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 54 (61). The Wicker Man (2006) Written and directed by Neil LaBute, Based on The Wicker Man by Anthony Shaffer and Ritual by David Pinner Watched on Tubi, available on Hoopla. Fran Challenges 13/13 Franchescanado posted:13. Horrible Holidays I began this challenge finally watching the original Wicker Man for May Day and loved it. And I immediately said I kinda wanted to see the remake even though I know its bad. And I hate watching like Christmas movies or whatever out of season. So why not finish this challenge with a May Day or Solstice holiday movie? I love symmetry. Pagan holidays count too. But man this was boring. It was so boring that its been like 10 hours since I finished it and I just have yet to come up with anything to say about it. I know there’s a lot of people who love Cage in this and his over the top performances in bad movies, but I found him boring as well. The film seems to make a crucial mistake of making him the hero where in the original he thinks he’s the hero but he’s always kind of befuddled and half a buffoon. He’s not the hero, he’s basically the victim of this town playing with him. That’s a lot of fun during the film and it pays off in a big way with the finale. But her Cage is just the basic, generic hero cop man with the love interest fawning over him and the villains being transparently villainous. That’s such a departure from Christopher Lee’s creepy but affable leader or the innkeeper’s daughter who is clearly messing with the cop. Its humorless and dull as Cage just bounces around his investigation until the finale. And when it does come its just kind of generic bad guy scheme instead of this culmination of a bizarre movie long game. And I just don’t care. The weirdest thing about this might be reading Cage quasi defend it and saying he wanted to remake it with some J-horror director as a ghost. And like… did anyone watch the original film? Its a poor idea, poor execution, poor understanding, poor performance. I didn’t laugh at it because it was so bad. I just waited for it to end and then felt too burned out afterwards to watch something else. But hey, at least I finished the challenge.  - (62). Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) Directed by Michael Curtiz, Screenplay by Don Mullaly and Carl Erickson, Based on "The Wax Works" by Charles S. Belden Watched on Svengoolie Svengoolie Episodes: 10/13 I’ve seen this and didn’t love it so I wasn’t really that excited for a rewatch. But this did provide something new as the copy I watched last time was kinda bad and this was a “painstakingly restored” copy. I guess this was one of the last films made in Technicolor and the studio just never held onto the negatives so there’s been flawed and half complete copies passing around over the years but this copy was put together with everything they had to get the best quality version. And you can definitely see the difference in the Technicolor. I don’t think I really like Technicolor but when the flames came on screen it was kind of amazing. The whole film has that weird kind of over bright pastel look, but man those flames looked amazing and so vivid. The most memorable part of this is how obvious it is that the wax models are people and how none of them can manage to stay still or not blink. I don’t blame them, I couldn’t either, but it seems like such a bad idea. But Svengoolie explains to me that it was a necessarily evil because the wax kept getting melted by the studio lights. It still calls into question the entire plan here but its an explanation that makes sense. Ultimately I think I enjoyed the film a bit more this time than the first time. Part of that was probably simply that I knew what to expect and wasn’t comparing it to the Vincent Price remake as I was the first time. Ultimately its just impossible to compete with the screen presence of Price and this version plays his role much softer than I remember. But Lionel Atwill does a solid job as the deranged bad guy. The star is still probably Glenda Farrell who’s fast talking, wise cracking, reporter/detective is really something very unexpected for the time and would be borderline progressive if it wasn’t for the lame ending of the film. But she’s fun and without her this film would probably be a real slog. And a slog is definitely what I was expecting coming into this rewatch but I was pleasantly surprised. I still didn’t love it and wouldn’t go out of my way to see it a third time but it was a much more enjoyable watch this time already helped by the changed expectations, technicolor presentation, and Svengoolie’s little notes and gags. I still don’t know if I’d recommend it but its a solid and fairly prominent part of horror history considering both its remakes are probably more seen and known even if just for the massive star power of Vincent Price and… Paris Hilton?  55 (63). The Shadow of the Cat (1961) Directed by John Gilling, Written by George Baxt Watched on Svengoolie Svengoolie Episodes: 11/13 When I saw that the premise of this film was a family of murder conspirators having to try and kill a cat because it was the sole witness to their crime I had two thoughts. (1) why do you have to kill the cat exactly? and (2) I guess this is gonna be a madcap comedy adventure. The film actually does an ok job of addressing that first one. Sort of. Over time it kind of gets to be that the conspirators are just kind of losing their minds because of the cat’s presence and it feels more like just projected guilt and paranoia. They all clearly start to break down mentally and only get worse as the cat starts knocking them off. Although its still not entirely clear why they were afraid of him BEFORE he went all vigilante on them. But as hilarious as that premise sounds weirdly this film just doesn’t seem to be a comedy at all. There’s some moments that are definitely funny, just through the sheer absurdity of the cat’s spy skills or the pure derangement of its hunters. The moment when they catch it is something really pretty amazing for how over the top happy they all are. But for the most part this movie plays this whole thing painfully straight. Maybe its just really, really dry british wit but a few scenes aside it just didn’t feel like intentional laughs, and even the arguably unintentional laughs pale compared to the scenes of straight mystery and conspiracy and investigation. Its kind of bizarre. Intentional or not, there’s definitely some charm in the humor of the film’s premise. Even if the film is playing it completely straight its hard not to smile a little when they’re seriously discussing whether the cat is carrying out revenge murders because it understands they’ve murdered its master. But its still kind of a rough watch. The very dry and serious plot of people talking about the killer cat or trying to convince others there’s a killer cat plus a very weird visual problem. Part of the film is shot in a kind of smushed up ratio as if you’ve accidently hit the Stretch button on your remote. This is meant to be the cat’s perspective because I guess cats have wide eyes or something? I dunno. But the rest of the film is shot in that kind of cheap TV way that soap operas look. You know, that thing modern TVs default to with the Auto Motion or whatever because apparently someone likes that? But I hate it and this film really looked like that so it was a tough watch at times. But you know… that might just be me. This felt like it should have been a lot of fun, and every once and awhile it showed glimpses of it. And it was nice to see Barbara Shelley because I’ve actually like never seen her in anything somehow. But that’s not a lot really. And this film feels longer than it really should be. Like even once the cat gets its revenge things just keep going. Might be better if you can connect with whatever the comedy wavelength this might have been working on but just never clicked for me. 🌻🎈Spook-A-Doodle Half-Way-To-Halloween ’21: Return of the Fallen & King Spring🎈🌻 King Spring: 10/13🎈Return of the Fallen: 9/13👻Fran Challenges: 13/13🐺Svengoolie: 11/13 Watched - New (Total) 1. Riding the Bullet (2004); 2. Cat’s Eye (1985); - (3). Vampires vs. the Bronx (2020); - (4). The Thing (1982); 3 (5). Sleep Tight (2011); - (6). Dark Shadows (2012); 4 (7). The Wicker Man (1973); 5 (8). Varan (1958); 6 (9). The Roost (2005); 7 (10). The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007); 8 (11). The Leech Woman (1960); 9 (12). Sometimes They Come Back (1991); 10 (13). Varan the Unbelievable (1962); 11 (14). 1922 (2017); 12 (15). What Keeps You Alive (2018); 13 (16). On the Silver Globe (1988); 14 (17). The Phantom of the Opera (1998); 15 (18). Nina Forever (2015); 16 (19). Area 51 (2015); 17 (20). Carrie (2002); 18 (21). The Stylist (2016)/Stucco (2019)/He Took His Skin Off for Me (2014)/Zygote (2017); 19 (22). Mark of the Vampire (1935); 20 (23). Tigers Are Not Afraid (2017); 21 (23). Death Walks on High Heels (1971); 22 (24). Maniac (1980); - (25). The Beast with Five Fingers (1946); - (26). Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954); 23 (27). Summer Camp (2015); 24 (28). Man Made Monster (1941); 25 (29). Earth vs. the Spider (1958); 26 (30). Vampyr (1932); 27 (31). The Black Scorpion (1957); 28 (32). The Wild Boys (2017); 29 (33). City of the Living Dead (1980); 30 (34). We Are What We Are (2010); 31 (35). Mercy (2014); 32 (36). Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest (2020); 33 (37). Cell (2016); 34 (38). Sightseers (2012); 35 (39). Trucks (1997); 36 (40). Dead Hooker in a Trunk (2009); 37 (41). BloodRayne (2005); 38 (42). Big Driver (2014); 39 (43). The Body Snatcher (1945); 40 (44). Run (2020); 41 (45). Paganini Horror (1989); 42 (46). Army of the Dead (2021); - (47). The Invisible Man (1933); 43 (48). Scanners (1981); - (49). The Invisible Man Returns (1940); 44 (50). PG: Psycho Goreman (2020); 45 (51). Kindred Spirits (2019); 46 (52). Daughters of Darkness (1971); 47 (53). Cropsey (2009); 48 (54). The Girl (2012); 49 (55). Mermaid Isle (2020); - (56). Hellboy (2004); 50 (57). The Field Guide to Evil (2018); 51 (58). Devil Doll (1964); 52 (59). The Thing That Couldn’t Die (1958); 53 (60). A Good Marriage (2014); 54 (61). The Wicker Man (2006); - (62). Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933); 55 (63). The Shadow of the Cat (1961);
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May 27, 2021 07:05
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8. Urban Legend (1998) Watched On: Tubi TV A college student suspects a series of bizarre deaths are connected to certain urban legends. After going through a nice streak of great 90's horror, Urban Legend was such a chore to get through. A horrible copy of more successful films that came before it with no characters worth attaching to for their demise to even matter to you. Everyone is just a mean rear end in a top hat or impossibly stupid. On top of that you get a terrible ending that probably confused a poo poo load of people in the theater. But drat if it didn't make money and there are two more of these with an announced remake down the pipe... I guess I should say something positive and it's that I do really like the idea of Urban Legend and the opening sequence featuring an appearance by Brad Dourif is pretty good.  9. Prom Night 2: Hello Mary Lou (1987)  Watched On: Shudder Thirty years after her accidental death at her 1957 senior prom, the tortured spirit of prom queen Mary Lou Maloney returns to seek revenge. While this is a poor sequel to the original Prom Night (since it wasn't a sequel to it at all), on it's own merits this movie is pretty good. Michael Ironside and Wendy Lyon are doing great work through the movie and I don't think it could have worked nearly as well without them on board. It's a shame there aren't more movies quite like this, with a spirit possessing a character and using an array of powers to do sweet kills that don't exactly have to make sense or be realistic. During the climax when Mary Lou returns at points her portrayal strikes a balance that I found attractive and repulsive at the same time and that's hard to nail down. 
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May 27, 2021 08:56
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10) The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) Although apart from the last ten minutes it's actually an adaptation of The Premature Burial. That's the problem with these Poe movies, I think. Poe was writing bite size portions of horror and there isn't enough to expand to a full movie. Matheson demonstrated just how great he was by creating any kind of watchable script. It also doesn't help that they're all so samey. It probably wouldn't have been apparent watching them a year or six months apart, but having seen four in a month it's very obvious. Pit even opens with the same oil light display as House of Usher. Price gives the same performance in every movie and it's feeling stale now; his mad torturer act at the end is a small change of pace, but it lacks the haughty superiority of a Phibes or a Lionheart. In fact if Theatre of Blood had been Vincent Price playing himself knocking off critics who had lambasted his performances in Corman's Poe movies, it wouldn't have been less believable.
