|
Once more I'm going to attempt to watch 31 horror films that I haven't seen. Last year I went in wondering if I would just have to watch 31 days of the worst and wound up discovering the films of Nobuo Nakagawa and watched almost everything of his that had been translated into English and I finally got to dig into the classic Hammer films. What am I going to find this time?Wilhelm Scream posted:Hulu does have a pretty big selection of Horror movies... Kwaidan is on Hulu as well and everyone needs to have seen that.
|
#
¿
Sep 20, 2016 02:06
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 15:30 |
|
|
TrixRabbi posted:If any of y'all want to diversify your directors this year here's a good resource. There's some films I liked on there and some films I hated (recommending Boxing Helena? Seriously?!), but it's a good overview. I've signed a purity pledge to not start my viewing until October and have a special ring and everything for it. However, I decided to look up a few different lists of "essential" horror films to see if I could find 31 on those that I haven't seen and really go for that. The list you provided is definitely getting added to the mix.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 24, 2016 19:08
|
|
|
Ambitious Spider posted:8 Jigoku trippy jazzy 60's visuals and a morality play with some cool gore effects? Hell yea! Watch Nakagawa's Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan as well. It's got a lot of that same visual flare applied to a traditional ghost story.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 29, 2016 12:32
|
|
|
Ambitious Spider posted:I googled it and it's also on Hulu. Not that I would know because searching/browsing Hulu is terrible. I really hope filmstruck's is better Nakagawa has had six of his films translated into English as far as I can tell. Two of them are in the Criterion Collection and I found Black Cat Mansion (which wasn't as good but was pretty neat) and Vampire Lady (kind of weird and not so good) on YouTube. The other translated movies I haven't been able to get my hands on at all even when I order copies of them. Even if I could find copies of his films untranslated, I might be willing to give them a try because his visual style, especially with color, is so arresting.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 30, 2016 00:38
|
|
|
Ambitious Spider posted:9 Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan I quite enjoyed it but there's a scene where the dude keeps trying to kill the ghost and murdering innocent people. It happens like four times. I was like It bothered me more that they let him off with a slap on the wrist after he murdered the entire household and said it was because of a ghost. If you're running through lesser known Japanese horror films of the period, check out Kuroneko. It's by the same director as Onibaba and has many of the same themes, only Kuroneko goes heavily into the supernatural.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 30, 2016 03:54
|
|
|
Raxivace posted:2. The Golem I think it makes Jews "the other" which is a problem, but it's sympathetic to them as an oppressed people which makes both readings correct at the same time! The Golem is visually interesting, but I feel that it's definitely the leftover movie in the German Expressionist horror film category. I'm really looking forward to getting started tomorrow. I need to pick out my movie now...
|
|
#
¿
Sep 30, 2016 23:13
|
|
|
DjLando posted:13. The Wicker Man --> have not seen this movie before The original one, right? Because that's one of the all time greats when the remake is one of the all time worst. (See above review that comments on it.) Thanks for pointing out The Wicker Tree. I'm adding it to my list for the month.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 1, 2016 16:36
|
|
|
Day 1 - It's impossible to talk about any film in the Phantasm series without talking about it's strange history. Phantasm more than any other horror film series, is the work of an auteur: Don Coscarelli. Coscarelli wrote, directed, and produced the entire series up to the most recent one where he handed off direction to someone else. Phantasm is his baby and new movies have only come when Coscarelli could find the money on his own terms to make them. And then there were the distribution problems. For about twenty years it was almost impossible to watch the movies. An extremely limited VHS release and a general lack of licensing the films for television screenings meant that you had to really go out of your way to see it. The cult around Phantasm grew, though, based on the striking visuals and creepiness of the movies. These days it's easier to check out the movies, though the restrictive distribution has become a series tradition. Phantasm V premiered last weekend at a film festival and will have a very limited engagement next weekend in a handful of theaters around the country. A quick concept description for those three or four people reading the thread not familiar with the series: Angus Scrimm is a mortician known as The Tall Man. And he's also something else. He's using the dead to make some kind of army, twisting them to his purpose. The Tall Man deals with people who are interfering with him by setting a flying silver orb on them which pursues people and drills into their heads if it catches them. The series has a very warped, unreal tone to it that feels almost like a fantasy movie with heavier gore. I've only seen the first two Phantasm movies, but I've heard that the third and fourth