Horror

MacGuffin · October 28, 2008, 05:36:13 PM

Day 28

I enjoyed this one. It's not on the level of Evil Dead II in terms of a complete blend of horror and comedy, but it works. Not played for cheap laughs; the film has a wink about it. Points for making a new spin on the zombie genre. Good amount of gore and laughs.

squints · October 29, 2008, 01:38:19 AM

SO. I actually didn't find this on VHS but as you you can tell from this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QsKYaRQv-c&feature=related

I guess the whole point of VHS i was trying to make is that horror/gore has this special place for me exactly because of this weird lo-fi aesthetic that comes with VHS and You Tube and the like.
So you can either find this on dvd, vhs, or in bits and pieces on youtube...

It is what it is. Its a troma classic. Its the movie Charlie Kaufman wrote right before he wrote Human Nature. I swear.

w/o horse · October 29, 2008, 02:05:08 AM

Charlie Kaufman is a baker now, and when I met him he gave me a buttered roll. That's true.

MacGuffin · October 29, 2008, 04:57:08 PM

Day 29

While I wouldn't put it so high on the pedestal as our beloved Mr. Xixax has, I do appreciate what this film has going for it - a great villian, an awesome death device, great imagery and some genuine scares.

MacGuffin · October 31, 2008, 12:32:43 AM

Day 30

Believe it or not, I never really watched DePalma's version of Psycho before; aside from some scenes here and there. It's DePalma at his best. I may fault him for taking Hitchcock's films and twisting them to his stories, but he is a well crafted filmmaker, and that is what has made me look past what bits he's lifted. The compositions and editing are wonderful, also going for many scenes without dialogue. The museum scene alone is a thing of beauty.

RegularKarate · October 31, 2008, 11:03:47 AM

This is a movie that I somehow had never seen until last night.

The movie is goofy as all get-up. Terrible acting, a sherif with a really bad fake moustache, and 80s camp shorts combined with what seems at first to basically be a remake of Friday the 13th make it fun to watch.

Then the end comes and it's truly disturbring. I laugh about it now... but I actually got a chill while watching it last night.

MacGuffin · October 31, 2008, 06:58:55 PM

Day 31

I purposely chose this film to cap off the month. Call it Michael Myers: The Early Years or Behind The Mask. The movie begins with Michael as a troubled youth. This is supposed to show how evil started in him, but all it really does is show us Myers as a Columbine-type kid in dysfuntional family, and the killing of his family seemed to be provoked by a night of heavy binge candy eating. It almost is retroactive to be terrified of the killer as we 'humanize' and understand him. The best part of the movie is Loomis and Myers bonding over time in the asylum, but once Michael escapes, the film really just copies the best parts of Carpenter's original. In fact, instead of an updating, Zombie has almost regressed, for the Lourie Strode of this film is weakened from Curtis's Strode. I like Zombie as a director; enjoyed his other films, but this classic just didn't need to be remade or updated or retold or whatever the term is.

And that's the end of my 31 days of horror. I actually surprised myself by doing this. Hope I didn't bore anyone, and hope some recommendations will be sought out.

modage · November 01, 2008, 11:13:54 AM

mac, my hat is off to you.

w/o horse · November 01, 2008, 12:33:03 PM

Awesome theater experience. Awesome. Saw it in the theater that's featured in the movie, Halloween night, and the audience was terrific. The movie is a b-movie of course, but a great one at that. Cinematic, tense, well written, and a lot of fun.

Edit - There should be a The Tingler poster there, ideally.

w/o horse · November 02, 2008, 01:59:39 PM

No Tingler poster appears in my last post, right, so some of you maybe thought I was referring to Zombie's Halloween? Very different films.

Again demonstrating that Halloween lives strongest and longest in LA, last night there was a horrorthon at the Aero, the first three films of which I watched. Night of the Creepers, TCM2, and Dead Alive.

While the first two were great, I was there for and ended up most impressed by Dead Alive, which I had never seen before. Outrageous the whole way through and beyond what I had expected.

samsong · February 20, 2009, 10:01:40 PM

has anyone else seen this? it's like scenes from a marriage by way of dario argento. this is one of the most insane movies i have ever seen, equal parts european art film and deliciously 80s exploitive horror film. isabelle adjani won best actress at cannes for her performance in this, as bold and unsettling as laura dern in inland empire. all i'll say for now is that i highly recommend it.

there's a sequence where a very emaciated sam neil (circa 1981) is losing his shit, during which time he grows an excess of scruff and sweats a lot, and rolls around/freaks out in his dilapidated bedroom. he looks like p.t. anderson doing martin sheen in apocalypse now.

SiliasRuby · February 20, 2009, 11:10:06 PM

I have it on DVD and will try and review it soon, been busy lately.

SiliasRuby · February 28, 2009, 01:42:40 PM

Ok RK, here's my negative review. Even though I HATED 'The butterfly effect'

This was an utter piece of crap. Too sensationisitic for its own good and had many moments than while sick and twisted and horrifying, most of it was just plain fucking bad. I was severley disappointed in the execution and while is completely independent the the Nth degree it there was no use for it to be this savage. I guess that must be the point to make us sick to our stomach but it just made me angry that it was so poorly done. It was as if a low rent oliver stone wannabe decided he wanted to do the story of the manson family like 'natural born killers' was done in. Man, this was fucking terrible.

Reel · February 28, 2009, 08:55:27 PM

Are those movies about Manson ever any good? It seems like all they do is show a depiction of what was outlined in Helter Skelter which makes them boring and not scary at all. How can they expect a horror film about it to even begin to touch on the fear people were really feeling around the time that it happened? Those events have already affected the way people think about serial killers and probably helped create the Slasher genre to warn us about them. Any attempt to try to recapture it on film for an audience to be entertained is just stupid when there are so many god damn movies out there made about mass murderers anyway.

MacGuffin · February 28, 2009, 10:42:20 PM

Quote from: Gistofit on February 28, 2009, 08:55:27 PM
Are those movies about Manson ever any good? It seems like all they do is show a depiction of what was outlined in Helter Skelter which makes them boring and not scary at all.

Helter Skelter is great; the original mini-series, not the recent remake. It's not a scary movie in terms of a slasher pic, it's an adaptation of the book so it's a reenactment of the events (think an extended episode of Law And Order), so that makes for a truth is scarier than fiction type horror.