random dross that cropped up via the "no cherry-picking" rule will finally have been churned through.
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Aug 7, 2023 18:13
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Basebf555 posted:I'm still not quite sure how I feel about the ending though, I'll have to sit with that for a while. It felt to me like they wanted to give Maika's character a big dramatic death scene, but that really would've been a huge bummer and I think left a bad final impression so they tried to have their cake and eat it too. I think I would've preferred if she just kills him in a more straightforward way instead of the fake out. Yeah, but then you dilute the impact of that last shot, which is what the whole film was about/building towards. She was right the whole time - there was a creepy stalker, he was dangerous, he did try to kill her - and she manages to come out of it alive but presumably mute for the rest of her life. And all she can do now is stare at her husband with a mix of anger, regret, disgust and rebuke - it's an "I told you so" kind of ending, and it hits a little harder knowing that a woman was responsible for writing and directing it.
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Aug 10, 2023 15:12
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STAC Goat posted:I'll be getting Watcher and GvK in today but I have finished Lady Terminator vs Rats. Actually, we've been chatting around the Godzilla vs. Watcher debate for a couple of days, but does anyone have any thoughts about the other match up? I won't personally have a chance to watch either before the end of voting on Sunday, and I'm curious where everyone else's head is at in regards to this (to selfishly see if my team has any chance to get to the next round, I admit).
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Aug 10, 2023 19:53
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I wanna see Halloween vs Rear Window.
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Sep 13, 2023 20:27
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I think, in the end, Hitchcock is gonna win based on the second two matchups, which are so lopsided against Carpenter that it's not even funny anymore. It's almost pitiable, the idea of throwing The Ward up against North By Northwest. I owe Rear Window a rewatch, but I would probably vote for that over Halloween as well, despite my affection for the latter film. That will probably be the closest vote of the match, and may be the one win that Carpenter manages to eke out here, but I'm half expecting a total Hitchcock sweep here.
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Sep 18, 2023 14:58
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So, I finally rewatched Rear Window for the first time in like 20 years last night. Prior to then, I would have given it the nod over Halloween, no question asked. Afterwards, I'm not so sure - I feel like the back half is interesting and fairly tight, but the first half feels a little too languid to keep my interest these days. Plus, while the very beginning is incredibly economical in getting across details and teaching you everything you need to know, the way that the film elides time and conversation afterwards feels a little forced. It's still good, but now I don't think I can give Hitchcock the nod over Carpenter, on this round. Round 2 is going Hitch's way, no matter what. So Round 3 is going to be the real contest here. I still think advantage is Hitchcock - I don't think very much of the Carpenter Village of the Damned, and that was reinforced when I watched it for last year's April Challenge, but the rewatch undid Rear Window in my eyes. I'll have to rewatch Spellbound, again for the first time in 20 years, and see if it fares any better; considering that everyone and their mother rates RW as the better film and it kinda sank itself, I think Hitch is weaker here than I might have previously expected. Class3KillStorm fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Sep 19, 2023 |
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Sep 19, 2023 16:07
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 04:11 |
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I didn't get a chance to work in a rewatch of Spellbound, and I forgot to vote for the other two matchups, but they ended up shaking out how I expected them to. After having rewatched Rear Window, I'm not surprised that my initial gut reaction of "Hitchcock could sweep the whole finals" ended up not panning out. Glad that JC finally managed to take the title that we all knew he deserved, though. Thanks again Goat for putting this whole thing together, and running it for so long, despite how it's obviously driving you insane. Darthemed posted:Let’s hear it for Roy Ward Baker, shown by the charts to be the real winner this year! Well, certainly he's the nicest one up there, by percentages.
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Sep 25, 2023 15:12
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