go off the rails which is why I didn't actively seek them out (not that the first two movies were ever properly on the rails  ). But now it's October and it's time to fill in some of those blanks so I'm watching them this month. The fifth film isn't playing anywhere near me so I won't be watching it.Which (finally) brings me to Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead. I'm trying to find something to say about this movie and it's tough even to recap since it's wildly incoherent. The story wanders from episode to episode without meaning or purpose until everything just kind of slams together at the end. It starts at the end of Phantasm II, wanders off to what feel like left over bits from the previous two movies haphazardly attached to this one, abruptly ends what seems like it was the plot of the movie in a dream sequence halfway through, everyone decides to go to the climax of the film for no good reason, and then it ends on a cliffhanger. The character we're following twice in twenty minutes wanders into an abandoned town only to be caught by robbers. And in an ending that makes you go, "What was the point of all that?" the movie flat out says, "You're not supposed to understand it." While I still enjoyed the off-kilter nature of Phantasm III, I can definitely feel the series running out of steam. The weird edge isn't quite there anymore. This feels like one of those long running series of fantasy novels where the first one is pretty good and the second one is a good follow up and then they keep going even though all the good ideas were used up already. My biggest disappointment was that only one person got their head drilled out by a silver ball. 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 1, 2016 20:24
|
|
|
It's a lazy Saturday so I thought I'd throw on something I haven't seen in awhile. Evil Dead (the original one) is a bit rough, but once it gets going the creativity that made Sam Raimi so popular is on full display. Some young people go out to a spooky cabin in the woods where they find a tape recorder of a guy reading from the Necronomicon. Playing the tape lets bad things out which picks them off until one is left. I felt like the first half of Evil Dead was kind of bland. The low budget weakness is on display there and I don't care about the characters (yes, even Ash). Then the ball starts rolling, Raimi goes crazy with the camera, and things get weird. That said, Evil Dead 2 makes this movie pointless. The sequel is so amazingly good and covers the same ground so heavily that there's no reason to watch the original unless you want to see how Raimi did the same story with even less money.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 1, 2016 23:38
|
|
|
Choco1980 posted:I'd call it completely subjective to the viewer what is and isn't a horror to you. Setting aside the fact that no one is going to horror check you ("I'm sorry, that film is actually suspense rather than horror. You are hereby disqualified from the Horror Movie Challenge.") horror as a genre is a really broad tent. The boundaries are fuzzy as it blends into other genres easily. Day 2 - Yesterday when I was deciding what to watch first, I was thinking, "I should watch Audition, but I've got two Phantasm movies to watch. I'll put one of those first and then watch Audition tomorrow." And then while listening to the Flop House podcast yesterday they spoil Audition. Okay, it wasn't much of a spoiler; it's the kind of thing I could figure out from the fact that Audition is a horror movie and not a romantic comedy. Still, it's just my luck that the day before I'm planning to see a movie I run into spoilers. The less spoilery concept than what I got is that a widowed television producer is convinced to use some fake auditions for a movie to audition a new wife. He finds his dream woman, they date, and as he's on the verge of proposing things go wrong. I feel like Audition would have worked a bit better if the game wasn't given away quite so early in the film. There's one ten second shot in the first half that changes the tone of the film and I think it would be better if the film got to the midpoint before changing things up. A lot of Audition has to do with Japanese sexual politics and I feel like that message may have been muddled in translation. It plays out to me like a story where the problems with relationships are all on the woman. If Yamazaki was the kind and obedient woman that she presented herself as, then the "faultless" Aoyama would have been fine. There doesn't seem to be a moral condemnation of tricking a woman into a relationship; he may have deceived her but her deception was much worse. I feel like I'm getting contradictory messages from the film and that may just be do to the cultural context. Overall, though, Audition was really good. It got nicely creepy and built to the horrifying climax I anticipated but did not want to see. Tomorrow I'm planning on watching Cemetery Man so nobody spoil that for me.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 2, 2016 19:13
|
|
|
Samuel Clemens posted:For all the shared plot elements, The Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 are very different in terms of atmosphere. The original is a tense and fairly low-key horror film, while the sequel is much more overtly comedic. It's not just about plot elements. I feel Evil Dead 2 did both horror and comedy better. Anything the original did, Evil Dead 2 did better. Well, except tree rape. Choco1980 posted:I give Laserblast: Leonard Maltin account spotted!