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May 27, 2021 09:23
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15 Gretel and Hansel (2020) Oh, you know the general plot already. Slow-paced, moody, deliberately anachronistic. I really liked parts of it. The look is great, lots of coloured lights against deep blacks. The witch (Alice Krige) was fantastic, and quite well-written; she's able to balance the predatory and motherly sides of the character without either one feeling false. The movie also does a good job of making her look subtly unearthly; they do the same trick as the Hannibal TV show, with the lights reflected in her eyes. I thought it was too slow, and some of the anachronisms (like the language, and the grab-bag of accents) fell flat for me. I disliked the clean, sharp-edged costumes at first, but ultimately they fit in with the overall look of the movie quite well.  /516 The Vvitch (2015) No screenshot due to Netflix Another rewatch. I didn't plan it as a double-feature with G&H, just happened to watch it the following night. A girl and her family somewhere in colonial New England are exiled to a farm deep in the woods, where they're plagued by supernatural misfortune. Witch-paranoia in early America, in my mind, is a thing that happens in villages, between neighbours who don't trust each other and so on. By setting this in an isolated farm, with no characters except the family and the witches who are actually real, it encourages the viewer to focus on relationships between characters. Like it's not a madness-of-crowds thing, because there isn't a crowd; the fear and distrust is very personal. The mother, Kate, is the main force in persecuting her daughter Tomasin (the suspected witch). The main thing that stood out in the rewatch was the question of how sincere she was in this belief; while there are signs she is acting out of personal vindictiveness (the whole subplot with her missing cup), I think the movie ultimately frames her as genuine in her belief, and struggling against severe hardship and trauma. Which is its own condemnation, since it makes her so uncharitable towards someone else afflicted with the exact same things, but her religion is not a mere excuse; it's the core of her worldview. After bitching about anachronistic language in the last movie I have to admit I used subtitles for this one. I don't understand how people said things like "t'other". The word "the" doesn't have a T sound in it, it makes no sense as slang. /517 Antiviral (2012)  A salesman of celebrity viruses becomes snared in a conspiracy when one of his firm's top-sellers dies, and the price of her merchandise explodes. A deeply gross, nasty movie, in which celebrity culture is exaggerated to the point of people eating steaks of vat-grown meat taken from actors, or infecting themselves with samples of viruses harvested from the famous. There are some neat sci-fi touches; I especially liked the design console that outputs data as a distorted human face, relying on the human ability to interpret faces and expressions to rapidly convey information. Towards the end I found it hard to follow; the technology they're talking about is bizarre enough, and now the movie is introducing some scheme to make it more profitable? Anyway, I didn't think much of the plot, but the ideas in it, and the grubby, sweaty discomfort of people in it, left an impression. Possessor worked better as a movie, though. /5
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May 27, 2021 09:29
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 #25. A Quiet Place (YouTube TV) After blind aliens who hunt by sound devastate the world, a family who has learned to live in silence tries to survive. This was fine, but there was a level of detachment that I felt toward the whole thing that I wasn't expecting going in, and I'm not quite sure if I can pinpoint what it was, exactly. Maybe it's the simple fact that there's only so many times you can see everyone freeze up with tense looks on their faces at any sound being made before you just get bored of the repetition? Maybe it's the goofy and clunky way that information is conveyed visually in this film? (These things lasted long enough for multiple weeks' worth of very loud newspaper printing presses to get word out about what's going on and the fact that these things are sound-based hunters, but somehow no one ever worked out their weaknesses before? To that point, who cared about printed media in 2018, when this movie was made, let alone the "in the near future" 2020 that it supposedly takes place in?) Maybe it's just the monster designs themselves? I don't care how quick or armored these Cloverfield-looking things are, I refuse to believe that no one had ever figured out that 1) if they're sound-based hunters that you could overwhelm them with high frequencies or 2) that creatures that have to open up their head armor to expose their fleshy auditory bits don't have an easily exploitable weakness that any army would have been able to figure out and use to fight back. The film is dumb while imagining itself to be clever, and that always ends up being an off-putting feeling. It's saved from its worst tendencies by a very game cast, especially Emily Blunt and Millicent Simmonds as the mother-daughter pair. And I guess the nature cinematography is nice enough. I was put on the back foot by the dumb and overly mawkish child death in the beginning, but the film threatened at times to rally and maybe turn into something good. Alas, it never did quite get there.  /5Watched so far: The Curse of the Cat People, Freaky, Vampires vs the Bronx, Rawhead Rex, Tarantula, In Search of Darkness, Ginger Snaps (rewatch), In Search of Darkness Part II (FC #10), Mother's Day (2010) (FC #7), Scream, Queen! (FC #9), House of Wax (1953) (FC #2), Vampire in Venice (FC #8), Possessor, Mandy, various shorts (FC #1), Saw (rewatch) (FC #6), Southbound (FC #12), Wendigo (FC #11), Stage Fright (2014) (FC #3), Tigers Are Not Afraid (FC #5), Psycho Goreman, Spiral, Vampyr (FC #4), Black Christmas (2019) (FC #13), A Quiet Place
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May 27, 2021 15:51
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 We Are What We Are(Fran Challenge: Cinco) This is apparently like a spiritual sequel to Cronos? Or is it really? I dunno I'm a bit confused about that, my sense from watching it is that they cast the guy from Cronos as more of an easter egg than anything really meaningful. But I only saw Cronos once several years ago so maybe there are some thematic connections here that I'm not seeing other than the obvious similarities between vampires and cannibals. The thing that stood out to me in We Are What We Are was the family dynamic. The family's patriarch dies in the opening scene, and so they're left to fend for themselves, which would be difficult for any family. Of course, it's even more difficult for this family because the father was the one in charge of obtaining the "meat" for their cannibal rituals. So there's a compelling power struggle that goes on where you're not sure exactly who's calling the shots, and whether they're going to stay together as a family with the increasing pressure of committing horrific murders to fuel the ritual. There are some genuinely disturbing scenes, although the film is actually not as graphically violent as you might expect. It builds to an appropriately intense climax and a nice and creepy ending. I can't say it blew my mind or that the movie is a masterpiece, but it does what it sets out to do very well and I'm glad I watched it.  Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde(Fran Challenge: Scream Queen) Found this on several lists of important LGBTQ films and I can see why, although of course it was made in 1971 so it's not exactly the most enlightened approach to the subject matter. But still, it's a surprising film in that it really does examine the experience of Jekyll as he starts to enjoy and then even prefer his female identity. Of course, he has to commit murders to keep the experiment going, and those murders are exclusively of young women, but the message is a bit muddled there I suppose. There's also a lecherous male gaze character who creepily stares at every attractive woman he encounters, and he finds Sister Hyde to be particularly alluring. So we can see here that the movie's thesis is that gender is truly a fluid thing, the creepy toxic masculinity dude doesn't somehow "sense" that there's something off about Sister Hyde, all he sees is a beautiful woman and he doesn't realize anything is amiss because there really isn't. She's actually a woman. The big thing that's tough to get around is that Sister Hyde is a murderous psycho. Obviously that trope has a long history in film that has been very damaging and so like I said, this is a mixed bag but I can definitely see why it's seen as a queer film. The very concept of gender fluidity is something that I wouldn't expect to see in a Hammer film from the early 70s, let alone as the core concept of the entire movie. 1. The Leopard Man 2. The Curse of Frankenstein 3. The Old Dark House(Fran Challenge: Sometimes They Come Back) 4. The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb 5. Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3 6. Mother's Day(Fran Challenge: Mother's Day) 7. Madman(Fran Challenge: Camp Blood) 8. The Legend of Boggy Creek(Fran Challenge: Myths & Legends) 9. Smoke and Mirrors: The Story of Tom Savini(Fran Challenge: Behind the Mask) 10. Nightbreed(Fran Challenge: Playing with Power) 11. Fear(s) of the Dark(Fran Challenge: Cavalcade of Creepiness) 12. Witchboard(Fran Challenge: Dead and Buried) 13. Punishment Park(Fran Challenge: MotM) 14. The Being(Fran Challenge: Horrible Holidays) 15. We Are What We Are(Fran Challenge: Cinco) 16. Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde(Fran Challenge: Scream Queen)
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May 27, 2021 16:37
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 31. SCREAM  Woohoo 31 movies! I initially went for 13 but was able to meet a 31 movie challenge. I decided to pick a classic as my final movie and went with Wes Craven's Scream ( originally was going to be titled Scary Movie. Overall I really liked this on a rewatch. Its a well directed , well acted movie. I don't get what people say about this being a "meta" movie because its only self awareness is that everyone in the movie apparently is a huge horror fan. Also a lot of the motivation behind the mystery doesn't make a lot of sense. Its not particularly gory either. Its just a really well done horror movie. I always enjoyed the twist of it being two killers but the killers motivation doesn't really make a lot of sense and the killings are rather random still it rejuvanated the horror genre at that point and was a huge hit. Anyway its a great horror movie despite its flaws. Final Move Break Down: 1. Fright Night (1985) Fran Challenge Playing with Power 2. Fright Night Part 2 (1988) 3. Night of the Creeps (1986) 4. Return of the Living Dead (1985) 5. Return of the Living Dead Part 2 (1988) 6. C.H.U.D. 2 , Bud the Chud 7. From Beyond (1986) 8. An American Werewolf in London (1981) 9. Beetlejuice ( 1988 ) 10. The Blob (1988) 11. Arachnophobia 12. Army of Darkness 13. Gremlins, Horror Fran Challenge 13. Horrible Holidays 14. Gremlins 2 15. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) 16. Van Helsing 17. Interview with a Vampire 18. Bram Stokers Dracula 19. Ed Wood Fran Challenge 10. Behind the Mask 20. The Mummy (2017) Fran Challenge 2. Sometimes They Come Back 21. Warlock Fran Challenge 11. Myths & Legends 22. The Hunger Fran Challenge 9. Scream, Queen! 23. Psycho (1960) Fran Challenge 7. Mother's Day 24. Army of the Dead 2021 25. Frankenstein and Monster from Hell Fran Challenge Dead and Buried 26. The Monster Squad Fran Challenge : Movie of the Month 27. The Final Girls Fran Challenge Summer Camp 28. Critters 2 29. Tales From the Crypt (1972 ) Fran Challenge 12. Cavalcade of Creepiness 30. El Vampiro Fran Challenge Cinco 31 . The Resurrected (1991) 32. SCREAM Whoops, looks like I miscounted and I actually am at 32 horror movies and not 31! Hollismason fucked around with this message at 17:31 on May 27, 2021 |
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May 27, 2021 17:02
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 All challenges done! And I'm well past my goal of 31... I may slow down a little but I'll watch a few more films before the end of the month for sure. 34. Targets (1968) dir. Peter Bogdanovich Amazon Boris Karloff stars as Byron Orlok, an aging horror film star (literally himself but with a different name, as clips from Karloff's actual films are used throughout) who decides he is tired of acting and wants to retire. His brand of horror - gothic castles and spooky monsters - just can't compete with the real-life horrors of violence and terrorism that fill the newspapers. Meanwhile, a young man named Bobby shoots his wife and mother and then goes on a killing spree with the intention of killing as many people as possible before the police catch him. Using a sniper rifle, he terrorizes the audience at a drive-in theater where Orlok is set to make a public appearance. This was really great! I love Boris Karloff in everything, and his performance here is excellent. The film is frighteningly prescient too. I guess I sort of think of mass shooting as a relatively recent thing in American life, and they are certainly more prevalent now, but even in the '60s they were on the public's mind. Bobby in this film is based on an actual mass shooter that killed 15 people in 1966. It's depressing how much worse things have gotten since then. Highly recommended, especially if you love Karloff as much as I do. 4.5 Karloffs out of 5  Fran Challenge #10. Behind the Mask35. Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist (2019) dir. Alexandre O. Philippe Shudder This documentary about The Exorcist is really just an extended interview with William Friedkin where he talks about the film and about his approach to filmmaking in general. He shares a lot of interesting behind the scenes info, and his passion for film and art and music really shows through. If you're a fan of The Exorcist I give this a strong recommendation, and even if you aren't completely wild about that film I think he still shares enough interesting insights to make this worth watching. 4 actual priests getting punched in the face out of 5 Edgar Wright's Top 100 Horror: 99/100 Slant Top 100 Horror: 98/100 TSZDT 2020: 678/1000 Total: 35 Watched: White Zombie | M | Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter | The Demoniacs | The Addiction | The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) | The Queen of Black Magic (2019) (FC#2) | Warlock | Prince of Darkness | A Record of Sweet Murder | The Neon Demon | The Day of the Beast (FC#13) | The Devil Rides Out | The Taking of Deborah Logan (FC#7) | Short films (FC#1) | Don't Panic (FC#5) | The Hitcher | Resident Evil: Retribution (FC#6) | Saint Maud | Stranger by the Lake (FC#9) | Frenzy | Spirits of the Dead (FC#12) | Spiral: From the Book of Saw | The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire | Madman (FC#3) | Dream Demon | Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde (FC#4) | Wolf (FC#8) | The Last Broadcast | Army of the Dead | Who Can Kill a Child? | The Shining | Demon (FC#11) | Targets | Leap of Faith (FC#10) Fran Challenges:
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May 27, 2021 21:34
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Chris James 2 posted:Yeah, I heard good things. It's on Tubi, I might watch it tomorrow or later in the week Done  24. The Unholy (1988)  Tubi, Vudu Free, Plex, Roku Channel, Hoopla A priest disbelieving in the devil hears of and witnesses increasingly-strange occurrences that lack any other possible explanation. An entrancing good vs evil climactic battle complete with a memorable nightmare sequence is the standout and justifies the watch. Just wish it didn't feel a bit slow to get there. For the first half the freakiest thing I saw was Alan from Boy Meets World with bleached hair Also gotta give a quick thanks to whoever was responsible for the bargain-bin-budget affordable DVD boxset this is on along with Waxwork, Chopping Mall, Slaughter High, Class of 99, CHUD 2, Ghoulies 3 and 976EVIL2. The Unholy (1988) was the last one I hadn't watched and I'm glad I finally got around to it *** 24/13 (The New York Ripper, Gwen, Sleepless Beauty, The Head Hunter, 13: Game of Death, Deerskin, Curve, The Incredible Melting Man, Starry Eyes, Eyes Without a Face, In the Earth, Macabre 1958, Macabre 1980, Oxygen 2021, The Djinn 2021, Wer, Spiral: From the Book of Saw, Moonstalker, Army of the Dead 2021, The Retreat 2021, Held 2021, Tooth Fairy: The Last Extraction, The Unholy 2021, The Unholy 1988)
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May 28, 2021 04:03
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I'm a big fan of The Unholy ( 1988) but it does meander a bit in the middle but that ending is worth the wait imo.
