Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
Basebf555
Feb 29, 2008

The greatest sensual pleasure there is is to know the desires of another!

Fun Shoe

david_a posted:

"Almost watchable" is a pretty fair description, honestly.

That really is a perfect way to describe Children of the Corn. You read a little about it and it sounds really interesting and creepy, then you sit down to watch and it turns out it does actually have a decent foreboding atmosphere. Then you keep watching it a while longer and the various character backstories are filled in, and its like "huh, this is pretty weird, kinda creepy. Hopefully something will happen soon though!". Then about three quarters of the way through you've fallen asleep but when you wake up you kinda want to give it another shot because it seems like there's a good movie in there. Repeat two or three more times until you give up.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Uncle Boogeyman
Jul 22, 2007

yeah Children of the Corn frontloads all its best material very hard, and its best material isn't even that great.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD
Sep 14, 2007

everything is yours
The story it's based on also isn't very good.

Basebf555
Feb 29, 2008

The greatest sensual pleasure there is is to know the desires of another!

Fun Shoe

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

The story it's based on also isn't very good.

Like a lot of King stories when you boil it down to a one or two sentence summary it sounds like a great premise. I'm a huge King fan but he's not always able to follow through on the (usually amazing) ideas he comes up with.

Uncle Boogeyman
Jul 22, 2007

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

The story it's based on also isn't very good.

it's better than the movie, at least. has some good creepy memorable images, the kids' society feels more fleshed out, and i like the ending.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD
Sep 14, 2007

everything is yours

Uncle Boogeyman posted:

it's better than the movie, at least. has some good creepy memorable images, the kids' society feels more fleshed out, and i like the ending.

It also needs to be about as half as long as it is.

david_a
Apr 24, 2010




Megamarm

Basebf555 posted:

Like a lot of King stories when you boil it down to a one or two sentence summary it sounds like a great premise. I'm a huge King fan but he's not always able to follow through on the (usually amazing) ideas he comes up with.
I've never really read any King but he sounds a lot like Philip K Dick in that regard. He comes up with cool concepts that sound great as a summary or a short story, but the long-form works usually leave something to be desired.

K. Waste
Feb 27, 2014

MORAL:
To the vector belong the spoils.
I've only read The Man In the Hight Castle, A Scanner Darkly, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, so I don't know about all that.

Uncle Boogeyman
Jul 22, 2007

i've only read a little PKD too but VALIS is loving awesome. i did think Do Androids Dream was a little shaggy.

lizardman
Jun 30, 2007

by R. Guyovich
I think people might want to throw things at me because I'm speaking more as "dumb mainstream moviegoer" rather than putting on my "film buff" hat, but it kind of baffles me how difficult it seems for Warner Bros. or whoever has the rights these days to produce a straightforward follow-up to The Exorcist.

I think it's pretty obvious what audiences want in an Exorcist sequel: an innocent person gets possessed by the devil or whatever and creepy supernatural poo poo happens while possessed person does and says blasphemous things, and then a climax with an intense exorcism (oh and get Linda Blair involved somehow). It seems like a no-brainer to me?

Basebf555
Feb 29, 2008

The greatest sensual pleasure there is is to know the desires of another!

Fun Shoe

lizardman posted:

I think people might want to throw things at me because I'm speaking more as "dumb mainstream moviegoer" rather than putting on my "film buff" hat, but it kind of baffles me how difficult it seems for Warner Bros. or whoever has the rights these days to produce a straightforward follow-up to The Exorcist.

I think it's pretty obvious what audiences want in an Exorcist sequel: an innocent person gets possessed by the devil or whatever and creepy supernatural poo poo happens while possessed person does and says blasphemous things, and then a climax with an intense exorcism (oh and get Linda Blair involved somehow). It seems like a no-brainer to me?

The problem is that movie has been done countless times by people trying to reproduce the success of The Exorcist, to the point that even if a new Exorcist entry tried to do it audiences would criticize it for being a retread. Its not like there have been no straightforward movies featuring exorcisms since the originals release 30 years ago, there have been too many to count.

The time to do it was when they made The Heretic, but for whatever reason they decided to get creative.

lizardman
Jun 30, 2007

by R. Guyovich
^^ That's a good point, but people would be willing to give a slight pass to an Exorcist movie following faithfully in its predecessor's footsteps, at least more than a random ripoff would.

For Exorcist II: The Heretic, John Boorman disliked the original movie and wanted to create a sort of counter-vision for the sequel. I'm not sure why that didn't raise red flags for the suits.

