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 15. Santa Sangre (1989) Amazon For the first 30 minutes or so, I was wondering how this could possibly be considered a horror film, but it most definitely gets there later on. It starts with a brief scene of Fenix, a naked and seemingly feral man who is being treated in a mental institution, and then goes to an extended flashback to his childhood working in his family's circus. There are lots of clowns and parades and general circus-y stuff, and Fenix's mother runs a nearby temple dedicated to a saint who had her arms cut off. It's all very strange and surreal. Fenix's father is a creep and cheats on his mother with a heavily tattooed woman, and she gets revenge by attacking and mutilating him with acid. He retaliates by cutting her arms off, and then kills himself. Fenix witnesses all of this and is heavily traumatized, and grows up to have... issues. Jodorowsky is a director that I've been meaning to get into for years, but just haven't gotten around to it. I did see El Topo a long time ago, but I remember very little about it other than that it's surreal and weird as hell. This film definitely fits that description as well. His style is so unique that it's hard to compare this to other films in a meaningful way, but think Psycho if it were directed by Fellini and you might be on the right track. I thought this was amazing. I'm still digesting the themes and symbolism so I'm not going to attempt to analyze it, but I think there's a lot to unpack here. People much smarter than I am have undoubtedly done this many times anyway. This is considered a classic by many (and is on two of the top 100 horror lists I'm aiming to finish) and if you like surreal and visually inventive films I highly recommend it. 5 comically oversized elephant caskets out of 5 Total: 15 Watched: Peeping Tom | Cry of the Banshee | The Loved Ones | The Tenant | Get Duked! | Sugar Hill (FC #1) | Ma | Shivers | Onibaba | The Black Cat | Beyond Re-Animator | Short films (FC #2) | The Hunger | The Skin I Live In | Santa Sangre SIDE QUESTS: Edgar Wright's Top 100 Horror: 91/100 Slant Top 100 Horror: 90/100 TSZDT Top 100: 99/100
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Oct 9, 2020 19:55
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17)Occupants salem horrorfest (couple of years old, might be elsewhere. letterboxed says tubi but that seems to be a different film with the same title) This is a movie with an interesting premise-a documentarian and her husband start making a doc about going on raw vegan diet, capture footage of their alternate reality selves-but it doesn't really do anything with it, and has a kind of tacked on spooky ending. There's a neil gaiman short story this reminds me of, though not as clever, and if you're looking for something with alternate realities, Coherence is a way better film. That said if you really want to watch a found footage, you could do worse.This isn't a bad movie, it just almost feels like a pilot to a tv show. You're left with "that's it?"  .5/517/31 haunt,bridge curse,#alive, the strings, amber's descent, papi ramirez vs giant scorpions, black lake, displaced, danni and the vampire, woman of the photographs, witches of hollywood, bleed with me, hell house, death drop gorgeous,A nightmare wakes, leni,occupants
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Oct 9, 2020 19:58
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 #64) Mardi Gras Massacre (1978) Another Video Nasty, this one concerns a man prowling New Orleans for “the most evil women,” so that he can sacrifice them to a Peruvian goddess. Sort of a stepping stone between Blood Feast and Blood Diner, in terms of the competence with the gory special effects being slathered over the simple plot. Unfortunately, this one spend a lot of time on dull police investigation scenes and lengthy exotic dancing performances, killing the momentum built up from the ritual scenes. The lighting is also an issue, often leaving sections of a room blotted out, while the actors are over-exposed (and not in a cool, expressionistic way). The soundtrack is great, using whooshing synths and light percussion to develop a sort of mystical disco vibe. The torsos carved up by the killer are blatant in their artificiality, but thanks to gallons of red liquid and some believable organs on the inside, they're passable enough for the purposes of the film. But as the murders are pretty much the same thing each time (to the point of reusing footage for the gorier parts), the movie as a whole feels like a drag. The performances are weak, the plot is skeletal, the visuals are bland, and there's not real surprises from start to finish, aside from a surplus of disco dancing scenes. One of the less memorable Video Nasties, and frankly, one of the tamer ones, too. If not for the guy pulling organs out through people's stomachs, it probably would have flown under the censor board's radar entirely. Rating: 4/10Watched on digital copy.