|
|
#
¿
Oct 3, 2016 00:39
|
|
|
Day 3 - I ran into a problem with watching Cemetery Man this evening, so I fired up my back up plan: a mysterious unlabeled video tape I found under my television. I've seen the original Japanese version of Ring and it's really good. And that made me not watch the US version. Not because I didn't think a remake could be any good but because I didn't think I needed to after watching the original version. So now I've seen the US version and it's also really good, but I also think that I didn't really need to see both. I feel obligated to give a premise even when I doubt anyone needs it. There's this videotape and if you watch it a nearby phone rings and a voice says that you will die in seven days. After the deaths of a group of teenagers, a reporter finds the tape, watches it, and then begins following the trail of clues on it to unravel the mystery before her seven days are up. The US version of The Ring is kind of funky to me. It's from 2002 and the cinematic style is very much of that era, particularly with the color adjustment of the scenes. But a lot of the set dressing feels more like 1992, probably to make the videotape feel more natural at a time when digital video was becoming very common. The film in general is visually striking and dreamy. I think The Ring gets a bit lost in the middle portions. The beginning and the ending are very creepy, but there's this portion in the middle that might as well be a straight investigation story since the tone is just dropped (essentially once the island is reached). Between the two, I think the US version is a bit better than the Japanese version on the visuals though I don't like the kid in the US one. It's not so much better that it's worth seeing if you've watched the Japanese version, though. Of course watching the Japanese sequels is just a terrible idea. (Oh hey, between the previous post and this one it's Grudge vs. The Ring right here. )
|
|
#
¿
Oct 4, 2016 03:18
|
|
|
Choco1980 posted:If I remember right, The Ring was really the first major US film to be doing that washout effect for dread in horror. It kinda started that trend we still haven't bucked. It might have been the first to do it in horror, but it's really mimicking The Matrix which popularized it in feature films and then everyone in those first few years of the twenty-first century was heavily color shifting their images. That mention of other versions reminded me that I want to check out the Chinese version which I've heard is distinctive. Maybe this October I'm going to keep seeing the ring. (Edit: Huh. Apparently I'm thinking of another movie or a different country's version. Well, I'll poke around and wind up watching another country's version of some major film I've seen anyway.) Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 03:54 on Oct 4, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Oct 4, 2016 03:51
|
|
|
Day 4 - What the hell did I just watch? I mean, I know the title is Cemetery Man, or Dellemorte Dellemore if you're in Italy, but what the hell did I just watch? Francesco Dellemorte is the watchman at a cemetery that was built on the site of an ancient Etruscan burial ground that had gone bad (I'm assuming that last part since there are no Native Americans in Italy). Some of the people buried there wake up seven days after being put into the ground and rise to devour human flesh. Putting them back down is the only one of his job duties that he takes seriously. He's a scoundrel and a lazeabout. When he falls madly in lust with a young widow, his life gets complicated. No matter where you think this movie is going to go, I promise you that it's not. Things keep shifting, abruptly and without using a clutch. It's a wild ride from beginning to end. I really enjoyed the absolute absurdity in Cemetery Man. Things seem to become sane for about thirty seconds and then suddenly there's just an utterly insane scene. And it's played for comedy. At the one scene I initially recoiled at how gruesome it was, then started laughing when I realized what the consequences were going to be. Overall, very weird but also very good. Wreath of Barbs posted:5. Night of the Creeps (1986) Night of the Creeps is so much fun and that line is a highpoint of the film. Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 02:52 on Oct 5, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Oct 5, 2016 02:49
|
|
|
Day 5 - Maybe it's the goon face blindness talking, but I swear that the main character in Vampyr looks just like H. P. Lovecraft. Are we absolutely sure that he didn't take a trip to Europe to star in a movie? On a visit to the countryside, an occultist stumbles onto supernatural happenings surrounding a dying girl. Care to guess what type of monster is involved? The Vampyr had some very striking images, but I could definitely feel the seams from it being a lost film stitched together from scraps. Some scenes really needed the missing audio to support them and the transitions were often rough. I can't really blame the movie for this, though. I liked the vampire lore in this movie, which is from that special time when vampires hadn't penetrated pop culture so deeply to have their rules firmly set. In this movie, the vampire is trying to drive its victim to suicide. Also, the servants were much more of a threat than the actual vampire. One of the servants gets one of the weirdest film deaths I've seen, buried alive by a flour mill. As you might expect, Carl Dreyer gets some great performances out of most of his cast, though I did not like the main character. Turns out he was a rich guy who funded the movie as long as he got to be the star.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 6, 2016 01:08
|
|
|
wormil posted:What a great idea for an October marathon; all of John Carpenters horror movies in order. I used to own them all, wonder if I still do. Let's be fair, once you get past In the Mouth of Madness it would be really hard to continue.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 6, 2016 12:23
|
|
|
Day 6 - I had a severe time crunch this evening so rather than following my plan of filling in gaps, I loaded up a streaming service, went to the horror category and decided to watch the first thing I hit that I hadn't seen and was under 80 minutes long. And that's why I watched Spirit in the Woods. As a movie, all I can say is that it admirably fulfilled its role of being under 80 minutes. The film is a naked Blair Witch knock off. Students shooting footage for a project on they were shooting vanished in the Spiritual Woods of Ohio and their camera was found. Apparently they were using VHS camcorders in 2013 based on the crappy filter they applied to some of the footage. The script is comically bad, the acting is worse, and the direction is just plain incompetent. I'm pretty sure they recorded the audio directly on the camera. My college has started a film club that wants to produce short student films and this feels like the result of something similar. A real "Hey, let's make this movie! I've got a script and we can do it over the weekend!" situation. I started writing down all the things that were wrong with just the script and I gave up in five minutes because it's just everything. Every cliche is hit, characters flatly exposite for no good reason, and the dialog often just doesn't make sense. . Weirdly enough, despite selecting the film based on it's length, it dragged like mad. The first sixty minutes of the movie are essentially, boring kids walk around the woods and get lost. There's maybe two things that could be considered "spooky". That's not an exaggeration, either. When something finally happened I checked the timestamp and it was 1 hour 27 seconds.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 7, 2016 02:31
|
|
|
Day 7 - There's a lot to be said for a simple idea executed well. Horror films in particular seem to benefit from this. 10 Cloverfield Lane is a good example of that since it takes it's simple story and does it really well. After a car crash a woman wakes up in a paranoid man's doomsday bunker and he tells her that everyone on the surface is dead. And then things get tense. I'm not really sure about John Goodman's performance in this film. It's definitely an intentional choice to be so restrained in most of his dialog, but it doesn't land right for me. It may be that he just plays it too flat. Also, that final sequence felt completely unnecessary to me. I would have been fine with the movie if it ended on that long shot with the alien spacecraft in the distance. The action sequence felt tacked on, like a studio exec said, "Sure, she used her wits to escape from the psychopath who was holding her prisoner for her own good, but we need to see her fight the real threat." Overall, though, pretty drat good. That dinner table scene was intense...