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May 28, 2021 04:20
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#30 Skull: The Mask Kapel Furman, Armando Fonseca, 2020  A goopy, gory, stylish demonic slasher from Brazil. I had a lot of fun with this. The story is a tad convoluted (the main character probably didn't even need to be written into the script), but the nutso practical gore effects and psychedelic demonic imagery more than make up for that. Good times all around. I'd love to see a sequel! 4/5 #31 The Invisible Man Leigh Whannell, 2020  What business does a horror flick about a dude with invisibility have being this intelligently written? It's tight, clever and tense. I love how Adrian is a fully fleshed out character despite us barely even seeing him until the final act. He's an unseen yet clearly defined menace throughout the film's runtime. All the actors do a great job, especially Elisabeth Moss. This is how you take an inherently schlocky premise and turn it into serious cinema. It totally surpassed my expectations. 4.5/5 31 Films watched: 1. Witchfinder General (1968), 2. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), 3. The Devil Rides Out (1968), 4. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), 5. Who Can Kill a Child? (1976), 6. The Raven (1935), 7. A Bucket of Blood (1959), 8. The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), 9. Hunter Hunter (2020), 10. Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971), 11. Prince of Darkness (1987), 12. What We Do in the Shadows (2014), 13. The Devil's Advocate, 14. Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), 15. Madman (1981), 16. The House That Dripped Blood (1971), 17. The Evil Dead (1981), 18. Alligator (1980), 19. The Terror Within II (1991), 20. Homicidal (1961), 21. El Vampiro (1957), 22. Cure (1997), 23. West of Zanzibar (1928), 24. 29 Needles (2019), 25. The Reckoning (2020), 26. Alucarda (1977), 27. Demonia (1990), 28. Resident Evil (2002), 29. School of the Holy Beast (1974), 30. Skull: The Mask (2020), 31. The Invisible Man (2020) 11/13 Fran Challenges completed: 2. Sometimes They Come Back, 3. Camp BLOOD, 4. Movie of the Month, 5. Cinco, 6. Playing With Power, 7. Mother's Day, 8. Dead & Buried, 9. Scream, Queen!, 10. Behind the Mask, 11. Myths & Legends, 12. Cavalcade of Creepiness
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May 28, 2021 04:45
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10. The Woods (2006) Watched On: Tubi TV Set in 1965 New England, a troubled girl encounters mysterious happenings in the woods surrounding an isolated girls school that she was sent to by her disinterested parents. Well I honestly didn't expect to find such a decent little folk horror movie in this challenge but The Woods had my attention. A bit of a cross between The Wicker Man and Suspiria where a boarding school of young women is menaced by mysterious forces in the trees. A few bits of CGI or shaky and the movie does sag just a little at points but the cast is putting in good work and The Woods has good atmosphere and an earthy range of colors that looks really nice on screen. You also get some good doses of Bruce Campbell and you can't hate that. 
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May 28, 2021 05:42
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Franchescanado posted:12. Cavalcade of Creepiness  23) The Uncanny - TubiTV - 1977 I can't remember if I've seen this one before. If I did, it's been at least 30+ years since I sat through it. Anyways, this anthology's all about cats. The wraparound is an author who's convinced cats are supernatural creatures of eeeeevil, and the individual stories are his proof about cats. We have the tale of the wealthy woman leaving her fortune to her kitties, and is murdered so her nephew inherits. The kitties, of course, protect their inheritance. There's the actor who murders his actress wife so his mistress can get the primo role, they also try to kill the wife's cat but do kill the cat's kittens. The wronged kittie gets due revenge. Then there's the orphaned girl who has to move in with relatives who make her get rid of her cat. She gets payback. Overall, this feels like a Tigon/Hammer/Amicus anthology, but was from a different studio altogether. I liked it. And since Herbert-cat watched this with me, his review is "Mroor maow maar."
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May 28, 2021 06:19
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 56 (64). Nightmare Detective (2006) Written and directed by Shinya Tsukamoto Watched on Dailymotion What do get when you mash up Inception with A Nightmare on Elm Street with The Silence of the Lambs and Se7en? A bit of a mess. I saw a lot of bad reviews for this and a lot of good ones and I find myself firmly in the middle. I didn't hate it and there were some solid or interest elements but ultimately it never came together for me. I just could never get on the film's vibe or tone. The first half feels overly procedural as a cop movie without all the usual tropes but with a supernatural slant. I kinda liked the spin of putting a young woman in the cliche position of the inexperienced young blue chipper but Hitomi gives a kind of cold performance? I guess you can chalk that up to her basic characterization as being socially awkward but apparently she's also a singer and this is the only film on her resume? So its possible giving the lead role to an amateur was just a tactical mistake. I wouldn't say she was bad or anything, but I also wouldn't say she had the necessary skill or energy for the character focused role. And I'm not sure the script did her any favors as it really didn't flesh out any of the characters beyond one sentence descriptions. The story didn't confuse or lose me but I found that in the second half the film itself did. Visually I just started to get lost and was never entirely sure what I was seeing. I basically understood what it was supposed to be, but I dunno... I know some people genuinely like this feeling. I personally have a low tolerance for disorientation as an enjoyable experience. Used sparingly within a narrative or in short bursts I can appreciate it, but over a long haul it just tends to lose me if not actively annoy me. It didn't get that far here but I just found myself very disengaged from the film and story. I knew (roughly) what was happening but just didn't really care. Its not terrible but it feels a little cheap, pretty thin, and very chaotic. Again, some people like chaotic. Tsukamoto seems to do chaotic. But I dunno. Not my thing.  57 (65). The Beast Must Die (1974) Directed by Paul Annett, Written by Michael Winder, Based on a short story by James Blish Watched on Svengoolie Svengoolie Episodes: 12/13 Werewolf whodunnit with Peter Cushing. Gotta be some fun? Cushing’s not really that big a part of it, which feels like a bit of waste 50 years later but I get the sense that he’s there in the 70s as a cute little bit of casting. Te focus of the film is on Calvin Lockhart and the basic question of whether or not he’s gone fully mad. Lockhart’s pretty good in the role, in his head some kind of great hero and werewolf hunter (with Cushing very cutely serving as the older expert he checks in with on details) or if he’s the deranged psycho who has just kidnapped all these people to terrorize them because of some crazy conspiracy theory. I wish the film had focused more on his wife’s side of that. The curious situation of finding yourself host to your husband’s rich white people kidnapping and potential execution. Lots of feelings there and I wish they had really focused more in on that, especially since she’s played by Marlene Clark of Ganja & Hess. Poor Ganja. Married to a vampire and a werewolf. Although sadly the director appeared to have so little faith in her that he dubbed her voice with some white lady. That sucked. The film’s whodunit aspect didn’t feel like it really left a lot. Admittedly I started to doze off a bit at one point but the film throws a lot of red herrings and twists in. I did basically guess it because (a) I was anticipating the twist and (b) the one actual combo of clue droppings left one suspect. But I’ve never really cared for the whodunit thing. I really rather just go along for the ride and be surprised than to have some silly sense of smugness that I guessed a movie mystery. And this film really kind of silly focuses on it with a “werewolf break” where i guess you want the whole theater yelling out guesses. I guess that’s no real different than the kind of charming little stunts William Castle would throw into stuff but it didn’t feel like it fit the rest of the very self serious film. All in all in wasn’t a bad film really, definitely something a little different and its fun to see some black leads, even if one of them got all half erased. It feels like a solid matinee or B horror watch if you’re just chilling and prepping for the main event. But I don’t know if I’d really recommend it for anyone to go out of their way for. Also their werewolf is just a regular wolf so booo.  58 (66). The Undead (1957) Directed by Roger Corman, Written by Charles B. Griffith and Mark Hanna Watched on Svengoolie Svengoolie Episodes: 13/13 Well a really lovely “I’m gonna hypnotize a sex worker without telling her why to conduct my experiment because her kind are the most weak willed and easily influential people” premise really started things off on a sour note. But its Roger Corman so that somehow sends us into a world of sexy witches, evil imps, knights, ugly witches, really cheap prop animal transformations, time travel, sexy demonic grave dancers, and Dick Miller waiting on line to sell his soul to Satan. Its all a lot of fun in doses but I’m not sure it fully comes together. Corman doesn’t really lean into the camp fully, or he does but he also focuses a lot on this romance and kind of basic familiar story the rest of the wackiness is built around. The star divided romance might have been the necessary core to build around but I just kind of glossed out when it was on screen. And the silliness just kind of felt more unintentionally cheap or poorly done as a result since it just never went full camp. I did have a good time with a lot of it, and I’m glad that crappy misogynistic doctor’s story went the way I was hoping it was. There was a wicked and fun sense of humor at times and maybe the whole thing just played a bit too dry. A more dynamic cast might have been able to deliver this a little stronger although Allison Hayes is mesmerizing as the gorgeous seductive evil witch and it turns out her evil little friend was the voice of Figment the Imagination Dragon. You may not know who that is but its like my favorite childhood thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ON1ZXeKOGc Its not a great film and it doesn’t fully pull all its parts together. But it does have a lot of fun parts. Roger Corman s good that way and there’s lots of tastes of him in here. But pretty early in his run, no Vincent Price, not one of his big ones, kind of visibly cheap. And a hell of a poster. Its not one you really HAVE to go out and see but its pretty unique so its not really a bad little watch for big horror fans. You go in knowing its a cheap, maybe unintentionally campy, early Corman snarky fairy tale and you should have an idea of what you’re getting. And a little guest tribute to our friend. https://imgur.com/j4YNjww  Finished Svengoolie Challenge. Finished Fran Challenge. Got 4 days for 7 films to complete my main two. Could get real tight. 🌻🎈Spook-A-Doodle Half-Way-To-Halloween ’21: Return of the Fallen & King Spring🎈🌻 King Spring: 10/13🎈Return of the Fallen: 9/13👻Fran Challenges: 13/13🐺Svengoolie: 13/13 Watched - New (Total) 1. Riding the Bullet (2004); 2. Cat’s Eye (1985); - (3). Vampires vs. the Bronx (2020); - (4). The Thing (1982); 3 (5). Sleep Tight (2011); - (6). Dark Shadows (2012); 4 (7). The Wicker Man (1973); 5 (8). Varan (1958); 6 (9). The Roost (2005); 7 (10). The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007); 8 (11). The Leech Woman (1960); 9 (12). Sometimes They Come Back (1991); 10 (13). Varan the Unbelievable (1962); 11 (14). 1922 (2017); 12 (15). What Keeps You Alive (2018); 13 (16). On the Silver Globe (1988); 14 (17). The Phantom of the Opera (1998); 15 (18). Nina Forever (2015); 16 (19). Area 51 (2015); 17 (20). Carrie (2002); 18 (21). The Stylist (2016)/Stucco (2019)/He Took His Skin Off for Me (2014)/Zygote (2017); 19 (22). Mark of the Vampire (1935); 20 (23). Tigers Are Not Afraid (2017); 21 (23). Death Walks on High Heels (1971); 22 (24). Maniac (1980); - (25). The Beast with Five Fingers (1946); - (26). Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954); 23 (27). Summer Camp (2015); 24 (28). Man Made Monster (1941); 25 (29). Earth vs. the Spider (1958); 26 (30). Vampyr (1932); 27 (31). The Black Scorpion (1957); 28 (32). The Wild Boys (2017); 29 (33). City of the Living Dead (1980); 30 (34). We Are What We Are (2010); 31 (35). Mercy (2014); 32 (36). Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest (2020); 33 (37). Cell (2016); 34 (38). Sightseers (2012); 35 (39). Trucks (1997); 36 (40). Dead Hooker in a Trunk (2009); 37 (41). BloodRayne (2005); 38 (42). Big Driver (2014); 39 (43). The Body Snatcher (1945); 40 (44). Run (2020); 41 (45). Paganini Horror (1989); 42 (46). Army of the Dead (2021); - (47). The Invisible Man (1933); 43 (48). Scanners (1981); - (49). The Invisible Man Returns (1940); 44 (50). PG: Psycho Goreman (2020); 45 (51). Kindred Spirits (2019); 46 (52). Daughters of Darkness (1971); 47 (53). Cropsey (2009); 48 (54). The Girl (2012); 49 (55). Mermaid Isle (2020); - (56). Hellboy (2004); 50 (57). The Field Guide to Evil (2018); 51 (58). Devil Doll (1964); 52 (59). The Thing That Couldn’t Die (1958); 53 (60). A Good Marriage (2014); 54 (61). The Wicker Man (2006); - (62). Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933); 55 (63). The Shadow of the Cat (1961); 56 (64). Nightmare Detective (2006); 57 (65). The Beast Must Die (1974); 58 (66). The Undead (1957); STAC Goat fucked around with this message at 06:28 on May 28, 2021 |
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May 28, 2021 06:20
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27. Basket Case (1982) Frank Henenlotter is probably my favourite genre filmmaker who would be absolutely horrible with a real budget. Flourishes in grime. Belial trashing that hotel room gives Charles Foster Kane a run for his money. /5
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May 28, 2021 14:35