Basebf555
Feb 29, 2008

The greatest sensual pleasure there is is to know the desires of another!

Fun Shoe

lizardman posted:

^^ That's a good point, but people would be willing to give a slight pass to an Exorcist movie following faithfully in its predecessor's footsteps, at least more than a random ripoff would.


I think the way to go would be to cast a real heavyweight actor in the role of the investigating priest. You'd need someone who's casting says "this is a serious movie, not some cheap bullshit." I would have said Phillip Seymour Hoffman but :(

Neo Rasa
Mar 8, 2007
Everyone should play DUKE games.

:dukedog:

Basebf555 posted:

I think the way to go would be to cast a real heavyweight actor in the role of the investigating priest. You'd need someone who's casting says "this is a serious movie, not some cheap bullshit." I would have said Phillip Seymour Hoffman but :(

You mean someone like Richard Burton, George C. Scott, or Stellen Skarsgård? :D

The traditional structure of The Exorcist is definitely way too played out to work today. Remember parody movies like Repossessed were coming out in 1990 and even earlier.

Now, I do say that in a post Mad Max: Fury Road world, but Friedkin has no interest in doing another one, and I doubt Warner Bros./Morgan Creek/whoever is going to want to drop like $160 million or whatever on another potentially awful Exorcist follow up.

Basebf555
Feb 29, 2008

The greatest sensual pleasure there is is to know the desires of another!

Fun Shoe

Neo Rasa posted:

You mean someone like Richard Burton, George C. Scott, or Stellen Skarsgård? :D

Well yea, that's exactly the point I was making. Especially Scott and Skarsgard, they absolutely carry their respective films. The original is more of a team effort because Von Sydow doesn't have very much screentime. I suspect the casting of Burton and Scott were major factors in getting The Heretic and Exorcist III greenlit.

edogawa rando
Mar 20, 2007

I think my mass effect is broken

lizardman posted:

^^ That's a good point, but people would be willing to give a slight pass to an Exorcist movie following faithfully in its predecessor's footsteps, at least more than a random ripoff would.

For Exorcist II: The Heretic, John Boorman disliked the original movie and wanted to create a sort of counter-vision for the sequel. I'm not sure why that didn't raise red flags for the suits.

They probably saw the box office success of Deliverance, as well as its critical success, along with the plaudits that Hell in the Pacific and Point Blank got. Apparently he also got the Best Director award at Cannes in 1970 for a film called Leo the Last, which he made just before Deliverance.

Him making Zardoz right before Exorcist II should have also been a red flag, to be honest.

AGirlWonder
Oct 24, 2010

Basebf555 posted:

The problem is that movie has been done countless times by people trying to reproduce the success of The Exorcist, to the point that even if a new Exorcist entry tried to do it audiences would criticize it for being a retread. Its not like there have been no straightforward movies featuring exorcisms since the originals release 30 years ago, there have been too many to count.

The time to do it was when they made The Heretic, but for whatever reason they decided to get creative.

The issue is that The Exorcist has so much heart to it. It's not just a movie about a possessed girl, it's about her mother's struggle to save her and Father Karras's struggle to regain his faith. The story is so scary because it deals with people encountering something they can't understand. It's a very intense film for reasons beyond the spectacle of the exorcism itself. The Rite dealt with some of the same issues in a very shallow way, making it unsuccessful.

I made my boyfriend watch the movie for the first time last week. He really enjoyed it, and took away a lot from it. His father is a charismatic pastor who has performed exorcisms for his denomination, so he has a totally different perspective on the exorcism scenes than I do.

Neo Rasa
Mar 8, 2007
Everyone should play DUKE games.

:dukedog:

Basebf555 posted:

Well yea, that's exactly the point I was making. Especially Scott and Skarsgard, they absolutely carry their respective films. The original is more of a team effort because Von Sydow doesn't have very much screentime. I suspect the casting of Burton and Scott were major factors in getting The Heretic and Exorcist III greenlit.

Ditto to The Sentinel. Burgess Meredith+José Ferrer+Ava Gardner in one movie?

Million Ghosts
Aug 11, 2011

spooooooky
The medical testing scenes are way more horrifying than the actual exorcism to me. Those old machines and how industrial they are is chilling in a way I haven't seen in another movie. The way they snake the tube into her neck made me actually feel ill.

InfiniteZero
Sep 11, 2004

PINK GUITAR FIRE ROBOT

College Slice

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

The story it's based on also isn't very good.