|
|
#
¿
Oct 8, 2016 03:12
|
|
|
SomeJazzyRat posted:21. Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982)[/b] Out of curiosity, did you watch one of the 3D home releases? I know there have been a few. Thinking about it has made me want to watch a 3D horror movie like that this month, though one that doesn't require those terrible 3D televisions. I know there have been a few releases that just come with the tinted glasses...
|
|
#
¿
Oct 8, 2016 14:02
|
|
|
Day 8 - If I had been a child in the UK in 1992, Ghostwatch would have scared the piss out of me. As an adult who knew what it was going in and has seen way too many found footage movies, it lacks that impact but it's still really good. On Halloween night in 1992, the BBC aired a live broadcast of a paranormal investigation. As the night went on, the event gets out of hand. Of course, it wasn't really live, but it was presented as though it were. There was a phone panel where people were calling in with their creepy stories which devolves into people saying they spotted something strange in the footage and that the broadcast is having a strange affect on their homes. There's B-list celebrities doing hosting duties which don't go quite right because the broadcast is "live". An in studio expert gets deflated as the show goes against her. And if you watch closely, you can get occasional glimpses of things happening. My biggest complaint about Ghostwatch is that it gives up the game just a little too early. I'm fine with it ending with the supernatural events spreading to the studio, but they could have gone to just a blackout with the teleprompter still working instead of the wind effects and people fleeing as the cameras roll around. Just playing it straight a bit longer would have been really effective. Still, very neat to watch and I can see why this show scarred a generation of kids in Great Britain.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2016 00:56
|
|
|
Day 9 - Time for one of the all time classics that for some reason I just never got around to watching: Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I mean, it's not a surprise that I never got around to it since it's from the side of horror that I generally don't care for. And I discovered that there's a reason that this film is considered a classic of the genre. A group of people on a road trip through Texas stumble onto a house where a monstrous person dwells. He has big knees and takes care of the place while the master is away. Wait, wrong film. Same idea, though. Here's what I thought I was going to get going in: a cheapy exploitation film from the 1970's that relied on gore effects and uncomfortable violence to move things along. What I got was a really atmospheric, creepy film that was really well shot, engaging and so when the violence did come in it hit with a major impact. I'm sure it helped that I watched the 40th anniversary restoration so it didn't look like the filmstock was rotting away. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is definitely an exploitation film, but it's a very well done one. That made it easy to see why it spawned so many imitators. Darthemed posted:#8.) A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014) .When I watched it last year, I felt like the film just wasn't well shot. Everything was so textureless that it made the film boring to look at. The bland, barrenness of everything including the story made the whole thing feel hollow.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2016 23:44
|
|
|
Franchescanado posted:I was considering watching through this series for Halloween, since I've never really watched any, but this was more of a slog than anything... I won't say that you need to watch the Leprechaun series because it really just will make you sorry for Warwick Davis, but Leprechaun in the Hood has to be seen to be believed. And if you survive that, Leprechaun in Space (which I think it the fourth movie), is also very odd.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2016 14:22
|
|
|
Franchescanado posted:I got to see this in theaters a few weeks ago for the first time, and I was blown away by the sound design. I have seen this movie dozens of time, but this was the first time hearing the subtle chanting/screaming/mumbling voices that pervade the music and atmosphere. For other people, there's a special nationwide screening of The Shining coming up in about two weeks: http://www.fathomevents.com/event/stanley-kubricks-the-shining/more-info/details . I'm probably going to go out and see that myself.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2016 22:15
|
|
|
Day 10 - The Devil's Backbone is the first in Del Toro's "People Do Horrible Things to Children During the Spanish Civil War" trilogy (part three coming someday, I'm sure). And unsurprisingly, it's fantastic. The plot is simple enough. A young boy is abandoned at a remote orphanage where he deals with his minders, fellow children, a war that is rapidly closing in on them, and a ghost that's stalking the halls at night. I feel like this is something that has likely been said many times before, but this film is really a gothic novel moved to twentieth century Spain. The archetypes are all there, they all play the traditional parts, and the plot unfolds in the way you'd expect. It's so geared to the gothic style that it feels jarring when the civil war intrudes on the story because it's one of the few things in the film that aren't gothic in style. I loved the ghost effects in this film. Especially during that middle sequence where it turns up and you start getting a really good look at the design and the whole thing comes together. Del Toro always has a great visual style and the colors in particular here are striking. The way the contrast often frames characters looks terrific. It really works with the ghost effects, too.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 11, 2016 01:57
|
|
|