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 #26. Lifechanger (Showtime) An aging shapeshifter drains the life essences of people to sustain his own, taking their forms and memories while leaving them dried husks. He does this in order to get closer to the woman he fell in love with using a previous body. Did anyone see that romantic fantasy miniseries (? I thought it was a movie when I saw it advertised) The Beauty Inside, where everyday a character played by Topher Grace's voice wakes up in a different person's body for one day, but he's fallen in love with a woman and so these different faces keep trying to meet her again? This is basically the horror movie version of that - less "Quantum Leap into a person for a day," more "drain them until they're a husk, then use their stolen face to chop up and burn the remains so no one can catch on to what's happening." Andrew, the off-screen voice stand-in for a character we don't meet until the end, thinks of this all as pure survival, but there's a cold, dispassionate remove that permeates all of the various bodies that he inhabits throughout the movie; young, old, male, female, doesn't matter, everyone basically plays it as a serial killer outside of interacting with one woman, Julia, who Andrew claims to love but maybe is just fixated on. That remove ends up being a double-edged sword. There's an undeniable creepiness to the ease with which Andrew lets himself into people's lives and ingratiates himself to others; the tensest scene in the whole film is one where he poses as an unhappily married dentist, obviously bored and disgusted with family dinner, the camera lingering on a knife with the young daughter out of focus in the near background. However, that remove also makes Andrew an obvious antihero at best, basically the antagonist of his own story, so it makes it near impossible to root for him to actually be happy or be able to confess the truth of what he is to Julia. Also, I think the movie has at least two endings too many. It gets to a point that's obvious to call from the midpoint - he ends up accidentally consuming Julia and stealing her form, destroying the woman he thinks he loves, ruining his one chance at happiness, however fleeting, and dooming her body to the consuming rot that has been forcing him to exchange faces so frequently throughout the movie- but then it keeps going from there. You'd think that watching the rot finally consume Andrew, as a final act of self-destructive acceptance of his unhappiness and a way to stop this chain of action might be a tad excessive, but it would also make sense. But then the real Andrew emerges from some kind of biological cocoon as an old man to wax American Psycho-style philosophical about the emptiness of identity and then I have to kind of roll my eyes, because this was not as interesting a place to end as about 5 minutes ago. I dunno - the film is put together well enough, and the cast of rotating faces is game to play one character stretched across 6 people. But there's not a lot of meat there for them to play with, and it makes the film's underlying doomed romance conceit feel hollow; the film asks you to root for Andrew like he's the Frank Langella Dracula, the tortured Romantic with a love he cannot truly have, not realizing that he's really Henry Lee Lucas, dispassionate psychopath occasionally making overtures towards love, as if it's something he feels he should pursue but doesn't really understand. That extended ending also really damages the film, in my opinion, as it drags the resolution out past the natural seeming end point to try and recontextualize the film in a way that it doesn't earn or even really benefit from. Chop down the last 5 minutes or so and you'd have an interesting treatise on identity that would be a great double-feature with something like Possessor; as it is, it's an interesting but flawed film that whiffs the landing badly enough to consume the whole thing. Which I guess could still be ironically appropriate. /5Watched so far: The Curse of the Cat People, Freaky, Vampires vs the Bronx, Rawhead Rex, Tarantula, In Search of Darkness, Ginger Snaps (rewatch), In Search of Darkness Part II (FC #10), Mother's Day (2010) (FC #7), Scream, Queen! (FC #9), House of Wax (1953) (FC #2), Vampire in Venice (FC #8), Possessor, Mandy, various shorts (FC #1), Saw (rewatch) (FC #6), Southbound (FC #12), Wendigo (FC #11), Stage Fright (2014) (FC #3), Tigers Are Not Afraid (FC #5), Psycho Goreman, Spiral, Vampyr (FC #4), Black Christmas (2019) (FC #13), A Quiet Place, Lifechanger
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May 28, 2021 16:21
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 39. Night of the Comet (Thom Eberhardt, 1984) Imagine waking up one day and just about everybody is dead. Not just dead, but turned to dust (thank goodness - less cleanup and disease). In this film Earth is going to pass through the tail of the same comet that showed up when the dinosaurs got bopped, so naturally everyone wants to have a big party (a la the rooftop fools in Independence Day). They're pretty much all vaporized (leaving hilarious piles of clothes behind). Some of those who didn't die have become goofy looking zombies(?). Two sisters, Reggie and Sam, are among the only non-mutated humans left the following morning, as they both slept in steel-lined rooms/buildings. I expect this to be a typical zombie movie but it's more interesting than that - yes, there is a montage of the girls looting the mall to Cyndi Lauper, but there's a lot of ruminating on the point of existence as well. It also looks amazing - everything has this red and orange tint because of the comet. It's not perfect, but it was better than I expected by a miracle mile. 4/5 40. I Saw What You Did (William Castle, 1965) I watched this for the Bracketology Tournament thread. This one didn't do much for me. A few girls spend an evening making prank calls, typically telling the person on the other hand that "I saw what you did, and I know who you are". At the beginning they prank guys named William Harrison and John Adams - presidential pranks! Eventually they call a man who just finished murdering his wife, and he now thinks he'll need to track them down and silence them. It felt very rote and none of the performances stood out. Not much tension (except maybe in the last ten minutes) and this is exacerbated by the score, which is so goofy and light it sounds like an episode of Leave it to Beaver. It's also devoid of any fun William Castle gimmicks. 2/5Challenge Count: 40/31 TSZDT Challenge: 100/100 Indiewire Challenge: 50/50
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May 28, 2021 21:15
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31) The Dark and the Wicked (2020) This is an intensely powerful film. It would make a great double billing with something like Hereditary, where the real horror is the family dynamic, and it's expressed through the medium of "spooky horror stuff". There are some genuinely upsetting scenes here. I loved it. 4/5 And with that I've completed all 31 movies and all 13 Fran Challenges! Final Total: 31 1. Crawl (2019) / 2. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) (FC1) / 3. Vampyr (1932) / 4. I Walked With A Zombie (1943) / 5. Kwaidan (1964) (FC12) / 6. Vampyres (1975) (FC9) / 7. The Howling (1981) / 8. Torso (1973) / 9. Frankenhooker (1990) / 10. Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore (2010) (FC10) / 11. Them (Ils) (2006) / 12. Nina Forever (2015) / 13. Aliens (1986) / 14. The Cremator (1969) (FC4) / 15. Saw IV (2007) / 16. Dark Skies (2013) / 17. The McPherson Tape (1989) / 18. Saw (2004) (FC6) / 19. Mother's Day (1980) (FC7) / 20. The Lure (2015) (FC11) / 21. Belzebuth (2017) (FC5) / 22. The House That Jack Built (2018) / 23. Thankskilling (2008) (FC13) / 24. House of Wax (2005) (FC2) / 25. Sleepaway Camp (1983) (FC3) / 26. Army of the Dead (2021) / 27. Shorts / 28. Gretel & Hansel (2020) / 29. Inferno (1980) (FC8) / 30. Bride of Re-Animator (1990) / 31. The Dark and the Wicked (2020) Fran Challenges - DONE!
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May 28, 2021 23:14
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Well, that's that. 13 Movies, including 13 challenges complete! Thanks to everyone for your reviews - you've added several things to my watch list going forward, and thanks to Fran for the challenges, which always lead me to something I wouldn't have watched otherwise. Fran Challenge 11.) Myths & Legends The Lure (Watched on Amazon via Rental)  Seeing this so strongly praised in the thread pushed it onto the roster. Very quirky, visually striking, and with a great soundtrack. This runs toward the magical realism vein, with events unfolding in a timeless and weightless world, one anchored by emotional and sensory impressions. It occupies a weird place - not particularly horrific, too strange to really place on the roster of "put this on in the background at events", and so on. Lure's more of an experience - it's unique, though for comparison my partner and I were thinking of in terms of things like Lo and Inhuman Kiss - both for the romantic content and for tone and storytelling. Definitely check it out if you have a chance. Fran Challenge 12.) Cavalcade of Creepiness Scare Package (Watched on Amazon Prime via Shudder)  The last time I watched an anthology, it was also for a Fran Challenge. I'm not sure why - I enjoy short horror, but most anthologies seem to have weak or actively terrible segments drag the whole thing down. This is "an anthology, but all of the shorts are trying to be the quirky, self-referential one". I honestly think the quality of the segments is about even, with no standout hits or awful misses. That said, the unfortunate issue is that the consistent level here is just too low. You get a lot of horror-comedy shorts, and none of them end up being particularly inventive or rising above "kinda funny." (Although, writing this out, it occurs to me that this would be perfectly adequate cut up to serve as intermission bits in, like, a hosted TV horror marathon.) So if we went to the library and asked for newspaper clipping regarding horrific events which occurred on the property...they wouldn't have any? Fran Challenge 13.) Horrible Holidays April Fool's Day (Watched on Amazon via Prime)  This definitely sets a land speed record for "make the cast so miserably unappealing the audience will be looking forward to their grisly deaths." (Shame they have the audacity to survive, the jerks.) Like Madman, this runs pretty much by the numbers. I think I'd rank it a bit higher than Madman in terms of creating scenes and giving a sense of place, though it lacks a striking killer. (As a small thing I liked, there's a bit in the parlor scene where Deborah Foreman's Muffy indirectly apologizes to another character, and the interaction is conveyed using camera placement and body language and not dwelled upon - it's not "subtle" but it shows a confidence in the audience which is unusual in this sort of thing.) Watched: 1.) Various Shorts [FC1: Short Cuts] 2.) Pet Sematary (2019) [FC2: Sometimes they Come Back], 3.) Madman [FC3: Camp BLOOD], 4.) Vampyr [FC4: Movie of the Month], 5.) Curandero [FC5: Cinco], 6.) Resident Evil: Afterlife [FC6: Playing With Power], 7.) Goodnight Mommy [FC7: Mother's Day], 8.) The Cat Girl [FC8: Dead & Buried], 9.) Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue [FC10: Behind the Mask], 10.) Scream, Queen! [FC9: Scream, Queen], 11.) The Lure [FC11: Myths & Legends], 12.) Scare Package [FC12: Cavalcade of Creepiness], 13.) April Fool's Day [FC13: Horrible Holidays] STAC Goat posted:58 (66). The Undead (1957) Do I remember correctly that the "medieval" characters speak in blank verse?
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May 29, 2021 00:25
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11) Deadly Manor (1989)Five Eyes posted:Fran Challenge 13.) Horrible Holidays A record that was promptly beaten by Deadly Manor. The last horror movie by Jose Ramon Larraz (of Edge of the Axe fame) manages to persuade us that everyone in this movie is an idiot rear end in a top hat who deserves to die within the first five minutes. Sadly - and as someone who is most definitely not a gorehound I don't say this often - they don't die in grisly fashion. Larraz is happy to show gore-splattered bodies all over the place, many of them not wearing clothes, but when it comes to actually killing people it's the most pathetically bloodless and almost non-violent stabbing you can imagine. That's not to say it's all bad - there's a bit of decent mood setting and shooting in a genuinely derelict house is good for atmosphere - but it's all outweighed by the continuity gaffes, cliched script and someone kicking in a door that was rather obviously open. 12) The Haunted Palace (1963) An entry in the Poe canon in name only, even more so than The Raven where the only connection is Price's opening recitation of the poem. Here we don't even get that; it's just one completely unrelated stanza at the end. But what we get instead is a fairly decent straight adaptation of Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward written by Charles Beaumont, who had succeeded Matheson as Corman's Poe wrangler of choice. Price is his usual histrionic self as Ward, but he changes up a gear when he's playing the malevolent Curwen. Everyone else is ... steady. It stretches its budget a bit too much - the traditional house burning at the end shows stone (actually canvas) merrily blazing away at one point - but when it hits, it hits. The scene where Ward and his wife are confronted by some of the mutated townsfolk of Arkham is the best and most horrifying scene in any of these movies so far.
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May 29, 2021 02:12
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Five Eyes posted:Do I remember correctly that the "medieval" characters speak in blank verse? I don't think so? I think they might have in bits and pieces but its all very clearly low effort. They were clearly having some fun but its also clearly one of those Corman films he like did on a weekend or something.
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May 29, 2021 02:53
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Challenge 13: Holidays 12: Hosts Man, I normally don’t care for mean spirited stuff, but this one was so over the top with it and completely serious about it that it brought me back around, especially the scene where things really kick off which is one of the most darkly comic things I’ve seen not be played for laughs. It helps that pretty much all the main cast did some really terrific acting, everyone feels like a real person and the family feels like a real family. As a whole it’s a bit half baked though, the story is thread bare and makes no attempt to explain what’s going on. Normally I don’t mind that but it needed a bit more here. For what it is it was good, just needed a little more exposition.