I think that Children of the Corn came to be because anything King wrote was considered fodder for a film adaptation at that time (Cujo, The Dead Zone, and Christine all saw film adaptations released the year before) and he had a huge backlog of short stories he had written after writing The Shining that were all ripe to be made into films from a few years previous.

Also, cocaine.


Stephen King, 1983

Note: I am a huge Stephen King fan but I agree with you about Children of the Corn both as a film and short story.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD
Sep 14, 2007

everything is yours
The Dead Zone is a hell of a lot better than it ought to be. Wasn't that one of those pieces King doesn't recall writing at all? I know Cujo was. Christine has a fabulous soundtrack. That's all I got.

The Cameo
Jan 20, 2005


He was drinking before he wrote The Shining, but his addictions didn't get so bad until Cujo, which was the first book he couldn't remember writing at all, and he didn't really start to clean himself up until he finished The Tommyknockers, realizing that 1) he'd written a real piece of poo poo and 2) he had made a main character that was basically his brain screaming at him to stop killing himself - and so he took off for rehab, which is why it was legit his first year-plus break from releasing a book since 'Salem's Lot in '75. Twelve years of books, twelve years of booze and coke snorts and mouthwash drinking.

Sad part is most of his great stuff - Shining, The Stand, the first three Dark Tower books, Cujo, IT, Misery, Different Seasons, most of Skeleton Crew - was in that period.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD
Sep 14, 2007

everything is yours

The Cameo posted:

Sad part is most of his great stuff - Shining, The Stand, the first three Dark Tower books, Cujo, IT, Misery, Different Seasons, most of Skeleton Crew - was in that period.

Jesus, no kidding.

Lurdiak
Feb 26, 2006

I believe in a universe that doesn't care, and people that do.


The Cameo posted:

Sad part is most of his great stuff - Shining, The Stand, the first three Dark Tower books, Cujo, IT, Misery, Different Seasons, most of Skeleton Crew - was in that period.

I am dead serious when I say that if I hear he's fallen off the wagon, I'll start buying his books again.

Uncle Boogeyman
Jul 22, 2007

Cujo's loving great, for a while that was my favorite King book. didn't have the best reputation for a while there, but people have come back around to it.

VincentPrice
Jun 26, 2009

lizardman posted:

I think people might want to throw things at me because I'm speaking more as "dumb mainstream moviegoer" rather than putting on my "film buff" hat, but it kind of baffles me how difficult it seems for Warner Bros. or whoever has the rights these days to produce a straightforward follow-up to The Exorcist.

I think it's pretty obvious what audiences want in an Exorcist sequel: an innocent person gets possessed by the devil or whatever and creepy supernatural poo poo happens while possessed person does and says blasphemous things, and then a climax with an intense exorcism (oh and get Linda Blair involved somehow). It seems like a no-brainer to me?

Trying to repeat the success and impact of the original by following a formula is exactly why all the rip offs don't have the lasting appeal or success of the original. The Exorcist was a movie the director actually wanted to make, it has heart.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD
Sep 14, 2007

everything is yours
It is much more amusing to know now that Exorcist 2 is like a snippy rebuttal from Boorman. It explains so much.

Neo Rasa
Mar 8, 2007
Everyone should play DUKE games.

:dukedog:

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

It is much more amusing to know now that Exorcist 2 is like a snippy rebuttal from Boorman. It explains so much.

I want a gif of the like two flashback shot where James Earl Jones in a leopard skin struts up to a possessed woman and screams does like a Skyrim dragon shout to de-possess her.

Basebf555
Feb 29, 2008

The greatest sensual pleasure there is is to know the desires of another!

Fun Shoe

Neo Rasa posted:

I want a gif of the like two flashback shot where James Earl Jones in a leopard skin struts up to a possessed woman and screams does like a Skyrim dragon shout to de-possess her.

I really like the fact that the series has maintained a pretty consistent connection between Pazuzu and Africa, the story being that the first humans lived there and therefore were the first to encounter him. There's an Africa connection in three out of the four films.

lizardman
Jun 30, 2007

by R. Guyovich

Neo Rasa posted:


The traditional structure of The Exorcist is definitely way too played out to work today. Remember parody movies like Repossessed were coming out in 1990 and even earlier.

Now, I do say that in a post Mad Max: Fury Road world, but Friedkin has no interest in doing another one, and I doubt Warner Bros./Morgan Creek/whoever is going to want to drop like $160 million or whatever on another potentially awful Exorcist follow up.

