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weekly font posted:The Halloween remakes are almost equally bad but mostly because they're made by a guy who, though he claims to love the original, doesn't really get what made the first great. They're entirely different by design. Myers is the protagonist in Zombie's Halloween. The stuff about him having a bad childhood or whatever is a red herring, shown most overtly by Malcom MacDowell's satirical approach to the Dr. Loomis character. Zombie's argument is that neither nature or nurture can explain Myers. He practically beats you over the head with this notion in Halloween II.
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Sep 22, 2011 20:56
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:They're entirely different by design. Myers is the protagonist in Zombie's Halloween. Yep, exactly. And because of this they are neither scary, good nor interesting. I do really wish they were because I like MacDowell's Loomis a lot.
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Sep 22, 2011 21:05
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By removing Michael from the perfect suburban family in the perfect suburban neighborhood, you remove the terror that the first film had with many people; that evil can strike anywhere, at any time for no reason. That, juxtaposed with adult Michael being seen in broad daylight for 1/4 of the movie, attacking Laurie ONLY because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time and not due to "he was her brother all along and he was drawn to her" stupidity, emphasized the random nature of death and evil, and was frightening because it was real. The remake had a bunch of "if we only did that, it would have been averted" stuff in it, while also compartmentalizing everything being a product of neglect and bad parenting. It wasn't that nurture created Michael's sociopathic tendencies that was stressed, it was that nurture caused it to develop to the extent that it did due to neglect or lack of notice; causing the problem to develop into a serious one. It introduced an element of containment to the evil as well as losing the random point by making the Laurie - Michael sibling connection. Also, depending on which version you saw, given that Zombie has made three at this point, the entire persona of The Shape was given conscious choice reasons instead of being intrinsic and rooted in the unexplainable, natural evil that humanity as a whole does have. Michael chooses to stop talking to people because he trows a tantrum because they won't let him out of Smith's Grove, and because an orderly tells him to bottle up all his emotions, which humanizes him to a ridiculous degree originally and in earlier screenings, which was later changed in the theatrical, and who knows in the director's cut. Also, there were changes to whether he killed the friendly orderly, whether he escaped due to someone being raped in his room and other things that dramatically change the subtext, depending on which version you see, so a difference between directors cut and theatrical changes any discussion about what the movie means by default. There is nothing wrong with being different or making those changes in themselves, but when everyone outside of a singular forums poster on the entire Internet (okay, to be fair, a lot of younger viewers liked that he was "more brutal" and "liked that the mystery was removed from the backstory") basically agrees that these changes result in an uninteresting, non-scary, and generally dull result, it may not have been a good idea to change those parts, while keeping so much of the other, more typical elements in tact. Also, if anything, MacDowell played Loomis more earnest and less satirical than the script intended. Darko fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Sep 22, 2011 |
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Sep 22, 2011 21:28
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Speaking of Halloween, I wanted to discuss last week's Ebert Presents at the Movies in this context. They've been doing archival episodes lately of the original At The Movies with Siskel and Ebert, and the last one was about the horror movies that started to saturate the genre in the late seventies. It's a really fascinating piece, because they make it pretty clear that it's not the concept of horror movies that disgusts them, but how a lot of them are little more than snuff films: http://www.ebertpresents.com/episodes/episode-209/videos/268 I really liked how they showed the Halloween clip right near the end as an example of how to do horror correctly, and it really does look like something out of a completely different film genre. I honestly felt like a bad person even looking at those other clips, they were so blatantly loaded with misogyny, sadism, and male gaze. And even knowing how screwed up the MPAA is as a result of several decades, it was exceptionally weird to have it stated that The Blues Brothers had the same rating as Silent Scream. Since this seems to be a thread for everything, I'd also like to toss this review of Scream 4 out there- http://www.ebertpresents.com/movies/scream-4/videos/120 I didn't see this movie, not so much because of what Ebert says in this review but because after listening to these characters talk for about a minute I really wanted to punch the screenwriter for thinking that directly describing tropes was somehow clever. So, I was just wondering- is the entire movie really like that?
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Sep 22, 2011 21:29
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Some Guy TT posted:http://www.ebertpresents.com/movies/scream-4/videos/120 I haven't seen Scream 4, but the exact same thing was done in the first one (and 2nd and 3rd I guess) pretty drat well so it might not suck.