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May 29, 2021 03:34
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Fran Challenge #1 - Short Cuts #32a Whistle and I’ll Come to You Jonathan Miller, 1968 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYjtxHHjZ00 I appreciate the minimalism and the lack of stylization. It's eerie in a quiet sort of way. I'm not a huge fan of the way the lead actor played his role. The mumbling and ASMR-like chewing and lip smacking got pretty old, even with a runtime of only 40 minutes. 2.5/5 #32b The Signalman Lawrence Gordon Clark, 1976 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL_4VHxdXng A super eerie and intriguing old school ghost story. It's oozing with atmosphere, with the fog, the bells, the train noises. As the details of the signalman's story are revealed, the sense of dread steadily rises. I won't spoil anything, but there are a few visual elements that nearly made me poo poo myself. British children must have slept with their lights on the evening this aired on TV. 4/5 32 Films watched: 1. Witchfinder General (1968), 2. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), 3. The Devil Rides Out (1968), 4. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), 5. Who Can Kill a Child? (1976), 6. The Raven (1935), 7. A Bucket of Blood (1959), 8. The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), 9. Hunter Hunter (2020), 10. Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971), 11. Prince of Darkness (1987), 12. What We Do in the Shadows (2014), 13. The Devil's Advocate, 14. Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), 15. Madman (1981), 16. The House That Dripped Blood (1971), 17. The Evil Dead (1981), 18. Alligator (1980), 19. The Terror Within II (1991), 20. Homicidal (1961), 21. El Vampiro (1957), 22. Cure (1997), 23. West of Zanzibar (1928), 24. 29 Needles (2019), 25. The Reckoning (2020), 26. Alucarda (1977), 27. Demonia (1990), 28. Resident Evil (2002), 29. School of the Holy Beast (1974), 30. Skull: The Mask (2020), 31. The Invisible Man (2020), 32a. Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968), 32b. The Signalman (1976) 12/13 Fran Challenges completed: 1. Short Cuts, 2. Sometimes They Come Back, 3. Camp BLOOD, 4. Movie of the Month, 5. Cinco, 6. Playing With Power, 7. Mother's Day, 8. Dead & Buried, 9. Scream, Queen!, 10. Behind the Mask, 11. Myths & Legends, 12. Cavalcade of Creepiness
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May 29, 2021 03:35
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Franchescanado posted:13. Horrible Holidays  24) A Cadaver Christmas - TubiTV - 2011 This was pretty much what I was expecting for a cheapy bit of cheese. The effects were good, actors okay. Where I started to get a skosh nitpicky, was the retro angle. It's not so much this film, but more something I've been sitting on and this film stirred it up. I'm probably going to sound ridiculous, but having grown up through the 70s and 80s, I pick up the flaws in modern retro without trying. To those who grew up later, it's probably no big deal. But it throws the feel off for me when the film's digital level of clarity with the added scratch and pit effects overlay. Same goes for aiming for a particular time period and not getting the era's tech right. Even with films attempting the feel of the 50s and 60s, there's usually a stumble of it's clear it was digitally filmed or it doesn't quite get the nuance of original black & white. I hate to make it sound like I expect Grindhouse level of perfection out of every retro style film regardless of budget, but so often it feels like a weak imitation when just a little extra effort would really add some pizzazz. For the most part, the film feels like they're aiming for set in the 70s, but then there's the easter eggs that any of us here in the thread would catch, like Jack Burton's shirt, a Treevenge posting, and an Evil Dead poster so I'll consider it a pseudo-70s. Overall, the movie was okay enough. And I'm calling it here for the May Challenge. Since not many of the old crew returned to work, I've been pulling mad hours while we're getting the newbies trained. With how busy we'll be for Memorial Day weekend, I'm not going to have time for more movie watching by last call.
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May 29, 2021 05:38
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 59 (67). She Dies Tomorrow (2020) Written and directed by Amy Seimetz. Watched on Hulu Return of the Fallen 10/13 Horror's Enemies aka Rustic Films; Eliminated in 1st Round by Park Chan Wook’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance I’ve been meaning to watch this for months. It comes from Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson’s Rustic Studios and I’ve loved everything that’s come out of there, and I saw both the movie’s star Kate Lyn Sheil and its writer/director Amy Seimetz in Silver Bullets back in January which I really enjoyed. So this was kind of the next film of this particular creative corner I love that I wanted to see and it being so female driven made me really curious to see how it all played out. Sheil isn’t quite the star of his. I mean she’s the film’s starting point for all this, for the “disease” spreading to Jane Adams and Chris Messina and Katie Aselton and Josh Lucas and Adam Wingard and Olivia Taylor Dudley and… Michelle Rodriguez? A pretty great and at some times surprising cast of characters who all one by one fall victim to this classic horror movie infection in this classic horror movie structure. Of course the horror isn’t really a monster or zombies or something. Its the anxiety and existential sense of dread of knowing you are going to die. Some day. Tomorrow in this case but the feeling is obviously one all people know. Its one of those fundamental things that map out your maturity from child to adult. That moment the concept of death enters your life. Or taxes. Or disease. Or divorce. That feeling of your life as you know it ending tomorrow, in an instant, with or without warning. For some people it paralyzes them, for some they hug the people they love, for some they seek out companionship and try and find company in their misery, for some they run off alone and drink or get high. There’s no real rhyme or reason to what starts it. We’re never really told if there’s actually anything coming. This could just be a viral anxiety attack that proves as debilitating and potentially deadly as any zombie virus for those unprepared. Its heavy and I think it really did establish that feeling. I’ve been down and having some of these kinds of thoughts the last few days and it wasn’t without its uncomfortable parallels. There’s also probably something mildly comforting about it? Seimetz’s characters don’t all fall into depression. They struggle but they all find different paths and ways to cope with this. Some actively turn to love. Some seem comforted just knowing others feel the same way. And that’s definitely something that can make it easier, right? Knowing these ideas in your head, these fears turning your stomach… that everyone feels them at some time or another. That we hopefully find ways to cope. The film doesn’t tell you that coping is pointless. It doesn’t have that kind of nihilistic streak that I avoid these kind of films for. Its not exactly hopeful either. But it feels empathetic. I’m not sure if I loved this or thought it was great. But I’ve watched a lot of depressing films the last year or so that dealt with similar themes, and I’ve rejected watching some that dealt with them in ways I didn’t want to experience. And this dealt with them in a way that I’m not sure I want to revisit again soon but that doesn’t leave me feeling low. It leaves me uncertain, uneasy… looking for something to distract me or make the most of my time. The film’s very loose and arthouse and not usually my thing, but it worked for me. It got that emotion it clearly wanted. I think it very much did what it set out to do.  60 (68). Body at Brighton Rock (2019) Written and directed by Roxanne Benjamin. Watched on Hulu Return of the Fallen 11/13 Team XX; Eliminated in 1st Round by Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue Start of the Film: “Man, I’d love a job like that being outdoors in the gorgeous scenery with some casual freedom and all.” End of the Film: “Never leaving my room.” You know that thing where people get real mad at characters in a movie when they make poor decisions or silly mistakes? Well if you tend to have that reaction you probably shouldn’t watch this film. This is basically a story of someone who makes like every possible mistake imaginable to keep driving the plot forward and put her in increasing danger. I’m pretty forgiving to movie characters since we all make mistakes and do stupid things but this one definitely pushes the viewer’s patience. I does so knowingly do and attempts to counter it with Karina Fontes who is kind of adorable in her helplessness early on and as things go on it walks a line in you wanting her to survive this ordeal by hook or by crook or maybe getting a little tired of it and rooting for Darwin. But I like people and stayed in there with her for the most part. I definitely never started rooting against her although I admit that apathy crept in a few times. The film does keep things moving well and keeps the viewer dancing by playing with horror conventions and keeping you guessing at what the dangers out here really are. There’s a lot of teasing and it does kind of get a little silly by the end. But by then I was definitely laughing with the film and not at it. And I do think the film had a kind of dry wit to it. Maybe we’re not supposed to feel for Wendy and root for her so much as we’re meant to just laugh at the never ending string of misfortunes and fuckups. The film probably tries to walk a careful line of dark comedy and tense thriller and I’m not sure it quite nails it. But I did largely enjoy it. Its a fun little story that maybe takes a few too many twists and turns but I stayed in for the most part. It definitely gave me some good laughs and few good surprises and tense moments. It doesn’t fully click but for a first time writer and director Roxanne Benjamin its really a very solid outing. She’s doing a remake of Night of the Comet next and I’m pretty curious to see how that turns out considering the original played the same kind of tonally odd line this one did. So curious to see if Benjamin can nail it on the second time through. 🌻🎈Spook-A-Doodle Half-Way-To-Halloween ’21: Return of the Fallen & King Spring🎈🌻 King Spring: 10/13🎈Return of the Fallen: 11/13👻Fran Challenges: 13/13🐺Svengoolie: 13/13 Watched - New (Total) 1. Riding the Bullet (2004); 2. Cat’s Eye (1985); - (3). Vampires vs. the Bronx (2020); - (4). The Thing (1982); 3 (5). Sleep Tight (2011); - (6). Dark Shadows (2012); 4 (7). The Wicker Man (1973); 5 (8). Varan (1958); 6 (9). The Roost (2005); 7 (10). The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007); 8 (11). The Leech Woman (1960); 9 (12). Sometimes They Come Back (1991); 10 (13). Varan the Unbelievable (1962); 11 (14). 1922 (2017); 12 (15). What Keeps You Alive (2018); 13 (16). On the Silver Globe (1988); 14 (17). The Phantom of the Opera (1998); 15 (18). Nina Forever (2015); 16 (19). Area 51 (2015); 17 (20). Carrie (2002); 18 (21). The Stylist (2016)/Stucco (2019)/He Took His Skin Off for Me (2014)/Zygote (2017); 19 (22). Mark of the Vampire (1935); 20 (23). Tigers Are Not Afraid (2017); 21 (23). Death Walks on High Heels (1971); 22 (24). Maniac (1980); - (25). The Beast with Five Fingers (1946); - (26). Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954); 23 (27). Summer Camp (2015); 24 (28). Man Made Monster (1941); 25 (29). Earth vs. the Spider (1958); 26 (30). Vampyr (1932); 27 (31). The Black Scorpion (1957); 28 (32). The Wild Boys (2017); 29 (33). City of the Living Dead (1980); 30 (34). We Are What We Are (2010); 31 (35). Mercy (2014); 32 (36). Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest (2020); 33 (37). Cell (2016); 34 (38). Sightseers (2012); 35 (39). Trucks (1997); 36 (40). Dead Hooker in a Trunk (2009); 37 (41). BloodRayne (2005); 38 (42). Big Driver (2014); 39 (43). The Body Snatcher (1945); 40 (44). Run (2020); 41 (45). Paganini Horror (1989); 42 (46). Army of the Dead (2021); - (47). The Invisible Man (1933); 43 (48). Scanners (1981); - (49). The Invisible Man Returns (1940); 44 (50). PG: Psycho Goreman (2020); 45 (51). Kindred Spirits (2019); 46 (52). Daughters of Darkness (1971); 47 (53). Cropsey (2009); 48 (54). The Girl (2012); 49 (55). Mermaid Isle (2020); - (56). Hellboy (2004); 50 (57). The Field Guide to Evil (2018); 51 (58). Devil Doll (1964); 52 (59). The Thing That Couldn’t Die (1958); 53 (60). A Good Marriage (2014); 54 (61). The Wicker Man (2006); - (62). Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933); 55 (63). The Shadow of the Cat (1961); 56 (64). Nightmare Detective (2006); 57 (65). The Beast Must Die (1974); 58 (66). The Undead (1957); 59 (67). She Dies Tomorrow (2020); 60 (68). Body at Brighton Rock (2019);
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May 29, 2021 09:16
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18 Us (2019) No screenshot due to Netflix A woman and her family are stalked and attacked by vengeful clones of themselves. I liked parts of it. The parts with the family, working together and separately, were a lot of fun, and I enjoyed how blasé they (and the movie itself) were about what seems like the apocalypse. I think it suffered from a lack of clarity; the main conceit of the movie is these secret underground bunkers that contain clones of everyone in America as part of some abandoned societal mind-control experiment. It was just too huge of a thing to put into a movie that is mostly just about the family. Which is an odd complaint, because I can accept the same mix of personal and world-ending in other movies, but it felt weird to me here. The ending sort of fell flat for me; my interpretation of it is that moral behaviour is impossible in modern America, and the only people who get ahead are the ones who can ruthlessly crush their fellows, but the surface level of the story didn't feel satisfying on its own. /519 His House (2020) No screenshot, again due to Netflix A pair of refugees, newly released in Britain, are haunted by a vengeful spirit, and memories of their lost daughter. Quite good. I liked how the conflict between Rial and Bol spread along different lines, assimilating and how to deal with the ghosts. And how the movie sets you up to have certain expectations about what they're running from, and then the reality turns out to be far worse than whatever you were picturing. There's also an interesting dynamic where the usual fear in horror movies-- everyone thinks you're crazy-- gets rolled up into the pressure of integrating and fitting in. Weirdly similar to Us-- not just in that it's a black horror movie, but in how the protagonists had to do something terrible to survive, and the movie doesn't condemn them for it. /520 It Follows (2014)  A young woman sleeps with this guy, and then finds herself pursued by an unstoppable shapeshifting thing that was previously after him. Another rewatch for me. Excellent movie. I remember it being... colder; this time around, it stuck out to me how comfortable and affectionate the main characters are. Also more male-gazey than I remember. I saw the director's other movie, Under the Silver Lake, a while back, and it was really full-on there. In both cases it's clearly a deliberate part of the narrative; kind of wish he'd make a third movie to prove he's got another style. To this day I don't understand what the kids were planning at the end there. /521 The Owners (2020)  Some hooligans take a doctor and his wife hostage in a robbery; things get really bad from there. Another inverted home-invasion movie; reminded me of Don't Breathe. Sylvester McCoy, who I just learnt played Doctor Who a while back, does a fine job of being just a little bit creepy, but not enough to justify panicking until it's too late. I loved the scene where the boys are threatening to kill the doctor's wife and he still refuses to give them the code to the safe; I liked how the movie doesn't belabour the point of how weird this moment is, it just puts it out there and then overwhelms you with five other things to worry about. /5Up next: They're Watching...