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Oct 9, 2020 20:14
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Anisocoria Feldman posted:B. I’m really curious if there were any cuts to the script that explained why the axe was named Otis. The story I've seen is that Bill Paxton wanted the axe to have a specific name so that it would be clear it was literally the same axe at the end of the movie, which I think makes sense. And while I can't find the original interview, I've seen one quoted as saying that he named it specifically "Otis" because during location scouting he came across a homeless man who wouldn't take charity, but let him "buy his name" to use in the movie, and that's a nice enough story I'm willing to repeat it without confirmation.
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Oct 9, 2020 20:41
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20. Midsommar Shortly after losing her sister and parents in a murder-suicide, an anxious young woman joins her boyfriend and his friends on a trip to Sweden to observe the Midsummer traditions of a pagan commune living in an isolated valley. I had to wait a bit over a year to watch this movie because I just wasn't in the right mindset to watch an Ari Aster movie for a long time, and I knew after Hereditary that it would seriously mess me up if I wasn't ready for it. Now having seen it I can say that it's very much like Hereditary in terms of raw, uncomfortable emotion on screen for two and a half hours - much like Hereditary, it's a very good film, but both films are clearly made to make their audiences as uncomfortable as possible as part of the experience. There's definite parallels to The Wicker Man in here - some obvious and some much more subtle - and it manages to feel like both a modern folk horror film as well as a somewhat retro one, with the commune/cult being so isolated from the rest of society (for reasons which become more and more obvious as the film progresses). The scenes of horror are relatively brief, spaced throughout the film's long runtime, but they stick in your head for a long time afterwards, particularly the scene in the quarry. The commune/cult are deliberately presented to seem sympathetic and "in the right", but we're still left with the uncomfortable feeling by the film's end that things will still not end well in the long run for Dani. 4.5 out of 5 21. Noroi: The Curse  A journalist documents his investigations into several different paranormal events, and as he does so he slowly starts to realise that they are all connected and leading to a terrible event. Every time I watch this film, I notice more small details that are all connected to the over-arching story, and it just makes it all the more brilliant. Little things, like the other children in the Psychic TV show segment, or the pigeons, are just presented or left in the background, but it's not until the film's climax that you realise how they were all important and predicting future events. It does climax with a breathless, shouting chase through some woods by someone holding a camera, but unlike certain films *cough* Blair Witch Project *cough* you actually get to see something at the end, and it's suitably shocking. 5 out of 5. 22. Hausu  A group of teenage girls visit the home of the aunt of one of their number, where strange supernatural events occur. I missed seeing this on the Scream Stream last year, so I'm catching up on it now. It's definitely a surreal film, that's for sure, with the weird names and soundtrack and effects that were cheesy even for 1977. It's also very enthralling, if only in that we can't help but keep watching to learn what's going to happen next. It feels more like a child's ghost story than an adult's, which makes sense with what I've read of the film's development, but without the sanitised happy endings that usually get tacked on. One thing I didn't get though was the inclusion of the teacher who spends most of the film making his way to the house, only to get a pre-The Shining Scatman Crothers Special when he finally gets there. 3 out of 5. Letterboxd Totals: 22 15 new (The Abominable Dr Phibes; Session 9; The Curse; Curse II: The Bite; Curse III: Blood Sacrifice; Catacombs; Teeth; Body Melt; Horror Noire; Becky; Maniac; The Last Horror Film; Ghoulies II; Midsommar; Hausu) 7 rewatch (The Grapes of Death; Rabid (1977); The People Under The Stairs; Phantasm; Idle Hands; The Amityville Horror (1979); Noroi: The Curse) Fran Challenges: 1 (Horror Noire)
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Oct 9, 2020 21:03