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Sep 23, 2011 00:29
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I didn't HATE the remake of Halloween, but I really disliked the sequel. I don't get why anyone like House of 1000 Corpses though. It was ok, til it suddenly went all supernatural all of a sudden. Everything past that was just laughable and totally pulled me out of the movie.
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Sep 23, 2011 01:44
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XIII posted:I didn't HATE the remake of Halloween, but I really disliked the sequel. I don't get why anyone like House of 1000 Corpses though. It was ok, til it suddenly went all supernatural all of a sudden. Everything past that was just laughable and totally pulled me out of the movie. Honestly for me, the hold up scene at the start is the best part of 1000 Corpses, the rest of the film just felt annoying to me. I would really love to see Zombie do a Texas Chainsaw film, it seems like every single one of his movies has bits and pieces of the movie in them and I'd love to see him finally get his hands on the property and go all out. Sherri Moon Zombie IS Leatherface.
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Sep 23, 2011 02:01
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I really can't stand Halloween and Halloween 2 both of them are just awful movies, no likable characters, no suspence, an overuse of the word gently caress, everything about them just sucks.
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Sep 23, 2011 02:05
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I would really love to see Zombie never do a film again, but that's just me.
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Sep 23, 2011 02:21
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US Human Centipede 2 poster, opens in the US on October 7th, probably in a highly cut form.
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Sep 23, 2011 02:53
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Slasherfan posted:US Human Centipede 2 poster, opens in the US on October 7th, probably in a highly cut form. And this continues to look more stupid then it does scary.
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Sep 23, 2011 03:03
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The tagline's kinda funny, though. But yeah, didn't see the first one and have no desire to see it or the sequel. Last note on Zombiechat: While I think The Devil's Rejects was brilliant and one of the better horror films of the 2000s, I can't really dig on any of his other movies. Halloween had its moments, but mostly just due to Malcolm McDowell.
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Sep 23, 2011 03:09
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I really liked the first 20 minutes or so of Zombie's Halloween 2 (the hospital scenes), but hated pretty much the entire rest of the movie. I'm not a fan of his in general though.
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Sep 23, 2011 04:38
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I just saw The Silent House, and thought it was pretty great. It was mentioned earlier in the thread briefly, but I don't think it's had nearly enough love. It's a cool little indie horror haunted house flick about a father and daughter spending some time in a house in order to prepare it for sale. The entire movie is one long continuous shot from a handheld camera, the acting is good, and I don't really have any complaints. I recommend everyone check it out.
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Sep 23, 2011 04:39
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weekly font posted:I would really love to see Zombie never do a film again, but that's just me. I'd be ok with this. I got about 20 minutes into House of a 1000 Corpses before I stopped paying attention, and turned it off by the 40 minute mark. His Halloween remakes were awful. I can accept that he wanted to do something different with the characters and whatnot, but the execution was terrible on every level. I don't doubt Zombie loves horror movies, but it doesn't mean he's good at making them. He has an obsession with rednecks and white trash and it just overwhelms his movies to the point where it's really drat obnoxious.
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Sep 23, 2011 04:52
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Zombie's version of horror is every outcast high school kid's version of looking bad rear end or scary. In Devil's Rejects we have multiple scenes of Otis, tilting his head down and yelling or looking angry through his long hair. Halloween has numerous scenes of Michael, young and old, tilting his head down and glaring ominously through his long hair. The Devil's Rejects was interesting to me because despite not really liking it, I got sucked in and by the end I was just hoping this horrible family of murderers would somehow get away. Going back in time to House of 1000 Corpses, I just thought that was a dumb as gently caress movie. The best thing that happened there was when that giant retarded guy walked down stairs and ate a bowl of cereal out of a dog bowl. That poster for Human Centipede 2 is pretty wicked looking. I don't like anything I've heard about it though. I'm a fan of the first film but the rumors about the content of this one make me feel like it may have fallen into the crap hole that A Serbian Film was birthed in.
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Sep 23, 2011 05:08
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Devil's Rejects is a good movie, and it's way better than a sequel to Corpses should have been. I don't care all that much for House of 1000 Corpses overall. I am excited as hell for his Lords of Salem movie. Partially because I'm a hop and a skip from where they'll be filming, although it's funny because modern day Salem isn't the Salem where witches were killed. That town changed their name, and some other town went "oooh, can we have it. TOURISTS!" TheBigBudgetSequel fucked around with this message at 05:12 on Sep 23, 2011 |
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Sep 23, 2011 05:10
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Because it was so poorly conveyed that I'm pretty sure no-one recognized that's what happened. No one recognized it but you, isn't that right SuperMechagodzilla? Oh, you are such a genius 
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Sep 23, 2011 05:14
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House of 1000 Corpses was utter garbage, but I liked Devil's Rejects quite a bit and I've been meaning to re-watch it. I liked his first Halloween remake a lot more than I thought I would, but I've stayed away from the second one because of how bad I've heard it is.