Day 11 - I had been looking forward to watching The Witch. An atmospheric horror film with a distinctive setting? Sign me up! I wanted to like it but I felt like the whole thing was less than the sum of its parts. The story plays like a ghost story that puritans would tell around the fire on those cold, hungry winter nights in Massachusetts. A man with slightly diverging views from the community is outcast to the wilderness where he labors to establish a new farm. Things start going bad, though, as his straining family is pushed to the breaking point by supernatural forces around them. There is a witch in the woods and the devil is at work. I have the silliest complaint about The VVitch. The homestead is on cleared land. The clean line of the trees tell me that foresters have been through there. Thematically, the movie should be about these people dealing with untamed wilderness in isolation, but in all the wide shots I can see see that they're not. I know that's an absurd complaint regarding things that the filmmakers lacked the ability to control (and may have been a necessity of production). Still, I think it reflects part of my problem with the movie: it just feels too tame. The dialog says they're struggling, something key to the way the story develops, and the film doesn't actually show that. The film also suffers a bit from it's attempts at accuracy. The story is a puritan's perspective of evil supernatural forces working in the world and these beliefs are entrenched in the story of the film but never actually developed. With some earlier events I was thinking to myself, "Was that supposed to be something evil happening?" only for the characters to not remark on it until much later in the film. I don't need explicit "This is what we believe" exposition, but something to bridge the gaps would have been helpful. This movie looks so absurdly dreary. You'd think that the New England wilderness was made entirely of grey mud with grey trees.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2016 03:55
|
|
|
Ambitious Spider posted:Another person that doesn't love the witch! I wanted to like it more. The concept is great; playing the whole thing from a solidly puritan perspective was distinctive. The family drama was more interesting than the supernatural elements to me. But things never gelled right. I feel like if the movie was twenty minutes longer so it could build up to events and have room to establish things more firmly, it could have been much better.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2016 12:32
|
|
|
Franchescanado posted:The movie gives you just the right amount of information to try and figure things out. Anything left unexplained fuels the story. Why were they banished from the town? The answer, we are told, is pride, which we see, but what was done? How was his pride a reason for excommunication? What are these "strange beliefs" that worry the other villagers? Your own answer fuels the story. If the movie provided any answer to this, it would kills the story-book quality of the story. The story is a folk-tale, and is told as such. My answer was it didn't matter why they were banished beyond the stated reason: he taught a different version of the religion than they did. Hence the idea that the heresy makes one vulnerable to the devil.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2016 13:19
|
|
|
Franchescanado posted:I guess my question to understand how you read the film is what makes you think the Witch is real? Not much of a spoiler since the Witch appears in the first ten minutes of the movie, in scenes separate from any witness that would give the sequence an ambiguous perspective. We are getting the objective eye's view almost immediately that there is a witch in the woods. In the context of the film, the witch is real, the devil is out there luring women into midnight nude dances, and the only thing that can protect you from it is being a good Christian. You know, of all the controversial opinions I have on bits of pop culture, "I didn't care for The Witch" is pretty much the one I'd expect least likely to stir things up. Day 12 - I'm almost to the end of my planned viewing for the month so I thought I'd flip through a streaming service and see if there was something that jumped out at me and there it was: I Saw the Devil. "Wait, isn't that kind of an action/thriller?" I said to myself, suspecting that Amazon had miscategorized another movie. A quick google check told me that plenty of people consider it horror so that's good enough for me to jump into it. A serial killer abducts a woman from the side of the road and dismembers her. Unfortunately for him, her husband is a cop and he sets out for revenge. Through some extremely dubious detective work, the cop finds the killer and then sets into motion a plan to torment the killer. So here's the thing, I can't call this a horror film. I think the reason that some people categorize it that was has to do with how gruesome some of the violence gets, but spurting arteries isn't enough for me to consider a film to be "horror". I Saw the Devil just doesn't have the tone of a horror movie to me. Part of the context of I Saw the Devil is that the detective is supposed to be morally failing as he pursues his revenge, but in my view, he was off the deep end of morality right from the start. He's given a list of four people who the police think might have raped people but don't have any evidence. So the cop goes around breaking into their homes and beating them into the hospital until he finds the one that did it. But even if I felt that theme didn't work, it was still a pretty good revenge flick. The action is cool, the way the story escalates works well, and in the fight scenes the cinematography and editing are pretty good.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 13, 2016 02:10
|
|
|