(And Re: everyone else responding about the Exorcist sequels)

Oh, no doubt that no one could ever authentically recapture the Exorcist spirit (heart and soul and all), but I definitely think there was about an eight-year window that just closed where a sequel that hits the notes people generally want and expect from a movie that's in the Exorcist lineage could have found success. Deliver Us From Evil bombed last year so I think we'll have to wait a few years for people to get hungry for exorcisms again but as recently as 2013 we had The Conjuring cleaning up with a climax that was basically "Exorcist in a chair". Hell, I think part of the reason there has been so many ripoffs is because the actual Exorcist series hasn't been satisfying audiences' appetite for demonic possession action. Just feels like kind of a waste since you could very easily do a 'Halloween H2O' type concept with a new Exorcist flick and I bet it would have done decent business.

Of the 3-and-a-half Exorcist sequels we do have, despite them all having talented people involved and each having their moments (even Exorcist II!), part of me wants to award the 'best Exorcist sequel' title to The Beginning despite the fact that it's a trashy hackjob, all because it's the only one that feels like it genuinely wants to be an Exorcist sequel (though the setting and trappings have it become something more like Indiana-Jones-meets-The-Omen). Hell, I'd go so far to say Renny Harlin's flick is the only one that's unapologetically a horror movie in general. All three of the others seem hung up on being a classy psychological thriller too good to get their hands dirty, or worse, a bunch of directors just kind of playing around with the IP and indulging themselves.

Only The Beginning seems to remember that it's the sequel to a movie where a possessed little girl projectile vomits into people's faces, masturbates with a crucifix, and whose most famous line is "Your mother sucks cocks in hell!"

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD
Sep 14, 2007

everything is yours
There have been at least a half dozen good Exorcist remakes since.

InfiniteZero
Sep 11, 2004

PINK GUITAR FIRE ROBOT

College Slice

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

There have been at least a half dozen good Exorcist remakes since.

SEYTAN (the Turkish Exorcist) is a good watch because it's a low budget twin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQT2lECrBZI



I've shown this to a few friends with great success. It's purely a rip-off of course but it's endearing in how it tries to remain true with a much lower budget.

Basebf555
Feb 29, 2008

The greatest sensual pleasure there is is to know the desires of another!

Fun Shoe

lizardman posted:

Hell, I'd go so far to say Renny Harlin's flick is the only one that's unapologetically a horror movie in general. All three of the others seem hung up on being a classy psychological thriller too good to get their hands dirty, or worse, a bunch of directors just kind of playing around with the IP and indulging themselves.

Only The Beginning seems to remember that it's the sequel to a movie where a possessed little girl projectile vomits into people's faces, masturbates with a crucifix, and whose most famous line is "Your mother sucks cocks in hell!"

I absolutely hate The Beginning, but beyond that, the original itself isn't purely a horror film. Its a mix of psychological thriller and horror. Unfortunately the balance between the more low-key psychological stuff and the projectile vomit stuff is very difficult to get right, and The Exorcist is maybe the most perfect example of that balance ever made. So the sequels and knockoffs have tried to achieve that, and they usually fail, usually ending up too far on either end of the spectrum. Dominion and The Beginning are perfect examples of two different directors going for that balance and failing in opposite ways.

Basebf555 fucked around with this message at 21:17 on May 21, 2015

somnambulist
Mar 27, 2006

quack quack



I saw the Exorcist when I was about 12 years old. I had heard about the movie, but I was pretty young and didn't really know what it was about other than "the devil".

I grew up Catholic, so I gotta say- I had the poo poo scared out of my rear end in a top hat. I couldn't sleep for months.

Now that I'm older, it doesn't have the same effect, but it's still a brilliant movie. Some of the shots are just fantastic. The best shot to me is when she's levitating on the bed and it's shot from above her bed looking down. The babadook did a very similar shot and it was neat to show the nod, but the exorcist did it a million times better. Her eyes are cloudy, and there is so much loving evil staring at you, gives me the chills even today.

DeimosRising
Oct 17, 2005

¡Hola SEA!


lizardman posted:

It really can't be over-emphasized: it was 1973. This was before Halloween, this was before Jaws, this was before The Shining, this was before Alien, this was before The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

I think it sells The Exorcist (and most movies) really short to ascribe their impact to novelty. The Exorcist is still good, regardless of what else I've seen. And there are a lot of gnarly films from before 1973, even if The Exorcist hit a much wider market, eventually, than they had.

david_a posted:

I've never really read any King but he sounds a lot like Philip K Dick in that regard. He comes up with cool concepts that sound great as a summary or a short story, but the long-form works usually leave something to be desired.