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Sep 23, 2011 05:43
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All this time I've avoided reading up on The Devil's Rejects because I happened to catch it on TV at a friend's house and was so disinterested in it that I genuinely thought that it was an MTV/Rob Zombie collaboration or something. I guess it's because they played ALLLLLL of Midnight Rider at the beginning and ALLLLLLL of Freebird at the end. It felt so much more like a music video than a film. Other than that I wasn't paying that close of attention so it may have been on M2 or Showtime for all I know. I just now checked it out on wikipedia and was genuinely surprised that it ... actually played in theaters? I honestly thought that this was a DTV sequel. I've seen my fair share of lovely 80s horror movies such as "Wolfen", "From Beyond", "Near Dark", and even "Frankenhooker" and each and every one of those movies had much more character, passion, and sincerity than this pile of poo poo. And thanks for making me associate a good Twisted Sister song with a lovely random monkey cheese penguin clown character. On topic, I finally checked out Triangle and it's a nice little concept. I've always been intrigued by Bermuda Triangle stuff and I can respect this movie for not beating its audience over the head with its history.
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Sep 23, 2011 05:56
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Of all the 80's horror movies you chose to call lovely, you chose Wolfen, From Beyond, Near Dark and Frankenhooker? Do you even like horror movies?
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Sep 23, 2011 07:10
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What kind of a jackass doesn't like Wolfen?
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Sep 23, 2011 07:12
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While I liked Devil's Rejects a lot I'm still not sure how it's a sequel to House of 1000 Corpses. It starts in a house where there are a lot of corpses, sure enough. And there are maybe 3 1/2 characters that are kind of like characters from Corpses, but other than that I felt the two movies weren't connected, at all. Are there any other connections between the two movies apart from some members of the family in Rejects being kind of like some characters in Corpses? And where's Doctor Satan?
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Sep 23, 2011 10:12
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Darko posted:you remove the terror that the first film had with many people It's wrongheaded to approach a remake (or, really, any film) from the standpoint of what was "removed", or what it "doesn't have". Because Cronenberg's Fly remake features a bachelor protagonist and is set in a warehouse instead of a basement, it "removes" the subversion of 1950s domesticity. This point would be very noteworthy, were it not for the fact that it's an entirely different film with only the basic premise in common. Despite your disclaimer about there being nothing wrong with difference, that's really the whole basis of your thought surrounding Halloweens 1 and 2. It's "boring" and etc. because it's not X. There's little to no attention paid to what it actually is. In this case, those darn kids have it entirely right. Zombie's film is brutal in ways that most slashers are not. It's also not scary at all, because that's not even what they're trying to do. The fake dichotomy between scary or boring in a horror film is enormously reductive, like there's only one emotion in 'serious' horror. [I could count on one hand the number of films that have actually frightened me (as opposed to simply being startled).] The entirety of the Halloween duo is spent generating unease over the audience's complicity in the action. Myers is an empty shell who kills people because they're annoying. But, crucially, they're annoying to the audience. He's indifferent - because Halloween is a superhero origin story, and Myers becomes "more than just a man ... an idea", much like goon-favorite Batman. His heroic purpose is to become an iconic slasher "villain", just as Stallone in Rambo 4 willingly drops all pretense of humanity and ascends to action-hero godhood. The Halloween films systematically eliminate the reductive explanations for what Myers is or should be. He kills the ghost because he's not a ghost. In the same sense, he's not a Frankenstein - nor a rapist (as Jason Voorhees is), nor the other things represented by his victims. The 'horror' of Halloween is that the void put into relief by these symbolic kills is an attractive one. These films are absolutely wonderful to watch when you're having a stressful day. This all serves as commentary on Carpenter's film, as Zombie makes no attempt to replicate it. His Halloweens are film essays about Carpenter's Halloween - its meaning and its cultural legacy. By default, like Zack Snyder's Watchmen, it couldn't be similar to the original if it tried - so it doesn't. Grendels Dad posted:While I liked Devil's Rejects a lot I'm still not sure how it's a sequel to House of 1000 Corpses. It starts in a house where there are a lot of corpses, sure enough. And there are maybe 3 1/2 characters that are kind of like characters from Corpses, but other than that I felt the two movies weren't connected, at all. House of 1000 Corpses is told as the extremely sensationalized "funhouse" version of the "actual events" (hence why the film frequently cuts to mundane video footage). While it's extremely arguable that Devil's Rejects is "more real", it's definitely more naturalistic due to the change in genre. Doctor Satan may not have even existed, and was simply an embellishment added to the real story. Both films explore the distinctly American fascination with celebrity serial killers (see also: the Zombie Halloweens' deconstruction of Myers' slasher-franchise stardom). SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 11:04 on Sep 23, 2011 |
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Sep 23, 2011 10:54
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:[I could count on one hand the number of films that have actually frightened me What are they?
