Horror

[MacGuffin]

Day 7





Review in it's thread:
http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=9840.msg266723#msg266723

[MacGuffin]

Day 8





The marketing tells us that the film is based on true events, but I would gather that the tale handed down from generation to generation would be a far scarier bed time story than the one provided here. As the family gets haunted nightly, the movie gets too redundant with these events (alright, we get it already, it's after the little girl). The entity is presented as the camera and it never becomes a being, just annoying (Think Evil Dead for the correct way). This makes for the actors to look like participants in a bad mime class. The only thing I can praise about this film is the remarkable sound design. As the camera swirls around (as it does many times), the layers of sounds from the voices, to the creaks, to the wind, and so on, kept my surround speakers working.

[squints]

I've never done one of these before and I probably won't be able to watch one a day but...
I was digging through the back of my video store and I came across a little treasure trove of horrible horror movies strictly on VHS so i had the idea: Everybody does a horror marathon in October so i'll mix it up by only watching shitty horror movies on VHS. When i was a kid I always remember the terribly poor quality of VHS combined with the terribly poor quality of these movies. So here we go, welcome to:



First up:



This low-budget movie from 1990 based on one of Stephen King's short stories used to scare the pants off of me when I saw it as a kid on USA's "Up! All night"
Now here I am so many years later and I actually enjoyed it. Sure the Rat/Bat creature at the end was pretty cheesy but there is an exceptional amount of gore and some pretty righteous death scenes. However, the real treasure in this movie is Brad Dourif's performance as crazy-eyed vietnam-vet exterminator Tucker Cleveland. His intense description of what the Viet Cong did to one of his buddies in the war was more frightening than anything in the rest of the movie.
I'm gonna seek out The Exorcist III and Critters 4 just because dourif's in them.

[MacGuffin]

Day 9





Better than the God awful predecessor, but it still doesn't do either franchise any favors. These films have done away with anything that makes the creatures intersting anymore and have come down to tallying up body counts. The basic story is that a spaceship crash lands on Earth and the King Poo-Bah Predator goes down to investigate. He's basically Winston Wolf or Jean Reno's Victor in La Femme Nikita; he's a 'cleaner,' even going so far as to use acid to dispose of the bodies. Except that his job gets harder and harder as the Alien-Predators start having more offspring than Jamie Lynn Spears. I can understand keeping things dark to not show too much (Ridley Scott used it to perfection in the first Alien), but this film was SO dark that you couldn't make out much of anything.

[MacGuffin]

Day 10





Haven't seen the original. But I enjoyed this one. I got what Haneke was getting at, and all throughout was aware of this; taking all the horror/suspense cliches and running with them to the point where we have besome so ingrained with every thriller that has come before, we still can't believe that it will end like it does. I even fell for one of those cliches as I got caught up in the film. From the talk directly to camera, to the loooong take, it is a film that is self aware of it's actions and has a wink and a nod with it's tongue firmly planted in its cheek. It toys with you just as the two villans do; do you root for the victims because of the unnecessary torture inflicted upon them, or do you side with the men in white because their prey are weak and dumb and you just want them to end it already?

[MacGuffin]

Day 11





The back of the DVD calls it a "psychological thriller," but I found it to be more of a character study between the two men, who are two sides of the same coin. My favorite Polanski film is Repulsion and would be a better recommend for the horror theme, but this film does show a great director in the making. Also, the black & white cinematography is beautiful; the compositions and the use of close-ups, along with using action in both the foreground and background, make this a film worth watching.

[Stefen]

Watched Clownhouse this week.

Fucking shit, man. It would have been awesome if Salva didn't molest the main character. Seriously, it's a fucking awesome story and movie with great cinemotography and editing, but it's gay and pedophile as fuck. Always shots of the kids butt's putting a wallet in their back pocket or landing on some crud.

Teenage Sam Rockwell was a fucking bully, man. A Real Grade A dickhead.

[MacGuffin]

Day 12





Doesn't really feel like an extention of Talented, and if you didn't tell me that the lead character was Ripley, I would have never made the association. Not expecting a Hannibal-type continuation, but the character (as with the others too) doesn't feel fleshed out enough to warrant that regard. But Malkovich does a great job in the role, and the story is an intrieging one. At times it felt like a DePalma film, and would have made good material for him. But as it is, it's a worthy suspense thriller that's worth a look.