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May 29, 2021 10:18
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28. The Johnsons (1992) The Johnsons is referring to the storm of penises within this movie, it's relentless. I like these movies where someone is thrown in over their head in investigating a gross spooky ritual. It drags hard in the middle but the ending is worth it. The crystal embryo demon thing looks like a little Lance Henriksen puppet. .5/5
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May 29, 2021 14:22
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 #27. Saint Maud (Amazon Prime) An intensely devout in-home caregiver becomes dangerously obsessed with saving the soul of an atheist former ballerina. Wow. Saint Maud is a clever, small film that works its way under your skin by taking a long time to set up its world and protagonist and saving its most gut-wrenching punch for its final frames. It's structured and put together like a moody British drama character piece, but as it slowly unveils more and more about protagonist Maud's fragile mental state it allows elements of the supernatural to creep in more and more steadily. Like many films like it, that slow burn and slow incorporation leaves you wondering whether or not Maud is correct, and if God really is a presence in the story and is blessing her with his presence and some amount of divine protection. But then, the film ends first by showing you Maud's imagined reality, where she immolates herself and gets angel wings and a halo and all the beachgoers around her prostrate themselves before that image, converts now to a truth Maud has known all along... only to get a few frames of the horrible truth, that she's burning and screaming and then smash cut to the end credits. I was already thinking that this was a fantastic film; that final half-second pushes this over into legendary status. That description of the ending might make you think that this is a cruel film, but it really isn't. It's curious about its lead, but not to a dispassionate remove like a Stanley Kubrick or David Cronenberg film. However, it is like a nature documentary in a way, because it feels like, however close the camera can get or however sympathetically it tries to frame Maud, it knows that she is, and has been by choice, isolated from the rest of humanity, and that her recent conversion is preventing her from seeking out more tangible connections or true help for her precarious mental state. It's a film that foresees the end that's coming and, while it doesn't delight in it or treat it as a black humored ending joke (thought I could see how you could read that ending as the latter), it also knows that it can't do anything to forestall or prevent it, either. Saint Maud is a film about the dangers of faith being taken to an extreme, but it also is a film about how precious human connections can be, and how we can't ignore or omit the tangible world around us in favor of the expectations of the one to come. Live for the moment here and now - the ending will get here eventually, in its own time. /5Watched so far: The Curse of the Cat People, Freaky, Vampires vs the Bronx, Rawhead Rex, Tarantula, In Search of Darkness, Ginger Snaps (rewatch), In Search of Darkness Part II (FC #10), Mother's Day (2010) (FC #7), Scream, Queen! (FC #9), House of Wax (1953) (FC #2), Vampire in Venice (FC #8), Possessor, Mandy, various shorts (FC #1), Saw (rewatch) (FC #6), Southbound (FC #12), Wendigo (FC #11), Stage Fright (2014) (FC #3), Tigers Are Not Afraid (FC #5), Psycho Goreman, Spiral, Vampyr (FC #4), Black Christmas (2019) (FC #13), A Quiet Place, Lifechanger, Saint Maud
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May 29, 2021 16:00
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19. Tales From the Dark 2 How did I watch this? – Plex. I kind of enjoyed the first one, so why not watch the second part of this ‘film project’, as Letterboxd calls it. Three more spooky tales, based on the stories of Lillian Lee. We get ‘Pillow’, about a obsessed woman dealing with insomnia after a breakup, who finds relief in a medicine pillow, AND something else. ooOOoo. ‘Hide and Seek’ is about a group of kids playing hide and seek in an abandoned elementary school. ‘Black Umbrella’ is about an old man doing good deeds to the people he meets, until he gets pushed too far. This triptych is profoundly mediocre, unfortunately. Pillow is ok, but long. The girl can’t sleep because her boyfriend is gone. Someone recommends a new pillow, and the creepy shop (which you can tell is creepy thanks to a loud musical cue) sells her a medical pillow, basically a pillow with lavender in it. The pillow lets her sleep, but also gives her incredibly vivid, rapey sex dreams of her boyfriend, only, of course, it’s not her boyfriend it’s some sort of incubus/succubus situation. Also she accidentally killed her boyfriend, which is probably why she can’t sleep. Hide and Seek is very simple, and straightforward, and filled with ghosts that only the audience sees accompanied by loud musical stings. The only interesting part was that the ghosts were children who died to SARS (yay pandemics) but even that isn’t much. Black Umbrella is ok, about an old man doing good deeds as he travels around the city, until he runs into a prostitute, and things take a gory turn. She is a terrible actress; I think maybe it comes across better if you speak the language, but there is no life at all to her performance. 1.5/5
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May 29, 2021 16:50
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25. Skull: The Mask Shudder “It's a mask, not the devil. I'd like it to be, I trained a lot for this, but it's not” Skull: The Mask is a super gory Brazilian horror film that begins by showing you some past history of the Mask, an artifact containing the spirit of Anhanga (a liege subject compelled to commit sacrifices to resurrect his god Tahawantinsupay). Regardless of whoever summons/awakens the Mask, if you wear it, you're possessed by Anhanga, and each kill you make is more blood added to the pile bringing Tahawantinsupay back to life A lesbian couple end up in possession of the Mask in the present day, one a museum assistant assigned to bring it back from the Amazon, the other a goth who knows partially about the Mask, enough to know the spell to summon it and mischievous enough to think it'd be a good idea. This goes exactly how you'd expect unfortunately The Mask eventually works its way to finding and possessing a person cleaning up the crime scene named Skull, played by real-life Brazilian pro wrestler Rurik Jr. What follows would make Jason Voorhees proud. Hearts get ripped out of chests, sleazy men get choked with intestines, a priest has a swordfight after keeping his sword hidden inside the arm of a Jesus statue, and there's just So Much Blood. Ultimately the only ones who may be able to get enough safe distance to figure out what to do next are a dirty cop who can't escape her past, an ex-priest who lost his way, and the museum's boss who may know more than he's willing to admit. Will any of them be able to stop Skull in time before the god comes back? You're either in on this completely or you wish it'd gone further. Skull: The Mask takes its psychotic gore man more seriously/with much less jokes than Psycho Goreman, and goes in harder on the "blood and guts and looking almost artistic while doing it" than Mandy. But the plot's a lot even if you're paying attention, and the final 12 minutes feel a bit more underwhelming than what at least I thought the previous 77 were building to. And as I've mentioned before, I'm sick of the frequent bury your gays trope, even in Brazilian horror films about possessed masks; if you're going to have two, don't immediately kill them off If you're fun and bloody enough, I can look the other way on most of that stuff though. Skull: The Mask is definitely fun and bloody. And Rurik Jr was a pretty intimidating villain **** 25/13 (The New York Ripper, Gwen, Sleepless Beauty, The Head Hunter, 13: Game of Death, Deerskin, Curve, The Incredible Melting Man, Starry Eyes, Eyes Without a Face, In the Earth, Macabre 1958, Macabre 1980, Oxygen 2021, The Djinn 2021, Wer, Spiral: From the Book of Saw, Moonstalker, Army of the Dead 2021, The Retreat 2021, Held 2021, Tooth Fairy: The Last Extraction, The Unholy 2021, The Unholy 1988, Skull: The Mask)
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May 29, 2021 17:07
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 42. 2001. Dagon Directed by Stuart Gordon Watched on Tubi After they wreck their boat on the one rock within ten nautical miles, four bougie turds are forced to seek help from the inhabitants of a creepy Spanish coastal village. The atmosphere gets very spooky right away as our “heroes” notice the the villagers seem more than a little off. Everything is just so oppressively damp and grimy.  I wasn’t expecting to enjoy Dagon as much as I did, to be honest. It looks like it’s in the bottom half of Stuart Gordon’s movies, ratings-wise. But it’s really endearing somehow. At one point, a drunken hobo makes a bunch of grumbling noises while some flashback sequences play. He’s really hard to understand, but it doesn’t really matter. You can get the gist of it. Everyone worships some kind of fish demon.  The protagonist is so bumbling and unlikable that I spent most of the movie just waiting to see what horrible thing was going to happen to him. Really, the moral of the story is: If you’re going to have to tangle with an ancient, malevolent fish cult, don’t be an insufferable nerd who only knows how to think in terms of false dichotomies. Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! 1/2Time Travel Challenge: 42/31 1. Jigoku (1960), 2. The Curse of the Doll People (1961), 3. The Burning Court (1962), 4. X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963), 5. The Long Hair of Death (1964), 6. Planet of the Vampires (1965), 7. Daimajin (1966), 8. Viy (1967), 9. A Quiet Place in the Country (1968), 10. The Cremator (1969), 11. Equinox (1970), 12. Lake of Dracula (1971), 13. The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972), 14. The Crazies (1973), 15. Deathdream aka Dead of Night (1974), 16. Race with the Devil (1975), 17. The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976), 18. The Incredible Melting Man (1977), 19. The Grapes of Death (1978), 20. Tourist Trap (1979), 21. The Changeling (1980), 22. My Bloody Valentine (1981), 23. Human Lanterns (1982), 24. Christine (1983), 25. Night of the Comet (1984), 26. Demons (1985), 27. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), 28. Wolf’s Hole (1987), 29. The Vanishing (1988), 30. Santa Sangre (1989), 31. Bride of Re-Animator (1990), 32. The People Under the Stairs (1991), 33. The Wicked City (1992), 34. Body Bags (1993), 35. Tammy and the T-Rex (1994), 36. The Day of the Beast (1995), 37. The Craft (1996), 38. Cube (1997), 39. Ringu (1998), 40. Ringu 2 (1999), 41. Ginger Snaps (2000), 42. Dagon (2001) Bracketology: 16/? 1. Vampires vs. the Bronx, 2. The Roost, 3. Varan, 4. On the Silver Globe, 5. The Phantom of the Opera, 6. Mark of the Vampire, 7. Tigers Are Not Afraid, 8. Sightseers, 9. The House That Jack Built, 10. The Wild Boys, 11. Creature from the Black Lagoon, 12. Scanners, 13. Nightmare Detective, 14. Hellboy, 15. I Saw What You Did, 16. Prevenge Fran Challenges: 13/13 1. Un Chien Andalou / The Big Shave / Kitchen Sink / Foxes / Portal to Hell!!!, 2. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 3. The Burning, 4. Dead Ringers, 5. Belzebuth, 6. Fright Night, 7. The Brood, 8. Village of the Damned, 9. Cat People, 10. Birth of the Living Dead, 11. The Lure, 12. Black Sabbath, 13. My Bloody Valentine 3D
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May 30, 2021 00:04
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36. Skull: The Mask (2020) dir. Kapel Furman, Armando Fonseca Shudder At an archeological dig site in the Amazon, a creepy skull mask is unearthed that the locals identify as an ancient evil demon. It is transported to a museum, but before it arrives the evil force is awakened and people start dying in incredibly gory ways. The plot actually gets pretty complicated for what is basically a silly gory slasher - there’s a cop investigating a string of missing children as well as the mask killings, an evil corporation that wants the mask for themselves, and a priest who has dedicated his life to defeating this demon, although he no longer believes the stories. Also another guy who sells fruit or something and was a guerrilla fighter along with the priest. And the cop was involved with some kind of massacre or something and now no one trusts her, and something about a femur of another god… ok it’s actually a VERY complicated plot and I don’t think I really followed it all that well. Messy plot aside, this is fun and the highlight by far is the insanely goopy and gory special effects. Hearts ripped from victims’ chests, heads cut clean off, intestines spilling onto the floor, and buckets and buckets of blood. The design of the mask creature is wonderful and there are some fun sequences involving ancient gods and such. Also lots of pro-wrestling moves that seem kind of out of place, but they are fun so who cares? I didn’t care for most of the characters though - the priest was probably the most interesting one, but he didn’t get all that much screen time. If you like goopy gore and fun special effects, I absolutely recommend this, but I don’t think it has much to offer beyond that. 3.5 busted rib cages out of 5  37. 29 Needles (2019) dir. Scott Philip Goergens traveling blu-ray This film follows Francis, a man with some serious psychological issues that lead to a fixation on sex and pain. He must go to increasingly extreme lengths to control his hallucinations, and basically does a lot of hosed up poo poo. That's pretty much it. This is, uh... something. There are a LOT of unsimulated sex acts, most involving BDSM and/or violence. This makes up so much of the film that it sometimes feels like hosed up porn, except that there's nothing erotic about what's happening on screen. It's straight body horror, and the fact that much of it is real makes the fake stuff seem more authentic and disturbing. Not for the faint of heart for sure. There are a couple of moments I thought were creepy, but the majority of the film didn't work for me at all. It's extremely amateurish - and given that it's this director's first film and probably had a budget of $10, that's understandable to a degree, but that doesn't make it less painful to watch. I don't know if anyone except maybe the lead is an actual actor. Maybe casting options are limited when the part requires you to get fisted on screen. This is certainly as extreme as it claims to be (at least at times), but it's also mostly really dull. Pretty much everything that isn't a sex scene felt like padding, and even those aren't all that interesting. If the director is trying to say something meaningful about the boundaries of pain and pleasure or whatever, I was too bored to understand it. I liked the giant penis monster though. 1.5 needles in your taint out of 5 Edgar Wright's Top 100 Horror: 99/100 Slant Top 100 Horror: 98/100 TSZDT 2020: 678/1000 Total: 37 Watched: White Zombie | M | Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter | The Demoniacs | The Addiction | The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) | The Queen of Black Magic (2019) (FC#2) | Warlock | Prince of Darkness | A Record of Sweet Murder | The Neon Demon | The Day of the Beast (FC#13) | The Devil Rides Out | The Taking of Deborah Logan (FC#7) | Short films (FC#1) | Don't Panic (FC#5) | The Hitcher | Resident Evil: Retribution (FC#6) | Saint Maud | Stranger by the Lake (FC#9) | Frenzy | Spirits of the Dead (FC#12) | Spiral: From the Book of Saw | The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire | Madman (FC#3) | Dream Demon | Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde (FC#4) | Wolf (FC#8) | The Last Broadcast | Army of the Dead | Who Can Kill a Child? | The Shining | Demon (FC#11) | Targets | Leap of Faith (FC#10) | Skull: The Mask | 29 Needles Fran Challenges:
