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I'm going to go for 31 new to me or rewatches of movies I haven't seen in 20 years, thank you for the thread
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Sep 30, 2023 00:26
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 16:02 |
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moths posted:Bride of Chucky
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Oct 3, 2023 04:41
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I'm way behind so I'm not worrying about challenges this time around and just watching what I'm in the mood for. So, my first movie of the month: In the Mouth of Madness - John Carpenter, 1994 Big fan of both John Carpenter and Sam Neill so this was one of those "can't believe I haven't watched this yet" movies! Neill really is at his best playing characters in the middle of a nervous breakdown. Don't get me wrong, I love Jurassic Park, but he's an absolute powerhouse when it comes to despair! A fraud investigator looks into the disappearance of Sutter Cane, a mysterious author that combines the occultism of HP Lovecraft with the pop literature appeal of Stephen King. Neill's great as a skeptic in a maddening world and Julie Carmen is a lot of fun as his dreamy traveling companion/horror novel editor. Thematically digs into the power of fiction and the effects of obsessive fandom as a new religion. Cane's stories soon start to bleed into reality, as Carpenter plays with the blurred lines between dreams, the waking world, and fiction, the kind of thing I love. Released the same year as Wes Craven's New Nightmare, this film dives into similar meta-fictional seas. The whole vibe here is nice and creepy while lightly satirizing the kind of spookiness that lives in both Lovecraft and King's work. Carpenter has a bit of a laugh at himself here, too! And you know what, struggling to create art and tell a story really does feel like you've got a gooey monster growing out of your head sometimes. Respect to anyone who keeps a clown horn in their glovebox.
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Oct 4, 2023 04:54
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Videodrome - David Cronenberg, 1983 Sleazy TV producer Max Renn tumbles into a gruesome world where sex, violence, the physical world, and digital presence merge into one giant horrific blob. It's all made even more gruesome but having James Woods play the role of Renn! At the heart of this madness is Professor O'Blivion (maybe one of the best character names ever,) an analog prophet who communicates only through screens. He brings something terrible into the world, a shared delusion that spreads through the airwaves until reality and dream can no longer be distinguished. Absolutely ahead of its time, Videodrome's subject is TV but it genuinely feels predictive of so many dark spaces of the internet. Fact and fiction unravel, the boundaries of life and death and blurred, and something new and monstrous emerges. An addiction to monstrosity, whether it's horrific videos, 24 hour cable news, or endlessly scrolling Twitter. At one point, we see a shelter where homeless people are exposed to hours of TV instead of decent food and a safe place to live, an attempt to realign them with society's values. It's ghastly and I'd be surprised if no one in the real world has tried that yet. A great synth score, unnerving acting, gross imagery. I don't always vibe with Cronenberg, but this one is really something powerful. Really goes wild with the use of the word "programming" to describe TV shows. The final act lost my attention for a while but the actual ending is solid.
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Oct 6, 2023 04:05
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I'm only on my third movie of the month, it's been tough to find time! The Brood - David Cronenberg, 1979  A family's collapse, centered around an experimental therapy and bizarre murders. Oliver Reed is a powerful presence as Dr. Raglan, the man behind Psychoplasmics, an intensive therapy with some dark secrets. Cronenberg's films are often clinical and cold and that's what makes some of them so effective; The Brood, on the other hand, is a completely emotionally driven film that's heartbreaking from start to finish. Child abuse, nervous breakdowns, addiction, cyclical violence, there's a lot of pain here that's examined with empathy, even when monsters start popping up. Like The Exorcist, the real horror for me here isn't the inhuman evil (though those things definitely get their horrific time in the spotlight) but the pain of trying to figure out what's happening to a family member who can't understand it themselves. A child suffering, confused, is such an awful thing to experience, and films like this help me feel like I'm not alone. There's a lot of Stephen King vibes here in this lonely, ordinary setting with something rotten beneath its facade, a combination of horror and sci-fi. Four years later, Cronenberg would adapt one of King's stories with 1983's The Dead Zone. The monster makeup is very Twilight Zone/classic Star Trek, an eerie disconnect from the late 70s atmosphere. In a lot of ways this film feels like a violent clash between the classic era of horror and the nightmarish new wave of the 70s.
