Horror

Started by TenseAndSober, April 22, 2003, 05:01:56 PM

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polkablues

I'm not going to have time to do a true marathon, but I'll try and keep up when I can. This is also a good excuse to start posting reviews of some of the horror films I saw over the past year and didn't get around to posting about.
My house, my rules, my coffee

jenkins



in terms of old sci-fi and horror, i'm bad at liking them. i'm a city symphonies person. but this is a classic horror movie i'd throw in my chips for. it's my favorite non-canonical movie with Karloff and Lugosi by a mile and a half. it's an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe and its atmosphere is "this feels creepy" and it performs it with the splendor and sophistication of its time.



i own it, i've watched it twice, and i can't super get into this movie, but Devo took Q: Are We Not Men? from here and Criterion put it out so that's what i'm saying, i'm bad at liking classic horror.



this story, compared to another version of the story or its original novella, it might be an example of why everyone initially thought movies just ruin stories, turn stories into movies, get absurd. this movie does that wonderfully so, directed by Rouben Mamoulian (who made the exceptional city symphony Applause, which 03 has posted about, and who funny enough was one of the early directors to consider moving the camera after sound was introduced and people had to stand by microphones, there's in fact a moving shot at the beginning of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde which i've rewound and rewound).



this, like Planet of the Vampires (which modage mentioned), it's hard for me to watch it and enjoy it from any perspective but the objective "this was so influential," and that's a first-world movie bummer because you get to think that while watching the movie


yo these two examples of what you (modage) want to share with others or ones you haven't seen? being rhetorical but i know others also throw down for the Psycho sequels as essentials. Psycho II was directed by Richard Franklin, an Australian director who perhaps came the closest to be a Hitchcockian director.

this is the one i want to bring up:

legit serious about this and if wilder has seen it i hope he'll back me up

also curveballing and mentioning this one from last year's home media releases, it's a movie that has my everything:

BB

Dude, The Vanishing (1988 version, please) is sooo, soooo, so0o0o0o0o, SOOOOOOOOOOO, SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO (so) good.

And jenkins, I'll back you up on The Fan if you want my back up.

modage

Awesome, I definitely will. The Vanishing is on its way from Netflix as we speak.

Last night I got started with one that surprisingly I had never seen, despite the fact that I would have been of perfect watching-at-a-sleepover age when it was on VHS and the fact that it had 7 sequels, Children Of The Corn (1984).



It's not very good. The opening scene sets up a decently creepy mood as a bunch of adults are all slaughtered in a diner but besides that and a young Linda Hamilton (meow), there's not too much else worthwhile here. Movie fails with basic plausible character motivation ("We're going into this town that is completely abandoned and don't seem to think anything of it") and the kids are mostly not really creepy, they're not possessed or stone-faced, they just look like little Amish assholes. When Peter Horton is standing in the middle of them, supposedly trapped, it looks like he could kick all their little asses without much effort. The film also suffers from some horrendously dated FX. But on the plus side, it co-stars the kid from Monster Squad. Yay, Halloween!
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

jenkins

nsfw from reasons of cyberpunkery, this trailer is Ken Russell's The Devils impressive, it's a "wicked curveball" for someone's Halloween fun:


jenkins

these are movies i'm thinking about watching this year since I've already watched Evilspeak and The Fan, has anyone seen:


this doesn't appear to be a horror movie and i need to hear about it asap for emotional reasons


is this hijinks, are people hijinking? hijenks. could be fate


all my most terrifying nightmares wake me is this scary


well, should i just buy it as a poster?

but this is the most seriously alluring cover:


not sure if wilder posted about this but eventually i'll buy it:

jenkins

**danger** the Phase IV release seems tricky from a serious perspective of it being the theatrical cut when everyone now knows the full cut is available, and although i stopped reading about it that sounds serious.


is that thing gonna get them? seems like it. this looks like a box to a videogame and i wonder about the movie but, buuuut, these aren't just great covers. i take note about each movie's important amazon star rating.


this is clearly 16bit. the full title is Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf. i can't tell how much of it is Czech and how much of it is LA and i can't tell how serious it is


sinister-looking and i might want to get to know them


that Godsend cover so good. this looks fun


two covers i downloaded earlier and forgot until now

this cover is up to no good, i like that, but i can't trust the movie


i agree with them about it being hilarious to make this edition signed


this one is actually good isn't that what i've heard


great cover great title

jenkins

The Legacy, the one with the cat head and the hand for a body on its cover, is the title from the above which i'm currently most likely to buy.