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Fran Challenge #2: Shorts The Strange Thing About the Johnsons (29:06) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqyQMX4rwHs I had heard a one sentence description of the plot beforehand, and I think it's really fascinating how well Aster handles it. What could come off as a crass one-note joke is really tense and suspenseful. The most insane thing I see this Spooktober might be someone stepping out of the bath directly into their pants. 5/5 My house walk-through (12:00) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWXnt2Z2D1E This was pretty ok, though the repetition made it feel slow. 3/5 I watched the 'making of' video afterwards which is kind of neat but backed by a remarkably upbeat pop song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtJ5rVfHkCA I took a short break to learn how to beat every saw trap, which was recommended next. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2etKJQsGU2k It's kind of a boring video, but key takeaway: remain calm. Beau (6:22) https://vimeo.com/23026704 A man loses his keys, and has to contend with a harsh world while trying to keep himself safe. It's great, but marred by an ending that is goofy for goof's sake. 4/5 Lights Out (2:41) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUQhNGEu2KA A woman prepares for bed but there might be something in the dark. Short and tense. You can see why the idea was crafted into a full film. 4/5 Don't Look Away (8:19) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f3hG-5grlw Teenagers struggle to follow the titular order. It's a tense and clever take, though I think it falls apart a bit in the middle when suddenly people can fight things they shouldn't be able to see. 3/5 Local 58 TV Weather Service (2:33) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M75VLQuFPrY It didn't really work for me, but I can see why it might be effective. 3/5 Tuck Me In (1:00) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNQIdEv-Emo Short and effective, despite an absolutely wooden performance from the dad. 4/5 Under the Stairs (3:06) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOTYuIaYO7U It tries to jam too much into the time it has, and ends up feeling jumbled. 1.5/5 SLUT (20:49) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEqAqrLpRHg The quiet unassuming local girl decides to give up being a wallflower, just as a misogynist killer comes to town. The main girl is great, and overall it works pretty well as a slasher. 3.5/5
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Oct 9, 2020 21:07
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 26. Cutting Class - Dir: Rospo Pallenberg - 1989 - Shudder Well that was something. They really just went ahead and made this "teenage" girl the sex object of every older and younger man in this movie. I like some titillation, dont get me wrong, but jeezy petes every other dude in this movie wanted to lay her. Martin Mull was lucky he didnt witness any of this. Martin Mull is a national treasure btw. Brad Pitt was fine, definitely a young actor just over acting the poo poo out this role, if you told me this movie was a prequel story to his character in Se7en I would believe you. Overbearing father that probably beat the poo poo out of him after his performance in the basketball game. Definite signs of a rough life going on. Everyone else kinda came and went, Roddy McDowell is another stand out as the pervy principal who needed our main girl Paula to bend over constantly in her new cheerleader outfit and then the art teacher who needed Paula to bend over while he traced her spine with his finger while she modeled in a one piece bathing suit for the class. Just a very 90's horror movie from top to bottom. Neat deaths though and the big bad at the end gets taken out pretty satisfyingly. Worth checking out for a young Brad, the aforementioned titillation if older men perving on a young woman doesnt completely turn you off and a couple of neat deaths (i never want to get on a trambopoline ever again).
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Oct 9, 2020 21:08
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 Ok, two parts to this. The first is simple. I’m gonna watch the second Hammer Mummy film tomorrow with Svengoolie so I have to watch the first one but I read the first one kind of remakes the sequels of the Universal ones and they’re all like an hour so I figured I’d watch them too. Simple. The other part is that I haven’t watched a horror movie in 2 days because I haven’t been able to because I’ve been sick with worry. My mother had surgery this morning and I was losing it for days with stress. She’s out and everything sounds good. Some goons helped me elsewhere but I know all of you would have if I had asked. I was going to distract myself watching these but my stomach only just settled down after I heard the news. So now I’m just gonna try and binge them all this afternoon. 6 mummy movies in one day. Can it be done? 19 (21). The Mummy’s Hand (1940) Directed by Christy Cabanne, Screenplay by Griffin Jay & Maxwell Shane, Story by Griffin Jay. Watched on Internet Archive, available on Peacock. Hooptober Se7en: 2/7 2nd films of franchises Well right off the bat this feels more like what I expected The Mummy to be like. I admit my only real familiarity with the character for a long time were the Brendan Fraser films so the original was a surprise to me. It felt less like an inspiration for that and more like a cheap ripoff of Dracula. But this definitely feels more like what eventually inspired those films I do associate with the monster. It seems like its got all the same basic elements. Some archeologists who are kind of down on their luck and desperate, a love interest lady, some