ThePlague-Daemon posted:What are the best Criterion horror films on Hulu? I don't think I have time to watch a lot of them, but I just got a Hulu account and then going out Criterion is getting their own separate streaming service in the next couple months, so I'd like to try to get a few in at least, especially from their Japanese collection, which is massive. I'm open to movies from anywhere, though. I've seen House and Jigoku recently, and Kwaidan is probably next on my list. Since you've watched Jigoku recently, you should watch Nakagawa's other film on the service: Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan. It's a traditional ghost story that he spices up. I really liked Kuroneko which is a film you don't hear a lot about. It's from the director of Onibaba and also features some women who take revenge on samurai, though they are supernatural in Kuroneko. The Cremator is a weird dark comedy that pushes into the edge of horror about a guy in 1930's Czechoslovakia who gets swept up in those up and coming National Socialists. His only problem is that he has a Jewish wife. Haxan is kind of clunky, but the devil sequences are great. I recommend just skipping the boring history of witchcraft sequences and go to the insane dramatizations. Also, this gif is not two separate scenes edited together:  Seriously, it's not subtext in that movie.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 13, 2016 22:15
|
|
|
ThePlague-Daemon posted:Thanks for the recommendations! Sounds like I'm gonna start with Kwaidan and then move onto Haxan, and definitely try to fit in some of these others. For last year's challenge I think I watched three different versions of Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan and there was a fourth I wanted to watch but couldn't dig up a copy. It's a traditional horror story that's been adapted many times. The black and white version that Criterion isn't very strong on the supernatural elements. It's an okay period drama, but not something I'd say that people should go out of their way for. The color version is the one by Nakagawa and it's got some really great imagery. Nakagawa made quite a few horror films in Japan in the late 50's and early 60's, he was the first director to really dive into the genre in Japan. Very few of his films are available in English, however. An interesting, though lesser film, by him that's you can find out there is Black Cat Mansion (I watched it last year off Youtube). I was just starting up my viewing for the evening and the first line in the movie is a narrator saying, "The picture you are about to view contains an evil spell."
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2016 01:22
|
|
|
Day 13 - Burn, Witch, Burn (or Night of the Eagle if you want the much worse original UK title) is definitely a film from another time. The treatment of women in the film is really awful. If you can get over that, though, there's some neat things underneath it. A college professor who abhors superstition leads a charmed life. Then he discovers that his wife has been performing black magic to get them the perfect perfect lives. He burns her witchcraft stuff (paraphernalia?) and then his life starts going badly wrong. The first third of this film wasn't working for me at all since the idyllic life was some 1950's style blandness and one of the first things that goes wrong for him is a rape accusation that is dismissed by him yelling at his accuser until she recants (I'm not spoiler protecting that since that's something that could be a deal breaker for some people and it comes out of the blue). Then things get much better as a new set of problems develop. The best bit in the film is the confrontation between the professor and the villain, but it feels like it comes too late in the movie. He's already conceded a belief in the supernatural when he resorts to a spell himself to try to save his wife. So having a confrontation about belief feels like it's out of place there. If that conflict had been played up earlier and if the film had been structured to avoid that problem, then it would work so much better. It feels like someone wrote that scene, and then a few drafts of the script were written in another direction.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2016 03:01
|
|
|
Choco1980 posted:It has a killer moment that's great for me. Earlier in the film he writes "I DON'T BELIEVE" on his blackboard. When he starts getting attacked by the Eagle and starts to realize there's more than just hogwash at work here, the moment he breaks and is afraid, you see him back against the board, covering up the "DON'T", leaving him framed by "I BELIEVE". It sounds hokier than it comes off as, as it comes off very subtle. Yeah, that stuff was the good things in the movie to me. I just feel like the moment of revelation actually occurred at the end of what is essentially act 2 of the film and then it all is reverted back for act 3.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2016 04:46
|
|
|
Day 14 - This is a yakuza post. It was written to kill yakuza. So going in, I knew Gozu was going to be a weird movie. I had been told that it's exceptional in its strangeness and that's why I wanted to watch it. Well, I definitely got that. What I wasn't expecting was that it was an insane comedy about sexually repressed mobsters. The yakuza have a problem. One of their enforcers has gone off the deep end and is having paranoid delusions. He also seems to want to kill the boss and take over. To deal with this problem they assign his best friend, who is in mutual lust with the enforcer though neither can express it, to kill him. The friend thinks he accidentally kills him on the drive to the disposal site, but when he stops the body vanishes and things start getting weird. The friend sets off on a hunt for the enforcer that goes through an absurd cast of characters. For pretty much all of Gozu I was watching it in horrified amusement. It's filled with disturbing, absurdist images and events. I had heard it was a monster flick but the monster is only in it for a few minutes. I mean, unless you count pretty much all of the characters in Gozu as monsters which isn't really that far off. You might think that bit about mutual lust is subtext in the film, but it's not. The themes in the movie are worn on its sleeve and really the throughline of the film is these characters finding a way that they can be together. I don't know if I'd actually recommend Gozu to anyone. It's just too out there and it wanders way too much for its own good. Still, it's definitely a movie that leaves an impression. 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 15, 2016 03:42