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May 30, 2021 00:55
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 61 (69). Carrie (2013) Directed by Kimberly Peirce, screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, based on the 1974 novel by Stephen King Watched on DVD. King Spring 11/13 I did not hate that, but I’m not sure it was necessary either. That’s probably the basic thing in common with all of these modern Stephen King remakes like It, Pet Sematary, probably The Stand (although I haven’t seen that one yet), and in a way even the back half of Doctor Sleep that gets fans so worked up. They’re all remaking something done pretty well, if not greatly, and even if there’s things that can be improved upon or updated and even when the films really do something different or uniquely impressive there’s still everything else about the film that you’re gonna have people comparing to the original and either saying “they did that better last time” or “what’s the point of doing it again?” There’s two major differences between this and the original Carrie, I think. The first is that it feels like it leans a lot more into the religious aspect. Religion’s always been a big part of the story and Julianna Moore is great as the over breaking, deranged religious mother. But this version definitely plays around with the idea a little bit and almost leaves the door cracked open a bit that Carrie might really be demonic. The plays into the other big difference in that Chloe Grace Moretz plays Carrie as a bit more confident and in control. I don’t like the reviews that say she’s “too pretty”. Thats a terrible way to look at things. Traditionally attractive people are not immune from abuse and mentally ill parents and a terrible upbringings and social anxiety and all these things. Carrie isn’t picked on because she’s ugly, she’s picked on because she’s vulnerable and bullies prey on vulnerability. And I think Moretz does a good job showing that even if she’s a little more wordly than Spacek’s Carrie (and in some ways a modern Carrie almost has to be in a world of cell phones and the internet) she’s still deeply vulnerable and raw. But a curious choice the film makes is also to put her more in control. That’s a bit odd because it means that once all hell breaks looks Carrie’s not purely a victim in a state of shock, she’s actively choosing to slaughter people (and to save select people). I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it feels different. Of course OG Carrie had culpability and anger and certainly this Carrie has shock and victimhood. But the balance does feel different and Carrie does feel like more of a villain in the final act. But in some ways that works for me because Carrie’s always kind of felt like its about the cycle of abuse and victims becoming monsters. Chris and her friends are terrible, no doubt, and we’re always given that scene of Desjarden righteously ripping them a new one. And we always get Sue feeling genuinely guilt for the bullying and making a sincere effort with Tommy to help. There’s always that crucially bittersweet character moment at the prom when Tommy and others are actually enjoying Carrie’s company and for one moment she’s experiencing the warmth of what’s possible. And I think its always about the imperfection of people and the value of second chances. Hell, even Carrie’s mom almost certainly got this way from abuse. But ultimately people can push others too far and then you can’t take it back. Chris can’t take back her vicious prank. Carrie can’t take back her violent actions. Sue can’t take back the bullying that started this all. No one’s innocent. There’s malice to go around. But there’s also vulnerability and regret and just plain immaturity. But sometimes you don’t get the room to make up for a mistake and get a second chance. Your actions and how you treat people matter and sometimes in terrible ways. I think all that stuff works. I think Moore’s great. I think Moretz is good. I mostly enjoyed the film. But its not scary. There’s no true tension during the film and ultimately I can’t help but think of how tense and terrifying the original film is as a result. And that goes back to where we started. I think this was a perfectly fine movie. I think there’s some good and different elements of it. But it feels completely unnecessary. I’m just not gonna take anything away from this that I didn’t already have and now that I’ve seen it I feel no need to reset it when I could just rewatch the original film. But it did make the “rain of stones” look decent. The other remake showed how bad that can go.  62 (70). Gretel & Hansel (2020) Directed by Oz Perkins, Screenplay by Rob Hayes, Based on Hansel and Gretel by The Brothers Grimm Watched on Amazon Prime, available on Hulu, epix, and DirecTV Return of the Fallen 12/13 Daddy Issues aka Team Lankins aka Team “Dad Was Always Quiet”; Eliminated in 1st Round by Brian Yuzna’s Beneath Still Waters If someone asked me to describe Oz Perkins I would say “high on style, low on substance” and I’m not sure this will change that description. There’s maybe more substance here than in his past films. There’s some solid witchy stuff throughout the film but the focus is very on the mood. And Perkins is great at that. The movie looks gorgeous, it looks spooky, it feels like every tree or dark corner is hiding something secret and ominous. Alice Krige is very appropriately spooky in a muted witchy way. You know she’s trouble, Gretel knows she’s trouble, Hansel knows she’s trouble. But she’s feeding you and teaching you stuff and you got a warm bed a dry roof so… I guess you put up with some creepiness. It was a very good tale of that danger of avoiding the red flags and still following the witch’s trap even when you kind of know its a trap. But drat it, that ham looks good. I think Sophia Lillis is good too, as the Gretel who knows better but is gradually seduced by promise of power. After spending a life of being at the mercy of the world, a mother who throws you out because she can’t feed you, old men who only offer work as an excuse to prey on her, and of a world that is unforgiving and harsh she’s given this new opportunity. She knows its not on the up and up. She knows its trouble. But it gives her a chance to finally have some control of her own fate and destiny in this world. And she struggles with whether the cost is worth it all the way to the end. And of course we all know what story this is so we all know what the cost truly is. I guess if you get hung up on that then this film could kind of be a slow burn to a known destination. But I mean… its a classic fairytale. Its right there in the title. So its built in to the price of the ticket. I think Perkins tells a unique and very moody version of the story that kept me engaged the entire way. Its definitely a slow burn and its definitely a soft ending. And that does feel like Perkins’ thing. But it worked for me here, more than I think it did in any of his previous films. But I think if you’re seen a Perkins film before you have a pretty good idea of what you’re getting yourself into. 🌻🎈Spook-A-Doodle Half-Way-To-Halloween ’21: Return of the Fallen & King Spring🎈🌻 King Spring: 11/13🎈Return of the Fallen: 12/13👻Fran Challenges: 13/13🐺Svengoolie: 13/13 Watched - New (Total) 1. Riding the Bullet (2004); 2. Cat’s Eye (1985); - (3). Vampires vs. the Bronx (2020); - (4). The Thing (1982); 3 (5). Sleep Tight (2011); - (6). Dark Shadows (2012); 4 (7). The Wicker Man (1973); 5 (8). Varan (1958); 6 (9). The Roost (2005); 7 (10). The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007); 8 (11). The Leech Woman (1960); 9 (12). Sometimes They Come Back (1991); 10 (13). Varan the Unbelievable (1962); 11 (14). 1922 (2017); 12 (15). What Keeps You Alive (2018); 13 (16). On the Silver Globe (1988); 14 (17). The Phantom of the Opera (1998); 15 (18). Nina Forever (2015); 16 (19). Area 51 (2015); 17 (20). Carrie (2002); 18 (21). The Stylist (2016)/Stucco (2019)/He Took His Skin Off for Me (2014)/Zygote (2017); 19 (22). Mark of the Vampire (1935); 20 (23). Tigers Are Not Afraid (2017); 21 (23). Death Walks on High Heels (1971); 22 (24). Maniac (1980); - (25). The Beast with Five Fingers (1946); - (26). Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954); 23 (27). Summer Camp (2015); 24 (28). Man Made Monster (1941); 25 (29). Earth vs. the Spider (1958); 26 (30). Vampyr (1932); 27 (31). The Black Scorpion (1957); 28 (32). The Wild Boys (2017); 29 (33). City of the Living Dead (1980); 30 (34). We Are What We Are (2010); 31 (35). Mercy (2014); 32 (36). Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest (2020); 33 (37). Cell (2016); 34 (38). Sightseers (2012); 35 (39). Trucks (1997); 36 (40). Dead Hooker in a Trunk (2009); 37 (41). BloodRayne (2005); 38 (42). Big Driver (2014); 39 (43). The Body Snatcher (1945); 40 (44). Run (2020); 41 (45). Paganini Horror (1989); 42 (46). Army of the Dead (2021); - (47). The Invisible Man (1933); 43 (48). Scanners (1981); - (49). The Invisible Man Returns (1940); 44 (50). PG: Psycho Goreman (2020); 45 (51). Kindred Spirits (2019); 46 (52). Daughters of Darkness (1971); 47 (53). Cropsey (2009); 48 (54). The Girl (2012); 49 (55). Mermaid Isle (2020); - (56). Hellboy (2004); 50 (57). The Field Guide to Evil (2018); 51 (58). Devil Doll (1964); 52 (59). The Thing That Couldn’t Die (1958); 53 (60). A Good Marriage (2014); 54 (61). The Wicker Man (2006); - (62). Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933); 55 (63). The Shadow of the Cat (1961); 56 (64). Nightmare Detective (2006); 57 (65). The Beast Must Die (1974); 58 (66). The Undead (1957); 59 (67). She Dies Tomorrow (2020); 60 (68). Body at Brighton Rock (2019); 61 (69). Carrie (2013); 62 (70). Gretel & Hansel (2020);
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May 30, 2021 04:38
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#33 The House by the Cemetery (rewatch) Lucio Fulci, 1981  Blue Underground's 4k UHD transfer looks amazing, as I was expecting it to. The depth and detail are unreal. It's like I was watching a 35mm print in the theater. God I love this format. Anyway, the movie. I've only seen this once before, way back in about 2007, and I remembered very little of it. The story's solid. A researcher moves his family into a house previously occupied by his former coworker who hanged himself and murdered his mistress. As details are revealed about the nature of the dead man's research strange stuff begins happening in the house, and the couple's young son is receiving warnings to stay out of the house from a mysterious young girl. And there's something particularly sinister about the cellar... It's kinda Fulci's take on The Shining. Only instead of a sense of foreboding dread we get lots of gratuitous gore. Nothin' wrong with that. It's Fulci's thing to shoot gore in brutal, prolonged detail. And I've gotta say this is about the best his gore effects have looked. It's really something. The only major problem with this movie is the kid, Bob. He's a good enough little actor, but apparently the filmmakers weren't able to find a kid to do the English voice over work, so they hired a women impersonating a little boy. The result is... off putting. It wouldn't be a huge deal if the boy's role was small, but he's basically the lead. It's bad, but I got used to it after a while. Aside from that issue there's really not much to complain about here. It's one of Fulci's more interesting scripts and the gore is just insane. I'd consider this top-tier Fulci. 4/5 33 Films watched: 1. Witchfinder General (1968), 2. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), 3. The Devil Rides Out (1968), 4. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), 5. Who Can Kill a Child? (1976), 6. The Raven (1935), 7. A Bucket of Blood (1959), 8. The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), 9. Hunter Hunter (2020), 10. Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971), 11. Prince of Darkness (1987), 12. What We Do in the Shadows (2014), 13. The Devil's Advocate, 14. Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), 15. Madman (1981), 16. The House That Dripped Blood (1971), 17. The Evil Dead (1981), 18. Alligator (1980), 19. The Terror Within II (1991), 20. Homicidal (1961), 21. El Vampiro (1957), 22. Cure (1997), 23. West of Zanzibar (1928), 24. 29 Needles (2019), 25. The Reckoning (2020), 26. Alucarda (1977), 27. Demonia (1990), 28. Resident Evil (2002), 29. School of the Holy Beast (1974), 30. Skull: The Mask (2020), 31. The Invisible Man (2020), 32a. Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968), 32b. The Signalman (1976), 33. The House by the Cemetery (1981) 12/13 Fran Challenges completed: 1. Short Cuts, 2. Sometimes They Come Back, 3. Camp BLOOD, 4. Movie of the Month, 5. Cinco, 6. Playing With Power, 7. Mother's Day, 8. Dead & Buried, 9. Scream, Queen!, 10. Behind the Mask, 11. Myths & Legends, 12. Cavalcade of Creepiness
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May 30, 2021 05:09
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Challenge 6: Playing with power Saturday afternoon and I’m taking it easy due to the Pfizer flu, what better time for  12: Plan 9 From Outer Space The infamous Ed Wood movie from 1959 widely considered to be one of the worst movies ever. Now, being a horror fan with multiple streaming services, I’ve seen a lot of bad movies and honestly this wasn’t even near the bottom of the list. The acting is terrible across the board, and the sets and costumes are barebones, but you can feel the genuine sincerity this was all made with and it’s a little charming in its own way. The story is actually kind of cool too, with a better writer and some real actors it could have been a classic for other reasons. As for the game, it’s an adventure game from the 90s, with all the good and bad that entails. If you’re interested it’s easy enough to find online and runs in browser, but it’s no Monkey Island.