comedy side characters, a sinister villain, a trip to the desert, a mummy. An actual mummy. That’s an improvement probably worth a star all on its own. I didn’t really mind the comedy but there’s too much of it and its not really that funny. It would have been fine if it was just a side thing but it definitely takes up too much of the first half of the film. At one point the movie felt less like a horror or adventure film and just two guys doing some bad comedy. Fine idea, bad balance. I did like the female lead. She was kind of fun and strong for a Universal/40s woman role but then unfortunately its a balance problem again because she sort of blends into the background in the second half until she has to play damsel in distress. When I say I like her I guess I mean I enjoyed like those two scenes of in the middle. The leading man is boring but whatever. George Zucco was a solid villain and its kind of striking how much he reminded me of Arnold Vosloo (or I guess it should be the other way around). But again, not really enough of him. Ultimately I guess that’s it. I liked elements of this film but the problem is the balance. Too much comedy and not enough of everything else. Still its a marked improvement on the original, there didn’t seem to be much problematic stuff this time, I can see the makings of better films, and its only 66 minutes. These Universals go down a lot easier when they go by so fast. Still it felt a bit longer if I’m being honest. So that’s not great. 20 (22). The Mummy’s Tomb (1942) Directed by Harold Young, Screenplay by Griffin Jay & Henry Sucher, Story by Neil P. Varnick. Watched on Internet Archive, available on Peacock. “And That’s How I Met Your Mummy.” So I’d heard that there’s a lot of rehash of old footage in these but devoting the first 15 minutes to a recap is impressive, especially when that constitutes 25% of your film. Someone really saved some money on this one. On the bright side I wasn’t exactly looking forward to more of Steve Banning and bootleg Bud Abbott, but I did want to see more of our lady lead. Ah well. The plot of this is really vindictive. Like, some guys accidently stumble on your undead pitbull, you have them no warnings, you still blame them, they clean up their mess, you keep your guy anyway, and you gotta go send someone after their kids? That’s just a dick move. While I’m glad this wasn’t a rehash of the too much not great comedy I also feel like maybe it could have used more? I feel a bit like Goldilocks and truthfully I think this was a perfectly fine straight horror for its time. But it did feel a bit dry and once again a 60 minute film felt not short. Not long or anything, just not quick or easy. Chaney Jr as the Mummy is a bit disappointing, not through any fault of his but because he’s really not given much to do in a rubber mask shuffling around. Chaney’s really good and likable as Larry Talbot so I’m surprised that Universal kept throwing him into these silent monster roles where they don’t give him the same kind of room to do something with it that Karloff had as Frankenstein. Without him really showing out as the Mummy, with a less compelling villain priest, a less interesting setting, another pretty generic leading man but pretty ok leading lady who doesn’t have much to do beyond being a damsel in distress and object of creeper high priest obsession… it leaves Mummy’s Tomb in the same kind of place of Hand. I can see the makings of a really good film but I mostly got an ok one. And boy did it kind of liberally take its ending away from Frankenstein. That was a little awkward to be honest. At least there was no Aunt Robin swerve. Letterboxd List October Tally - New (Total) 1. Eaten Alive (1976); 2. The Hills Have Eyes (1977); 3. The New York Ripper (1982); 4. Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970); 5. Life After Beth (2014); 6. Child’s Play (2019); 7. Blacula (1972); Fran Challenge #1: Horror Noire: 8. Bones (2001); 9. The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1985); 10. Two Evil Eyes (1990); 11. Creature with the Atom Brain (1955); 12. Night Monster (1942); 13. Vampires vs. the Bronx (2020); - (14). Attack the Block (2011); 14 (15). Spirits of the Dead (1968); 15 (16). Tales of Terror (1962); 16 (17). As the Gods Will (2014); - (18). Gothic (1986); Fran Challenge #2: Short Cuts: 17 (19). Tim Burton’s Shorts (1979-1984); 18 (20). Corpse Bride (2005); 19 (21). The Mummy’s Hand (1940); 20 (22). The Mummy’s Tomb (1942);
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Oct 9, 2020 21:34
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 111) Screamtime - 1986 - Prime A decent enough anthology. Wraparound pretty much telegraphs how it's going to end. I'm not sure if it's a me thing or not, but the wrap around feels like it's a completely different filming/quality than the stories as if someone just gathered the short films for stories, slapped a wrap around on it and it was off to the video shelves to make a buck.  112) Crystal Force - 1990 - Youtube This was a slog to get through. Near half of it is sitting around talking and the rest is bad for the era computer graphics sex nightmares. Apparently this film was such a clunker it made the Reviews section on the frontpage. https://www.somethingawful.com/movie-reviews/crystal-force/1/