|
|
|
Day 15 - Halfway there! And for the second episode in a row the Flophouse tried to spoil something for me. This time I at least could turn it off when I knew they were talking about Viy (which I'm still a few days off from). I'm looking forward to getting spoiled on whatever movie I'm watching at the end of the month when they release their next episode in two weeks. Adaptations of H. P. Lovecraft's stories haven't exactly been the greatest. Often they have more ambition than quality and the best films to have come out of his work have completely abandoned his tone. But when I saw that there was a recent adaptation of The Colour Out of Space, probably his best story, I had to give it a try. A meteor falls on a farm and afterward life in the surrounding area goes bad. The crops grow abnormally and rot while growing, the people on the farm become disturbed And at night, you might see something. This is a German production and they moved the setting of the story to Germany, but they added a terrible framing story about an American who comes to a village near the farm looking for his father who visited the area after World War II. So this film shot around 2010 had a framing story set in the 1970s that flash backed to the main story set in the 1920s and 30s. It's pointlessly convoluted, clunkily done, and completely unnecessary. The film is shot in black and white for the obvious reason. But just because it's the obvious way to go doesn't mean that it couldn't be done well. Sadly, this movie has a problem that I feel like a lot of recent black and white films have: it wasn't shot very well. B&W photography isn't just turning the color switch off on your digital camera; everything has to be lit properly or you just get a flat, ugly film. There are some bits that do look good which makes me think that this may have been a product of the a hasty production schedule. Another problem visually is that when the colors show up (look, it's in the title, I'm not spoiling that), it looks like a flat overlay on image. The ending is terrible also. Apparently the colours just decided to hang out in a well for a decade until a GI dropped a rock into it. And that was their signal to abandon the planet. Also, I want to know how the "I was just fleeing the blighted alien landscape my farm was becoming," defense would go at the Nuremberg trials.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2016 03:07
|
|
|
Day 16 - Badly time constrained today and too many of my movies are foreign so I can't watch them and get work done at the same time. So instead, I put on Maggie, the recent Arnold Schwarzenegger zombie movie. There's a zombie plague going around, but turning undead isn't a quick process. The infection takes weeks or months and infected people who are nearing the point that they may attack people are rounded up and shipped off to quarantine where they're given experimental drugs to try to retard the transformation as long as possible before they die. The runaway teenage daughter of a farmer get infected in a city and he brings her home while they try to figure out what to do. This movie was real mixed bag for me. Schwarzenegger does his best, but he doesn't have the ability to pull off midwestern farmer working through losing his daughter. And some scenes are really clunky with terrible dialog (was I really supposed to be in suspense when she put her lips on his forehead and held it there for a few seconds?). On the other hand, there are some scenes that get it right and convey the emotion of the situation. Mainly it's the scenes with the daughter more isolated. Maybe it's me, but I completely agree with the idea of isolating people with a highly infectious disease who can suddenly turn violent and are a danger to both themselves and others.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 17, 2016 02:18
|
|
|
STAC Goat posted:Seriously, by the time anything starts happened I looked and it was like 51 minutes into the movie. It's scary how often this is true about found footage movies. I'm sure it's because they're all shot on the cheap, they have only about twenty minutes of actual story (including the stage setting and building atmosphere), and they want to pad the film as much as possible.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 17, 2016 13:24
|
|
|
Day 17 - I've wavered on watching Tetsuo: The Iron Man forever. I knew that it was exceptionally gruesome and featured a lot of metal going into and coming out people which hits my nerves even more than the standard slasher killing does, so that made me keep away even though it's also supposed to be pretty good. But this month my viewing is all about trying to hit things that I should have watched a while ago. The plot here isn't really straightforward. It's more of series of escalating metaphorical vignettes that roll back and forth. The basic structure of it is that for a Japanese businessman, scrap metal has become an infectious disease that's taking over his body. The first half of this film is really strong. The "what the hell is happening?" followed by "here's something else strange and disturbing happening" keeps it going. Then the villain(?) shows up and it gets boring. There really feels like there are two separate movies here since even the visuals in the second half (well, other than the [spoiler]metal future[/url]) just