but maybe a part of me has died, maybe i've already watched too many movies like this, or maybe something else, something, for some reason this all seems less captivating to me than it has in previous years.

here's the international section:


werewolves done a bit differently or something, Adrián García Bogliano, a director from The ABCs of Death


i'll keep saying "oh i can't believe it, omg are you serious?, oh wow" maybe


why have i seen Miike movies? what do his movies do to me? i always think they're weird different from how other movies are weird and i always think they're a bit nonsense. this one is about high school nonsense and it's cheap, maybe i should visit Miike again


mainly because of this screencap:

any movie with a fire-breather in the background is a movie i need to think about seeing. the director is also associated with The ABCs of Death

i think that's the last of the group of movies i'll have in my thoughts this October because of October. that's four posts in a row that's just me, which is socially awkward, but i'm blaming you for that, and as for time well i spent the time to make the posts so stfu and that's a wrap

Reel

Fall always throws me for a loop, because I hate when I can sense it approaching. Back to school memories fill me with dread for what's to come in the last few months of the year and this wave of residual angst from my childhood washes over me as we make our way into September. Then, October hits and along with my birthday,  suddenly horror movies are playing on TV all the time and the artsy fartsy oscar bait movies start trickling into theaters as well as the town's annual film festival. I start to notice flyers all over for movie marathons and conventions. What takes precedence over everything are the nights planned at our 'Palace theater', this year's being the "Tommy Jarvis trilogy" of Friday The 13th being shown on all 35mm prints!!!  :yabbse-shocked:  Then the night after that they're showing "Last Man on Earth", "Killer Klowns from Outer Space" and a midnight screening of Rocky Horror Picture show (all on 35). I'm practically going to be living at the theater that weekend. Gonna be so much fun. I can't even think about it because the date is so far off, what I'm consumed with now is to expose myself to as much dirty, grimey, bloody, nasty horror films as humanly possible.

What stays at the top of my list are the things I already own and haven't found the time to watch yet, or just really want to see again to get into the spirit of halloween. The number one movie that has been brought up time and time again here as a true anomaly is Andrzej Zulawski's "Possession" (1981)






I have been obsessed with it ever since I encountered it late one night on Turner Classic Movies and  and had this experience:

Quote from: Reelist on September 03, 2013, 05:52:00 PM
I caught it a half hour in and to this day I would call it one of the weirdest cinematic experiences I've ever had- watching all that shit happen without a context for it. When I see it in full, it probably won't seem any saner to me. I remember even before the kooky scifi stuff starts happening it felt like a very dangerous movie, the tone of the acting, the blocking, it was so violent. Like the story was about to take a direction I could've never anticipated and sure enough, it did.




I find The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to be most timeless and tasteful of all the early 'gore films'. Watch it, there's barely any blood in the death scenes. The most you see is when the hillbilly cuts his own hand in the beginning, and it LOOKS real when he does that! The entire film just has an air of authenticity, where the documentary feel of it blends perfectly with Tobe Hooper's artful direction. I sure have seen the first one a lot, though. I'd like to get closer acquainted with the balls out wackiness of part 2. It's practically the same story transplanted to the 80's with a cool new cast of characters, (including Dennis Hopper!) and an underground lair that has the vibe of like if "The Goonies" never left that cave and just stayed down there doing meth for the rest of their lives. Unlike the first one, it's graphically violent to a gratuitous and disturbing degree, I had to turn away from the screen a lot on my last viewing.








This next one is frustrating because I'm absolutely SURE I own a copy of it but in the process of moving it ended up in the bottom of a box somewhere. I only watched it once and it played fine, but actually killed my vcr with this green gunk that was stuck in the spools, like the tape itself was cursed. It's a truly funny, campy, but dark, dark story about a boy who discovers a gang of mutant creatures living in the woods and decides to start feeding them so they'll do his bidding. This is one you want to throw on close to halloween with a lot of friends to join in on the sheer bafflement of it all. "The Pit" (1981) ( best cover I could find ):







Lastly, I will add what I've come to know as THE go to guilty pleasure horror movie of mine,  based on how many times I feel the urge to rewatch it alone. I love the "Child's Play" trilogy, the first is the coolest, the second has some neat kills but feels kind of hokey, and the third has a whole mess of problems that actually give it a kind of cheesy charm, but the final sequence makes up for all of it. I'm not talking about any of those, though. This month I plan to revisit "Bride of Chucky" (1998):






What I like so much about it is it's willingness to be funny, corny, self referential, really not scary AT ALL but enjoyable for the absurdity of the entire plot. Really well directed by Ronny Yu, who gives it that signature sharply lit tone he pulls off so well. Disgustingly violent, too. Pretty bad special effects, though. And just a stupid movie overall that I can't help but love.