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May 30, 2021 06:22
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22 They're Watching (2016) A film crew for this Grand Designsesque show travel to rural Moldova and become embroiled in witch-paranoia. Trashy found-footage fun. The film crew are just charming enough to put up with their unpleasantness, and there's just enough stuff in the movie to convince me the cheap shots against the Moldovans are really just part of the characters, not part of the movie. It was pretty easy to guess how things would shake out early on. I'm baffled by the decision to put one of the main characters getting iced in a flash-forward in the first few seconds of the movie. The big special-effects extravaganza at the end was beyond the budget they had, but damnit they tried. /523 The Cremator (Spalovač mrtvol) (1969)  A distant, malleable funeral home cremator sinks into the Third Reich, gently, like an old man getting into a hot bath. Watched it for Movie of the Month, naturally. It was good as hell. Lots of very discreet scene transitions (or very non-discrete scenes, if you like) that make the whole thing flow together, dreamlike, with little ability to track the flow of time. The main guy, Rudolf Hrusínský, is fascinating to watch: a vessel for other people's intentions and opinions, whose own perspective is incredibly esoteric. He is, I suppose, the polar opposite of a materialist, so distant from material concerns that he'll gladly kill his children to satisfy some abstract notion of spiritual orderliness. /524 Army of the Dead (2021) No screenshot due to Netflix. Casino vault heist in an abandoned city bepopulate with zombies. It was pretty good. I liked the weird proto-society the Zeds were constructing, the extremely close fighting, the gore, the weird poo poo like robot zombies (if you look closely) and the time-loop conversation. It was also unfocused (story-wise); it gestures in all these interesting directions and then goes down the least interesting one. Supposedly they're planning a bunch of spin-off crap; I'd watch another movie, but nothing more than that. A lot's been said about the length and the lack of focus (in the literal sense, the use of lenses); honestly it never dragged for me, and I felt things were too blurry like twice. I feel like there's a lot of little details here to reward a rewatch some day. /325 Halloween (1978)  It's Halloween. What hasn't yet been said about it? I'd never noticed before how closely It Follows riffs on this movie, all the distant shots of dark suburban houses. And the scene where Sam's in class, and the pursuer is there out the window, it uses almost the same camera angles as the identical scene in Halloween. The aspect I found most interesting this time was the idea of whether or not Michael actually gives a poo poo about Laurie. I mean, obviously he tries to kill her, but he seems far more interested in her friends (who have SEX); he goes out of his way to kill them, and makes a big ritual out of it, while his pursuit of her seems improvised; she's nearby the main targets, so he might as well. I'm probably reading a narrative out of nothing; he acts decisively against the friends because those scenes end in their deaths, while he improvises against Laurie because she's the survivor and it makes the movie more interesting. And of course there are scenes earlier where he appears to stalk her specifically. Dr Loomis spends the movie telling us there's nothing in there, but there clearly is. Speaking of, Loomis is incredibly bad at his personal crusade; he spends like six hours standing on a street corner, waiting for Michael to show up, before realising that his own stolen car has been parked just across the street. Another thing that stuck out to me was Michael's age. I'd always conceived of him as a perpetual 40-year-old, but here he's in his early 20s, only a few years older than the high-schoolers he hunts. /526 Halloween II (1981)  Immediately after the events of the first movie, Laurie spends the rest of the night in hospital, asleep. Also, Michael keeps killing people. Honestly it kinda sucked. I appreciate that they tried to change up the setting, but murder in a hospital just isn't creepy like murder in suburbia is (admittedly I'm fortunate enough to have no strong memories of hospitals). The victims are broader and less likeable than those of the first movie; the whole subplot with Laurie being Michael's other sister was totally pointless, a cheap soap-opera twist that's surprising but not scary. Some of the early scenes, when Michael is on the [strike]run[/strike] stride from the law and making his way out of suburbia, those captured the feeling of the original, but they felt like trailer-fodder, disconnected from the body of the film, which is the hospital. I did quite like the part where you learn Loomis accidentally killed that boy Laurie likes, just for its shaggy-dog meanness. /5Up next: A Quiet Place Pt II...
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May 30, 2021 07:17
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Loomis should absolutely not to be taken as an authority on anything, especially Michael. 15, 10, 5 years before we meet him, maybe. But by the time we do he's clearly deranged and obsessed and half the fun of the sequels is watching him go crazier and crazier.
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May 30, 2021 07:42
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 63 (72). I Saw What You Did (1965) Directed by William Castle, Screenplay by William P. McGivern, Based on Out of the Dark by Ursula Curtiss Watched on the Internet Archive. ”I’m normal!” - Me during any one of these scavenger hunt challenges when I look at the numbers. This one time when I was a kid I made stupid prank calls and it ended up getting real complicated and scary because it turns out one of the random numbers I dialed had some serious poo poo happening on their end of things. Little did I know William Castle had made an entire film to warn me. a This film is only 88 minutes but it really presses the limits of that 88 minutes. Its kind of a cute premise. A basic Leave it to Beaver domestic suburban bliss setting and tone where a couple of teenage girls do some seemingly harmless dumb kid stuff that millions of kids have done. They’re just killing time, just amusing themselves, no malice, no ill intent. Its kind of a lovely thing to do but it seems harmless. But they don’t know who’s on the other end of phone and Castle cycles through a bunch of comical settings of people reacting with minor annoyance or hopefully easily resolved domestic squabbles. But then there’s that one place they called that actually didn’t have just normal regular people in it and actually had a storm brewing that this one random, stupid, clueless kid prank lets loose. Accidently prank calling a mass murderer. Whoopsie. It is a fun enough concept but it really drags. Once you’re done smiling a little and weighing the moral responsibility of making some random wife think her husband is cheating and we get to the actual danger it kind of just crawls along. I think Castle tries to space out the danger… I say I think because I honestly forgot if the people they call in one scene are the same people they call in the next, but I’m gonna assume they are because it would be weirder for them to call a bunch of murderers than for them to just dial the same number a couple of times for narrative reasons. But the goofy 60s sitcom tone of the film really doesn’t allow any tension to actually build. The girls have no idea they’re in any danger and the danger is so deeply removed and slow moving that its like worrying about a storm you can hear in the far distance or something. I guess its gonna come but it doesn’t feel like I gotta run inside quite yet. Castle is so committed to his silly premise that even in the final act when the storm has finally arrived and things SHOULD be getting tense there’s still this silly soundtrack playing that defuses the danger. Its actually kind of funny. If you drop a sinister soundtrack on the last 30 minutes I bet you get a pretty tense Hitchcockian thing. Hell maybe the entire film. Castle’s a good director but he’s also kind of a goof and in this case the goofiness just undercuts the good stuff. This isn’t really a mistake. Its clearly Castle’s intention. The way the final act plays out pretty much cements that. But it feels like a bad call. I mean, maybe not a bad one. Castle obviously had fun doing what he did and this is another weird and silly Castle thing. But I dunno. The result is something that I wouldn’t call bad, and wouldn’t quite call boring but definitely kind of drags at points and never really feels like it has the urgency it probably needs. It does pick up right at the end but by then, I dunno. I was ready to move on. Not a bad film, really, definitely kind of unique. But I probably won’t be watching again.  64 (73). Prevenge (2016) Written and directed by Alice Lowe. Watched on AMC Plus, available on DIRECTV and Shudder. I spent an inordinate amount of time focused on the title of this movie and trying to decipher what “prevenge” meant before I accepted/realized it was just a forced portmanteau. Then again aren’t all portmanteaus forced? But I spent a lot of time trying to figure out of getting preventative revenge was just a psychotic break or some kind of Minority Report thing. That might have been the first clue that this wasn’t gonna be something I quite clicked with. This is the second Alice Lowe written film I’ve seen in a few weeks after Sightseers and I really didn’t feel that one’s tone of dark comedy at all. Just a brand of really dry, really dark, often British humor I’ve never gotten a lot from. Its why I’ve never watched the UK Office. And I really wasn’t feeling this one much at all for the first half and was thinking this was gonna be another polarizing difference from me from the norm. But I actually started to get sucked in more in the second half when it felt like the movie started to focus more on Ruth’s grief and her motivation for the killings. Like I had a vague idea all along but once the exact link became clear I think I started to engage more in the story and character. While I don’t get a ton from her writing i did really enjoy Lowe’s acting in this. She puts on a great performance of split between anger, grief, confusion, and fun. Ruth’s dance as she clearly enjoys herself doing these things she knows are wrong but believes she’s being driven by someone else, be it the unborn child destined to torture the neighborhood pets or just her own internal anger and grief lying and rationalizing things to herself. Lowe has great presence going back and forth and keeps the film from ever getting quite as dark as I thought it was going and would have definitely lost me entirely. I didn’t love it. I struggled too much in the first half to say that. But the fact that it pulled me in later actually is pretty rare and a testament to the film. Ultimately my problems with the film really aren’t criticisms of it at all, they’re just purely taste stuff. So if you like Lowe’s stuff or that style of British dark and dry humor then this really probably more your think and definitely worth checking out. Still, even despite my problems it still did eventually click a bit and give me something so it probably really clicks for the people who like that stuff. 🌻🎈Spook-A-Doodle Half-Way-To-Halloween ’21: Return of the Fallen & King Spring🎈🌻 King Spring: 11/13🎈Return of the Fallen: 12/13👻Fran Challenges: 13/13🐺Svengoolie: 13/13 Watched - New (Total) 1. Riding the Bullet (2004); 2. Cat’s Eye (1985); - (3). Vampires vs. the Bronx (2020); - (4). The Thing (1982); 3 (5). Sleep Tight (2011); - (6). Dark Shadows (2012); 4 (7). The Wicker Man (1973); 5 (8). Varan (1958); 6 (9). The Roost (2005); 7 (10). The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007); 8 (11). The Leech Woman (1960); 9 (12). Sometimes They Come Back (1991); 10 (13). Varan the Unbelievable (1962); 11 (14). 1922 (2017); 12 (15). What Keeps You Alive (2018); 13 (16). On the Silver Globe (1988); 14 (17). The Phantom of the Opera (1998); 15 (18). Nina Forever (2015); 16 (19). Area 51 (2015); 17 (20). Carrie (2002); 18 (21). The Stylist (2016)/Stucco (2019)/He Took His Skin Off for Me (2014)/Zygote (2017); 19 (22). Mark of the Vampire (1935); 20 (23). Tigers Are Not Afraid (2017); 21 (24). Death Walks on High Heels (1971); 22 (25). Maniac (1980); - (26). The Beast with Five Fingers (1946); - (27). Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954); 23 (28). Summer Camp (2015); 24 (29). Man Made Monster (1941); 25 (30). Earth vs. the Spider (1958); 26 (31). Vampyr (1932); 27 (32). The Black Scorpion (1957); 28 (33). The Wild Boys (2017); 29 (34). City of the Living Dead (1980); 30 (35). We Are What We Are (2010); 31 (36). Mercy (2014); 32 (37). Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest (2020); 33 (38). Cell (2016); 34 (39). Sightseers (2012); 35 (40). Trucks (1997); 36 (41). Dead Hooker in a Trunk (2009); 37 (42). BloodRayne (2005); 38 (43). Big Driver (2014); 39 (44). The Body Snatcher (1945); 40 (45). Run (2020); 41 (46). Paganini Horror (1989); 42 (47). Army of the Dead (2021); - (48). The Invisible Man (1933); 43 (49). Scanners (1981); - (50). The Invisible Man Returns (1940); 44 (51). PG: Psycho Goreman (2020); 45 (52). Kindred Spirits (2019); 46 (53). Daughters of Darkness (1971); 47 (54). Cropsey (2009); 48 (55). The Girl (2012); 49 (56). Mermaid Isle (2020); - (57). Hellboy (2004); 50 (58). The Field Guide to Evil (2018); 51 (59). Devil Doll (1964); 52 (60). The Thing That Couldn’t Die (1958); 53 (61). A Good Marriage (2014); 54 (62). The Wicker Man (2006); - (63). Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933); 55 (64). The Shadow of the Cat (1961); 56 (65). Nightmare Detective (2006); 57 (66). The Beast Must Die (1974); 58 (67). The Undead (1957); 59 (68). She Dies Tomorrow (2020); 60 (69). Body at Brighton Rock (2019); 61 (70). Carrie (2013); 62 (71). Gretel & Hansel (2020); 63 (72). I Saw What You Did (1965); 64 (73). Prevenge (2016);
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May 30, 2021 11:11
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STAC Goat posted:Hell, even Carrie’s mom almost certainly got this way from abuse. From what I remember in the book, when they interview Carrie's extended family, Carrie's mom was always leaning hyperreligious even when younger. It got worse when she met Carrie's dad. There was no mention of abuse, though who knows what happened with Carrie's dad.
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May 30, 2021 13:23
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Kazzah posted:I did quite like the part where you learn Loomis accidentally killed that boy Laurie likes, just for its shaggy-dog meanness. That was such an amazing scene. This cop car just zooms in out of nowhere and pancakes some random dude into the side of a van, exploding in flames. You can't blame that poo poo on Michael Myers! What the hell was that cop doing?
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May 30, 2021 14:00
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