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Sep 23, 2011 11:04
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:House of 1000 Corpses is told as the extremely sensationalized "funhouse" version of the "actual events" (hence why the film frequently cuts to mundane video footage). While it's extremely arguable that Devil's Rejects is "more real", it's definitely more naturalistic due to the change in genre. Doctor Satan may not have even existed, and was simply an embellishment added to the real story. Both films explore the distinctly American fascination with celebrity serial killers (see also: the Zombie Halloweens' deconstruction of Myers' slasher-franchise stardom). This makes a lot of sense, thank you. It's been a long time since I have seen either movie, but when thinking about them both what I remember most vividly is the difference in tone. Corpses being a kind of funhouse version of events leading up to Rejects would explain that rather elegantly, and the feverish quality the end of that movie has.
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Sep 23, 2011 11:13
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Hakkesshu posted:What are they? The Blair Witch Project, Capturing the Friedmans, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Them!, Trigger Man, Very Bad Things, Incident at Lake County (Original Cut), Martyrs. Okay, so that's technically two hands. I suppose it depends on your definition of fear though. Throughout Zombie's Halloweens, I was afraid I would sympathize too much with Michael Myers, that the film was going places I didn't want to. I'm frequently afraid of films in this way.
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Sep 23, 2011 11:32
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:[...] Incident at Lake County (Original Cut) [..] This is a fun pick. edit: Wait, there are different cuts? Dissapointed Owl fucked around with this message at 12:37 on Sep 23, 2011 |
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Sep 23, 2011 11:40
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Grendels Dad posted:Are there any other connections between the two movies apart from some members of the family in Rejects being kind of like some characters in Corpses? The "antagonist" Sheriff Wydell is hunting down the Firefly family because of events from the first movie. I really quite like House of 1000 Corpses, although I can see how it's a baby-step from Zombie's music-videos. It was just different (psychedelic) enough from the usual horror fare of the early noughties for me to appreciate, it's not exactly a brilliant horror movie but it does the job. Surprised at some of the comments here as I think Zombie is one of the better horror directors kicking around - you might not appreciate his style but at least he has his own. Plus I really want to see Werewolf Women of the SS starring Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu become a reality & you're a dick if you don't.
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Sep 23, 2011 12:11
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AN AOL CHAT ROOM posted:All this time I've avoided reading up on The Devil's Rejects because I happened to catch it on TV at a friend's house and was so disinterested in it that I genuinely thought that it was an MTV/Rob Zombie collaboration or something. I guess it's because they played ALLLLLL of Midnight Rider at the beginning and ALLLLLLL of Freebird at the end. It felt so much more like a music video than a film. Other than that I wasn't paying that close of attention so it may have been on M2 or Showtime for all I know. I just now checked it out on wikipedia and was genuinely surprised that it ... actually played in theaters? I honestly thought that this was a DTV sequel. I've seen my fair share of lovely 80s horror movies such as "Wolfen", "From Beyond", "Near Dark", and even "Frankenhooker" and each and every one of those movies had much more character, passion, and sincerity than this pile of poo poo. I've had the argument with friends that the end of Devil's Rejects isn't good, it's just that Freebird is good and there is some stuff happening while it's playing.
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Sep 23, 2011 12:44
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Zyklon B Zombie posted:I've had the argument with friends that the end of Devil's Rejects isn't good, it's just that Freebird is good and there is some stuff happening while it's playing. I loving hate Skynrd, but I love that ending.
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Sep 23, 2011 13:03
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:...Very Bad Things...