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Oct 9, 2020 21:37
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6) Jennifer's Body Prime Video - First Watch I'll fully admit that I didn't watch this when it came out because of a lot of really weird biases against the people involved. After all, it stars 'bad' actress Megan Fox from the bad Transformers films (it's obvious now that most of the worst parts of her character was a result of Bay's direction rather than Fox herself, and it's obvious now that she generally gets a whole lot of poo poo she didn't deserve)! It was also written by 'bad' writer, Diablo Cody (Juno was actually okay but Young Adult and Tully are both amazing). So I thought that this challenge was a good time to correct that mistake and actually watch Jennifer's Body. And it was good! It's a really solid horror comedy with two excellent performances from both Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried. It's fairly obvious that the marketing at the time did it no favours, as while that seemed to highlight the personalities of the two main characters as the stereotypical slut/virgin, in the film they are much deeper and nuanced than that. I also think it's really refreshing that at no point during a film about a demon succubus luring men to their death and killing them is any of the actual sexuality shamed in any way. Jennifer's character has a lot of flaws, which are all explored and commented on during the film, but the fact that she's sleeping with guys is never highlighted as one of them. In fact, the fact that she's sexually active is the entire reason she survives in the first place. It was pretty dumb of me to sleep on this one for so long! 4/5 Would make a good double-bill with Under the Skin??
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Oct 9, 2020 21:49
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Glad you got some good news at the end of that worry, STAC! #65) Evil Eye (1975) Dreams of dark mysticism are plaguing Peter Crane, and as they grow more violent, women he knows start turning up dead, and memories of one day's events don't match up with things in the next, he grows increasingly worried. It's a mix of brutal, giallo-like murders (except there's no mystery about who's committing them) with some vague witchcraft trappings. If the lighting and music were more extreme or experimental, there might be some Argento comparison in the making, but the camerawork tends to be lifeless, lending things almost a made-for-TV look at times. The dubbing is about average for this time and level of Italian film, with a variety of accents muddling together without too much concern about whether they fit the characters' respectively given origins or stations. Dialogue is decent, but tends to go off on dull tangents, and the film takes a long time to get to events that it's telegraphing far in advance. When the score (by the usually-fun Stelvio Cipriani) gets chances to stand out clearly, it's not too bad, but it's definitely simplistic, relying on slow progressions of single notes in the lead melodies for a menacing mood. The dream montages are the best part of the film, though, pulling together a bunch of weird footage while the music builds up behind it. There's also a memorable moment with a pallet of bricks hanging from an unstable hook. If this were trimmed down by fifteen minutes or so, there could be some punch to it, but the persistent sidelining of the interesting parts of the plot in favor of high society squabbling, while probably well-intentioned, takes the life right out of it. “I think if the powers of good exist, then the powers of evil do too, and you've got to watch out for them.” Rating: 5/10Watched on digital copy.
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Oct 9, 2020 22:02
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 Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986) "Some folks sure got a strange idea of entertainment." Second rewatch of the season, needed some easy comfort food. This is one of my favorites in the series, it's certainly goofier than some of the other ones but I love the opening scene with potato brain Tommy Jarvis needing to make sure a corpse is hella extra dead, and I enjoy Megan mouthing off at her cop dad so much. 3.5/5SA October Horror Challenge Count: 24/40 First Time Watches: 23/31 Fran Challenges Complete: 2/2 The Berzerker fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Oct 12, 2020 |
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Oct 9, 2020 22:30
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 113) The Cat and the Canary - 1927 - Youtube I was surprised to see this pop on my Youtube recommendeds. With what I watch, it should've popped up much sooner. This film gave us the formula for the old dark house genre. I've seen all the other versions of this, and I think this one's become my favorite version. It's got a good blend of creepy and silly. No wonder this would influence the Classic Universals to come. I highly recommend this one.