Stephen King is not very much like Philip Dick, at all. In his latter (and mostly better) period I'd say Dick is just the opposite of that. Unless you have a thing for psychedelia something like VALIS or Transmigration of Timothy Archer sounds retarded, but is actually fantastic.

Neo Rasa posted:

You mean someone like Richard Burton, George C. Scott, or Stellen Skarsgård? :D

The traditional structure of The Exorcist is definitely way too played out to work today. Remember parody movies like Repossessed were coming out in 1990 and even earlier.

Now, I do say that in a post Mad Max: Fury Road world, but Friedkin has no interest in doing another one, and I doubt Warner Bros./Morgan Creek/whoever is going to want to drop like $160 million or whatever on another potentially awful Exorcist follow up.

I dunno. It's still a pretty common structure. Virtually every possession movie uses it, and there's still a good one every two or three years. It's not too dissimilar to any given "descent into madness" movie, either.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

Christine has a fabulous soundtrack. That's all I got.

Are you talking about the book or the movie? The movie is bottom of the barrel Carpenter but it's still a lot of fun and it looks radical.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD
Sep 14, 2007

everything is yours
Talking about the movie. It might be Carpenter's best soundtrack.

Kull the Conqueror
Apr 8, 2006

Take me to the green valley,
lay the sod o'er me,
I'm a young cowboy,
I know I've done wrong
Christine has that one sick shot of the car riding down the highway ablaze and there's this brilliant low electronic hum serenading it. That's really all I remember.

Waroduce
Aug 5, 2008
My father is from a very small town in the mountains in Colombia. The Excorcist was the first movie he ever saw as his friends father owned a thearter in a city nearby and somehow got his hands on a copy. My dad was very young, 13 or 14 when he saw it and it scared the poo poo out of him. He didnt know if it was a documentary, if it was fake, or even what a movie was. They didnt even have tv. He said he would stay up all night and started going to church alot more.

chessmaster13
Jan 10, 2015

Waroduce posted:

My father is from a very small town in the mountains in Colombia. The Excorcist was the first movie he ever saw as his friends father owned a thearter in a city nearby and somehow got his hands on a copy. My dad was very young, 13 or 14 when he saw it and it scared the poo poo out of him. He didnt know if it was a documentary, if it was fake, or even what a movie was. They didnt even have tv. He said he would stay up all night and started going to church alot more.

Yes, the movie can leave a lasting impression on a young person, especially considering the circumstances your father grew up in.
I was 18 when I first saw the Exorcist and it still had a profound effect on me (I don't consider myself easily frightened by movies).
A real piece of art, probably to scary for today's audiences.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

BeanpolePeckerwood
May 4, 2004

I MAY LOOK LIKE SHIT BUT IM ALSO DUMB AS FUCK



Quote-Unquote posted:

I wish there was a cut of The Exorcist that had a few of the director's cut additions (like the first time Reagan is at the doctor's and is shown getting violent, and we see Captain Howdy 'waking up' in her, or the extra bit with Karras and Merrin talking in between the two 'rounds' of the exorcism which I think adds a fair bit to both characters) but not poo poo like Captain Howdy's face randomly appearing in fridges and extractor fans, and other pointless additions like a random shot of the house at the start.

Or, for that matter, the infamous spiderwalk scene which comes kind of out of nowhere and completely breaks the flow of the movie at that point. It's a cool looking scene - though the director's cut used the version where she vomits blood and the scene ends really abruptly; I much prefer the 'original' spiderwalk where she crawls at the mum and nanny while flicking her tongue. It looks a little goofy now but the music is loving brilliant, and the actual spiderwalk is slower and wayyyy more tense. Still makes no sense in the movie (it happens before any of the really major manifestations of the demon happen), because you'd think someone would, y'know, mention to a doctor that she was able to contort her body and run down the stairs upside down and then spew blood all over the place, especially considering how early on in the possession that it happens. Plus it completely takes away the impact of Burke's death.

The spiderwalk scene has no business being in the film proper, the director said as much and took it out for very specific reasons. It's a great outtake or dvd extra, and it's incredibly creepy on its own after watching the film or while watching a documentary (like as part of the doc/commentary included on the 30th anniversary edition, the best edition), but it completely fucks with the flow and continuity of an entire section of the film...and I'm talking mainly about "The Version You've Never Seen", which is everywhere now iirc.

  • Locked thread