More posts to come as the month presses on...




polkablues

Last Shift


A terrible cover hides a surprisingly effective, well-made haunted house (well, haunted police station) movie. It plays out essentially as a supernatural take on Assault on Precinct 13, with a rookie officer watching over an old precinct building on the last night before everything switches over to the new location, which also just so happens to be the one year anniversary of the night a Manson-esque cult leader and two of his followers killed two police officers and then themselves, one of the police officers who just so happened to be the father of the rookie officer. So yeah, you might have to ignore some of that to get full enjoyment out of the movie, but if you can ignore it, what you're left with is a rock-solid lead performance by Juliana Harkavy, who spends a large chunk of the film entirely alone and carries it effortlessly. The movie gets a lot of mileage out of the "character looks at something, then looks away, and when they look back it's different" trope (including one very opaque Poltergeist reference), but the strength of the performance and the filmmaking keep it from feeling too repetitive. Ultimately, the film doesn't amount to much and I doubt it will take up much space in my long term memory, but it's a refreshingly competent horror movie with a great lead performance and some strong imagery.
B
My house, my rules, my coffee

polkablues

The Expelled (aka "F")


I saw this one a while ago and don't think I posted about it, but this is absolutely one of my favorite unsung horror movies. My longtime thesis is that good horror is both a magnifying glass and a funhouse mirror we hold up to the darker aspects of human experience to gain a greater understanding of them. "The Expelled" turns its lens toward a man near the very bottom of a downward spiral, both professionally and personally, and his desperate attempt to salvage one tiny glimmer of redemption, at whatever cost. David Schofield plays the main character as starkly unsympathetic, a man who recognizes his failings but seems almost willfully incapable of overcoming them. When the events of the plot start unfolding, and he's the only one who recognizes the impending threat, he sets out to save his daughter not so much out of actual love or concern, but because it would be the one action that could prove there is any virtuous quality left in him. And at the end, he is forced to make a choice that leaves that virtue entirely up to interpretation.

While the actual plot is very straight-forward, this is a deceptively complex film. The filmmakers don't even make a cursory effort to explain the true nature of the threat, which is a brilliant storytelling decision because it simply doesn't matter to the story they're telling. Contrasted to a tonally similar film, "Citadel," which had a third act irreparably bogged down with expositing the minutiae of what had been scary until they completely demystified it, The Expelled stays laser-focused on its main character, to great benefit.
A
My house, my rules, my coffee

modage

Polka, you remain the king of indie horror movies I've never heard of.  :bravo:
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

polkablues

This is the hidden benefit of piracy. There are so many great indie horror movies that I found through torrenting and have since bought that I likely would have never even heard of otherwise.
My house, my rules, my coffee

Reel




This was a fun harkening back to that innocent year of 1980, when every slasher movie trope hadn't been used up yet and the filmmakers still felt like they were doing something original by having a guy call his victims over the phone with a voice modulator and threaten to air the audio of his killings live over the radio. Or those signature 80's style kills where the girl immediately dies from one cut to the throat and the reveal of her corpse later is supposed to be DOUBLY SHOCKING, but never is. It's a rather sophisticated plot that I found hard to follow, a murderer sets out to visit each time zone in the U.S on New Year's Eve to kill a victim as the ball drops, which he tape records and then badgers a radio host into playing them. What I found unique about it was that they make no attempt to hide the killer's identity from the first time we see him, as he goes through an array of disguises like a beanie hat, a fake mustache, and a really creepy halloween mask. Whatever his motives are in the end were unclear to me. They sure explained the hell out of it, but nothing clicked. I would prefer that these movies not try to give evil an 'excuse', doesn't it pack so much less of punch when it turns out that the killer was victimized as a child and is now getting their revenge? I don't need a reason for them to kill! Let's just see 'em kill!


Anyway, the overall most entertaining part of this movie is how closely the slasher resembles Bruce Jenner:





polkablues

Hidden


Alexander Skarsgard and Andrea Riseborough are great, and the movie has some good tension and nice world-building early on, but the series of twists toward the end left me cold. I will likely have forgotten I watched this film within a month.
C+
My house, my rules, my coffee