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Sep 23, 2011 13:11
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Dissapointed Owl posted:This is a fun pick. The one you can find online (on google video and whatnot) is the "director's cut" which is longer and notably inferior. When the film was initially aired on TV, the studio feared that it had a bomb on its hands and substantially edited it from 90 minutes down to a lean 60-ish minutes. In the process, they removed pretty much everything that detracted from the naturalism of it. This meant all the weakest acting and the weakest effects, and specifically the way too on-the-nose social commentary that reduced the characters to one-trait wonders (one is a drunk, one is a racist, etc.) - and reduced most of the events to capital-S Symbolism. In removing the 'artistry' from the film, the studio's bastard cut resembles a real videotape more than most films in the genre. The people simply act like people in a crisis, and the events are abstract instead of a forced commentary on America and The American Family. The pacing is quicker, the story is entirely different, and even the basic plot was changed, with an entirely different ending. It's like if some editor miraculously transformed Paranormal Activity 2 into The Blair Witch Project. The original version was aired only once as far as I can tell, since its success led to a release of the dumb director's cut version for all subsequent airings.
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Sep 23, 2011 13:19
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Attack the Block is fantastic and features the best monsters I've ever seen in any movie regardless of budget. Watch it.
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Sep 23, 2011 14:03
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prahanormal posted:And this continues to look more stupid then it does scary. I dunno, as with the first one, I think it's scary in SMG's definition above - I'm scared of the depths to which it will sink. Considering that everything I've read about this movie suggests that it's very extreme and is everything the first film wasn't, I have no idea of what they're going to pull out here. The first film kept me at the edge of my seat because I expected it to resolve in some absurdly horrifying way and even if it doesn't completely deliver on that, it certainly works as a meditation on boundless ambition and despair.
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Sep 23, 2011 14:13
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The one you can find online (on google video and whatnot) is the "director's cut" which is longer and notably inferior.
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Sep 23, 2011 14:20
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frozenpeas posted:Attack the Block is fantastic and features the best monsters I've ever seen in any movie regardless of budget. Watch it. Yeah, its good.
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Sep 23, 2011 14:55
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This has been posted here right? Zombie's Torture commercial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p68u3ZWlDU
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Sep 23, 2011 15:01
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:It's wrongheaded to approach a remake (or, really, any film) from the standpoint of what was "removed", or what it "doesn't have". Because Cronenberg's Fly remake features a bachelor protagonist and is set in a warehouse instead of a basement, it "removes" the subversion of 1950s domesticity. This point would be very noteworthy, were it not for the fact that it's an entirely different film with only the basic premise in common. Despite your disclaimer about there being nothing wrong with difference, that's really the whole basis of your thought surrounding Halloweens 1 and 2. It's "boring" and etc. because it's not X. There's little to no attention paid to what it actually is. As an initial approach, yes, but we aren't talking about an initial approach. When you explore why a remake fails to have the same impact as an original, a compare and contrast exploration, as well as an exploration of the change in social attitude between the two films, is relevant. You're correct that Zombie's (first) Halloween remake works as a kind of commentary of the entire original Halloween series. Nothing makes this more obvious than containing the innocent little girl heroine from 4 and 5 and having her be the slut who gets her tits out and is brutally almost murdered (and then even more brutally murdered in the 2nd). That doesn't by default make it interesting/scary/etc. though. And when it fails to have any impact as a film, you then question the deviations from the original, in why he did so, and at the same time, why he retained other elements that didn't work so well in the original. The biggest problem was including the sequels in his realization. Any Halloween sequel that isn't 3 and very, very small facets of H20 (as it also worked as a bit of a deconstruction) are not good films at all to varying degrees. 4 being the only one that's even watchable. Including the sequels in the commentary for the remake was probably the hugest mistake, as they were already uninteresting to begin with. If he contained it to the first movie, instead of the entire series, which is actually kind of weak (he becomes a Jason clone in 2 - on as opposed to what he symbolizes in the first), it could have possibly been a more interesting film. As it is, it failed for me, and the majority of other people here, and a discussion why will inevitably contain compare and contrast.
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Sep 23, 2011 15:07
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Darko posted:Nothing makes this more obvious than containing the innocent little girl heroine from 4 and 5 and having her be the slut who gets her tits out and is brutally almost murdered (and then even more brutally murdered in the 2nd). Wrong character. The girl who gets attacked in Zombie's first Halloween and killed in the second is Annie, the Sheriff's daughter and the same girl who gets killed in the car in the original Halloween. The little girl from four and five was Jamie. She doesn't show up at all in Zombie's films that I remember.
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Sep 23, 2011 15:46
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