[MacGuffin]

Day 13





I liked the first one; not excellent, but enjoyable. This sequel starts off promising, but quickly turns redundant and, egads, boring. It could be Crash as a horror film in that seemingly unrelated, yet so, grudges take place in different parts of the world. This makes for cutting back and forth between them and none of them prove to be interesting. Okay, maybe the schoolgirls does, but the movie becomes a series of scares for the characters who have become grudged. That's bascially it; not much of a story, just scare scene after scare scene. So how are the scares? A few are good, but most of them just sort of lay there. The best scare takes place in a photography darkroom. So I can give the film props for not just rehashing Amber Tambyn to the same events that Sarah Michelle Gellar did in the first, but the film would have been more improved by sticking to storyline.

[bonanzataz]

when I saw it as a kid on USA's "Up! All night"

oh my god i used to love rhonda! somewhere i have a tape of the first three friday the 13th movies from up all night. i got nostalgic and i found this.




yeah, brad dourif rocks.

[RegularKarate]

Man, it seems this month the only time I'm able to watch any horror films is during bad movie night.



The Manitou

Tony Curtis in what is probably his worst performance ever has an ex-girlfriend who has a fetus growing on her back.  The fetus turns out to carry a curse that makes crazy things happen like people throwing themselves down flights of stairs.  It eventually hatches and out comes an ancient Indian spirit (in the form of basically a mutant midget).

The strength of the spirit (Misquamacus) is beyond anything imaginable... he floats in outer space and uses the Manitou (the spirit that surrounds a person or object... like the force) to control everything.  What turns out to be the one thing that it's weak against?  A typewriter that Curtis decides to throw at it.

Totally ridiculous movie with ridiculous acting, bad effects, and a "gypsy" girl who is a white woman with bad brown makeup on.

[MacGuffin]

Day 14





The problem going into this worthless prequel is that A) you know all of the villians will survive, and B) none of the victims will survive to get away. So the movie is reduced to how will the teens get killed. My beef with both of these films are that R. Lee Ermey is the main bad guy, and Leatherface is reduced to being a cameo part. He's nothing like the looming presence in Tobe Hooper's classic; like Jaws, in that he's always talked about and shows up to give a good scare. It's subtitled as The Beginning, but you really don't get any indication of how Leatherface came to be. It would have played better if it was a biography; show me how he progressed as he grew up and started from kitchen knife to butcher knife, from hatchet to axe, from hack saw to chainsaw. That would have been a better natural born killer story.

[hedwig]

ok you guys have finally convinced me. horror movies suck.

[squints]

Week 2:





Hardware


Now this movie is impossible to find on dvd (amazon price: $140!) so i guess it is fitting that it be included in my VHS marathon. Pretty interesting cast. Aside from the dude who plays "Shades" and Dylan McDermott's character every other character in the movie is some deformed or generally "freakish" character. The story itself and the world that it takes place in (post-apocalyptic future/wasteland/scavengers and what not) really feels like Fallout 2: The Movie, which is actually pretty cool and pretty funny. The special effects are interesting to say the least. Not too cheesy but cheesy nonetheless. It borrows(steals) from every sci-movie that came before it (it came out in 1990) Dune, Alien, Predator, especially Terminator but it has a charm and a quality all its own. I generally would consider it more sci-fi than horror but at about the 30/40 minute mark it turns into straight slasher/gore/horror camp. The robot's rampage gets pretty horrific as it disembowels, rips eyeballs out, destroys any human in its way and its up to Dylan McDermott's ridiculously dressed hero to take it down. The soundtrack is so wonderfully terrible and throughout the whole movie we get Iggy Pop with a little V.O. as the city's resident shock-jock radio announcer "Angry Bob". So the movie has sex scenes and perverts watching from afar, lots of blood and violence, a first person camera view of the killer as he stalks women in their underwear  so I think its safe to say this fits the bill for shitty vhs horror.

the trailer's pretty awesome too:
http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi4037411097/


edit: I forgot! Lemmy Kilmeister's in this movie too as a cab driver who is blaring "Ace of Spades" on his radio! Fuck yeah Motorhead!

[MacGuffin]

Day 15





Yes, Hedwig, there are some good horror films. This is one. Think of it as Fatal Attraction is David Lynch directed it. The story is about looking for and finding that one person who understands you, then turning into every man's nightmare when that 'perfect' woman is not who you thought she was. For the most part, the film is a build-up and mystery about who this woman is, and you buy into that mystery wanting to know as the lead character does. And when you find out, that's when the fun begin. Both cringe-worthy and hilarious, it's a film that goes "deeper" than a average girlfriend-from-hell flick.