lack the flare of the first half. This is a really grimy movie. They really took advantage of shooting on b&w 16mm for the look. It helps cover up some of the dodgy prosthetics (though not all of them). Some of the exteriors were shot on residential streets in Tokyo and I'd really like to have seen people's reaction to them shooting the ending in that neighborhood. Finally, after watching Gozu, the sex scenes in Tetsuo feel like they're restrained and sensible. STAC Goat posted:Its kind of the nature of found footage. Those movies are designed to suck you into the first person perspective and the characters and the tension is about what's appearing just off camera. The found footage genre basically says "in most movies you have some kind of omnipotent view where you can see what's happening elsewhere, with us you can only see what's in front of you." That means you spend a lot of time waiting to see what happens and if they do it right you spend that time building up sympathy for the people whose eyes you've been seeing through and getting scared with them when they get scared. I know you weren't criticizing the film and I have seen a few found footage movies that use the build up effectively. I was replying because that comment does reflect something that an awful lot of found footage movies do poorly. Most found footage films would benefit hugely from losing about forty-five minutes of their first hour because presumably there's still an editor working on the footage before the viewer sees it even from the perspective of the film. You can get those same connections across to the viewer very quickly in less time and be more effective about it; see how a good short film can do it. Also, it doesn't help empathy if you wind up hating the people that they have on screen . Now to do that, the screenwriter, editor, and the director need to think carefully about how they're establishing the film and find ways to fill it out effectively. Obviously, just taking a razor blade to the celluloid isn't going to help. But there are plenty of times when I'm watching found footage and asking, "Why is this scene even here?" Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Oct 17, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Oct 17, 2016 20:12
|
|
|
SomeJazzyRat posted:32. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)[/b] I can't think of a worse time loop to be trapped in than Halloween 4. Unless it was Halloween 6.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 18, 2016 13:08
|
|
|
Day 18 - I'm running into the problem that some of the movies I have on my list are vanishing from streaming services before I get to watch them. Fortunately for me, Viy could be found on Youtube with English subtitles. The Soviet Union produced very few horror movies. The list is essentially Viy and Den' Gneva. (FWIW, Den' Gneva is set in the United States and now that I know about its existence I really want to see a Soviet horror film about the US). Viy is based on a short story and was made in that period when Soviets were doing fantasy films which probably explains how it got made. A young seminary student stays one night in a barn where an old witch finds him, climbs on his back, and rides him through the night sky. He invokes God which brings them to the ground and then beats her with a stick. Just before killing her, though, the witch turns into a beautiful young woman and he flees. The next day, some men come to the seminary to say that the daughter of a rich man was dying after being beaten and she insists on a particular student coming to pray for her soul for the three nights. I found the first half of the film to be kind of weak. The film is very stagy in presentation and that first half in particular suffers for it. And the tone in the ride over to the estate feels like they don't know if it's supposed to be funny or unnerving and winds up being neither. But once they get to the estate, the film turns around. The people on the estate know something is up but not exactly what and the father has a great performance where he's always shooting nasty glances at the student. The night scenes are great because the limited location lets the presentation work better. The final segment where the monsters start pouring out of the walls is especially great.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 18, 2016 16:35
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 15:30 |
|
|
Butch Cassidy posted:Just watched this while cleaning up afted a project and making dinner. I rather liked the stage feel in the first half and the wagon ride was subtly funny enough to keep interest. I absolutely.loved just how Soviet the design of Viy was. I'm also somewhat surprised a movie with a Christian figure as the protagonist even got made in that era. Possiboy because his god doesn't save him and the rest of the church figures are comic caricatures. It was definitely hard to not read Soviet propaganda into the film just due to the time that it was made. Similarly, the treatment of people by the rich father seems to reflect that. The stage style presentation was only a problem in some of the scenes for me. The design, blocking, and camera work seemed to reflect the idea that there would be a person in a physical audience watching rather than something more dynamic. Later on when they have more physical exteriors and the interiors are where the action is centered, I think it winds up working better for me. Edit: While we're on the topic, I'm now trying to dig up a copy of Den Gneva so that I can say that I've watched every horror film that the Soviet Union made (okay, there's probably a few more than my cursory search didn't turn up). I'm not having any luck finding it beyond the fact that TCM aired it at least once, but I did find this East German poster for the film: 
Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Oct 18, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Oct 18, 2016 20:36
|
|