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Oct 12, 2023 03:34
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The Shiver of the Vampires - Jean Rollin, 1971 Tonight's movie - It may be Friday the 13th today but I just watched that whole series last year and it's too soon for another round. So, it's Jean Rollin's 1971 Shiver of the Vampires, which my phone kept trying to correct to Soccer of the Vampires which would be something very different. Flowing velvet outfits and progressive rock everywhere, even in an ancient castle, let us know exactly what kind of mood we're in for here. A film with lots of harsh, single color lighting that creates the kind of vibes in always into. Aims for hallucinatory rather than spooky. Lots of slow pans around the castle to say, "Look at this, this place is great." And yeah, it is, wonderful decoration all over. There's a fish tank built around a skull! One of the vampires sleeps in a grandfather clock! She casually enters a room through the chimney! The score rules too, a big part of why the film works as well as it does. The clunkiest parts go a little too heavy on dialogue for a film that's so driven by music. A newlywed couple stops by a dusty castle that, obviously, is full of vampires. These particular ones look more like a commune of hippies than classical Draculas, a cult of free love outside the boundaries of the normal world. The whole thing is heavily sexual with lots of nudity but most of our undeads have an almost bored expression from having lived too long. The erotic becomes ritual, and the bored husband isn't thrilled about his wife's new girlfriends. A pair of bisexual male vampires run the show and their banter is delightful; unlike the three lesbian vampires we meet, these guys blend the hippie aesthetic with the more classical Gothic. Great costuming, and everyone here makes the newlywed straight couple seem downright boring. The wife, Isle, becomes much more colorful once she starts down the road to vampirism, while the frustrated, abstinent husband, Antoine, almost never removes his tie. He is, as they say, a square. Great hair, though! Lots of standard vampire fare here with a few twists and the tale of a young couple stranded with monsters is old hat even by 1971, but I favor style over originality and this one's just stacked with style. Definitely funnier than I expected, too.
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Oct 14, 2023 04:32
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The Black Room - 1935, Roy William Neill A film from 1935 that does a more convincing job showing an actor performing as twins than 2023's The Flash. A 16th-century gothic horror in which the Baron of an unnamed country is scared stupid by a prophecy that his twin sons will be the downfall of his family. If you like Boris Karloff, you've got two of him here! Karloff plays both the light-hearted Anton and miserably paranoid Gregor, reunited years after their father's death. Turns out his paranoia is warranted, with two assassination attempts in the first fifteen minutes of the film! His life would be simpler if he wasn't a maniac with a thing for murdering the women in his estate. Both brothers are played well, so completely different in disposition but both highlighting the aspects that made Karloff such a presence. Solid acting all around, but he is really something special here, so confident and horrible in his villainy. A film that's about class conflict as much as it's about faith and superstition. Gregor, believing the prophecy that his brother will one day murder him, fears nothing from anyone else, including the peasants whose wrath he incurs with his abuses. The invincible, irresponsible behavior of the rich. A very tight 68 minutes with some great twists that the audience is fully in on as we watch the characters figure it out with dawning horror. Features a heroic dog.
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Oct 15, 2023 03:55
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The Man They Could Not Hang - 1939, Nick Grinde A 1939 Science Gone Wrong film starring Boris Karloff. Karloff plays a doctor in the process of developing artificial organs for transplant. A volunteer dies during an interrupted experiment and Dr. Savaard is sentenced to death. The first half of the film is Frankenstein as a courtroom drama and honestly you could make an entire movie of just that. The second half is a horror film in which the doctor becomes a revenge-driven monster after dying and coming back wrong. A rare case of Karloff playing the role of both The Doctor and The Creature and he's as good as ever, delivering some great threatening monologues. One of those villains who has the time of his life causing mayhem! Feels like a less flamboyantly gleeful Dr. Phibes mixed with an escape room plot. At barely over an hour the final act feels very rushed, with much of the revenge happening off-screen between acts. A solid thriller that needed a little more to it, but what's there is quite good.
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Oct 18, 2023 03:54
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Erin M. Fiasco posted:50. Detention (2019) This was one of my biggest surprises last year, I really loved it. I didn't know it was based on a game until later!
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Oct 20, 2023 05:17
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Moon Garden - Ryan Stevens Harris, 2023 A fantasy-horror from the point of view of an anxious five year old trying to navigate her parents' vicious arguments. A very painfully real opening that soon becomes a surreal voyage through fears and imagination. My own daughter is only a year older than Emma here and she also suffers from fears that she can't find words to describe. Thankfully our family is more stable than this, but for all the abstraction in the film it is remarkably real. The way children process things they can't understand can be both wondrous and terrible, the way parents unconsciously put pressure on them. There's a very thin wall between the dream world and the real world here and to the mind of a young child they may as well be the same thing. In film we're asked to accept that childlike wonder that can accept a melding of the real and unreal, and I always like movies that play with that. Lots of Silent Hill vibes here, both visually and emotionally. Shades of Pan's Labyrinth, The Wizard of Oz, and Nightmare on Elm Street too, but the overall feeling I got more than any is that this really feels like a Japanese horror film. It's a cool combination of familiar bits into something very creative! The monster scenes are nice and creepy and the dream logic that Emma uses to get through them is fun; spooky things can be both empowering and terrifying to a kid. There are some bits of rough writing, but honestly that feels kind of right, watching a child recollect stories. The point of view dictates everything here. I wonder how this would hit someone who wasn't a parent. I loved it and while I think I still would have appreciated it if I wasn't a parent, it absolutely got to me and my anxieties. And yeah, it made me want to be a better person. A sweet movie propelled by fantastic art design. 
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Oct 21, 2023 04:53
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Frankenstein - 1931, James Whale I watched this in theaters today, what a great experience. Absolute classic made even better. Been a wild ride seeing Frankenstein on a poor quality broadcast TV as a kid to seeing a restoration at home so many years later to finally seeing it on the big screen.
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Oct 22, 2023 23:20
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The Devil Commands - Edward Dmytryk, 1941 A misleading poster and title! A Boris Karloff scifi-horror about making contact with the afterlife via scientific method. A rare early film narrated by a woman, Amanda Duff plays Anne, daughter of Karloff's Dr. Blair, a man unraveling following the death of his wife. Blair invents a machine that records people's brainwaves, part of an experiment to create psychic connections between minds. After his wife's death, a mysterious brain pattern shows up on Blair's machine, leading to a search for a path between the world of the living and the dead. Psychic medium Mrs. Walters (Anne Revere) soon becomes Blair's sole companion. She is a sort of devil figure, pushing Blair deeper and deeper into disturbance, but I still don't think the film's title really fits. We're kept in the dark as to whether she's a true believer or full-on conning Dr. Blair. It's a really good performance on the same level as Karloff! Very cool Mad Science sets, especially towards the end of the film. I love the psychic spirit suits forming a sort of electric seance of their own. A sad and haunting film focused on guilt and loss rather than scares.
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Oct 25, 2023 03:59
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House - 1986, Steve Miner A writer plagued by personal trauma and creative block moves into the house that belonged to his recently deceased aunt. Spooky things follow. A film about trauma that's more fun than traumatic. A very Stephen King styled suburban horror story with some nice rubbery monsters. There's a lot of good gags here aided by how straight William Katt plays the role of author Roger Cobb. In a lot of ways, this one feels like an extended segment from King and George Romero's 1982 Creepshow anthology. Also features some really great pop song usage, the way You're No Good drops is an absolute classic. George Wendt is a lot of fun as the nosy neighbor Harold. He initially comes off as a weird fanboy but reveals himself to be a very compassionate, if awkward, guy. The whole idea of trying to cover up ghostly madness while remaining polite with your neighbors is really funny stuff, and I will give props to any movie where someone smashes a chair over a monster's back House pre-dates Evil Dead 2 by a little over a year but they've actually got a lot of common when it comes to slapstick horror. ED2 is the better film to me, but they complement each other really well. The more serious part of the story involving Cobb's flashbacks to Vietnam are the weakest part of the film but they don't drag it down.
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Oct 30, 2023 04:20
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 16:02 |
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I didn't come anywhere near completing my goals but I enjoyed reading everyone's reviews! My last movie for the month. Even The Wind is Afraid - Carlos Enrique Taboada, 1968  A group of girls are stuck at boarding school while their classmates leave for vacation. Soon, spooky stuff starts to surface, and that witchy headmistress knows more than she's letting on! This is the earliest Carlos Enrique Taboada film that's easily available. The audio and picture quality on Prime are a lot rougher than what we got in the excellent Mexican Gothic box set released earlier this year and the subtitles are quite bad; still, it's a fun film in spite of that. Gaudy costumes, huge hair, bright pink rooms; a great aesthetic that I'm always into. Of the four Taboada films I've watched, this feels the most like a Hammer production. This is definitely a horror movie but like Taboada's Blacker Than Night, much of its runtime is just friends hanging out and being jerks. And it's mostly fun, even if they really cross some inappropriate lines. This is an ensemble film but at the heart of the story is Claudia, a girl who has mysterious dreams about a student who died at the school five years earlier. It's a ghost story but the focus is more on solving the spooky mystery than on scares. One of those high school movies where some of the students are very obviously 30ish and each character has one basic trait. There's also a 60ish groundskeeper played by a 44 year old actor with really bad old man makeup and one of the teachers looks into the camera way too often, but honestly all of this just adds to the campiness and I dig it. Blacker Than Night is a more refined version of this film, but both are totally worth watching. In both films, it feels really weird when boyfriends appear because the gay vibes are so strong. Dudes just don't fit into this world. Nothing can convince me that the teacher and the headmistress aren't a couple.
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Nov 1, 2023 04:35
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