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Oct 9, 2020 23:20
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 "Science describes the least of things, the least of what something is. Religion, magic, bows to the endless in everything, the mystery." 26. A Dark Song (2016) This film is so deeply my poo poo. It's a slow, creeping, haunting, moody, psychological, claustrophobic, low budget, character-driven, arthouse adjacent The vast majority of the film is a two-person play, in a small, enclosed space. The film deals with magic and ritualistic ceremonies in a down-to-earth, nuts and bolts, almost contemporary feeling way. It still feels illicit, hidden, and murky, but accessible. It almost feels like a gnostic Rocky film, in which all of the training is leading toward piercing the veil, and contacting angels and demons. There's a great deal of ambiguity in regards to whether or not any of this is actually supernatural or not, which makes the relationship of the couple incredibly fraught and potentially toxic on multiple levels, and also opens up multiple readings of the film. I'm going to rattle off a few films, and they're not connected in terms of events necessarily, but there's a strong thematic family resemblance, so if you like any of these you'll probably enjoy A Dark Song. Noroi, Baskin (before it goes all Baskin), The Blair Witch, Hellraiser, The Babadook, and The Exorcist. 5/5 would summon Satan again Total: 26 Queer Interest: 13 Fran Challenges: 2 Horror Noire, Short Cuts Scream Stream: 4 Countries Visited: 16 USA, Hungary, Portugal, Vietnam, Georgia, Switzerland, Nigeria, United Kingdom, Lithuania, Germany, Finland, France, Spain, Japan, Monaco, Ireland Debbie Does Dagon fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Oct 9, 2020 |
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Oct 9, 2020 23:39
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#32: 1962 King Kong vs Godzilla After the awkwardness of Godzilla Raids Again, Toho has figured out how to turn Godzilla into a series; drop the existential horror, crank up the monster spectacle. In GRA, the Godzilla vs Anguirus fight was just another way for a city to get hosed up and it was finished halfway through the movie. Here monkey vs t-rex is the main event, and the entire plot is about setting that fight up. There's a first abortive fight halfway through that ends when King Kong realizes he cant beat Godzilla. And then the big throwdown at the end after King Kong has been supercharged with electricity. You know a movie isn't trying to inspire existential horror when an electric King Kong is being airlifted in under a bunch of weather balloons. I don't know if King Kong vs Godzilla's depiction of "natives" is more racist than the original King Kong, but it's certainly in the running. They are all played by Japanese people in blackface complete with jheri curl wigs, and they instantly agree to serve as porters when offered cigarettes. But on the other hand, they are never driven to violence by their instinctive desire to possess the first white woman they see. We're gonna need some race experts to weigh in on this. The other issue is the King Kon suit. It looks pretty bad. The arm extensions are awkward, the mouth is malformed, the chest and hands have a weird lumpy texture, and the eyes are crudely painted on. But if you can look past those two equally problematic issues, King Kong vs Godzilla is a lot of goofy monster fun. 32 Movies Watched: Dracula, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, King Kong, Son of Kong, The Bride of Frankenstein, Werewolf of London, Dracula's Daughter, Son of Frankenstein, The Mummy's Hand, Son of Ingagi 1, The Wolf Man, The Corpse Vanishes, The Ghost of Frankenstein, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, Son of Dracula, The Mummy's Ghost, The House of Frankenstein, The Mummy's Curse, The House of Dracula, She-Wolf of London, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Godzilla, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Godzilla Raids Again, Five Short Films About Bigfoot2, Abbot and Costello Meet The Mummy, Horror of Dracula, Psycho, King Kong vs Godzilla
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Oct 9, 2020 23:46
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18)Last Thanksgiving Salem Horrorfest It's a throwback slasher wherein a bunch of racist pilgrim descendants kill and eat people who don't celebrate thanksgiving with their families. It's modeled after post halloween and friday the 13th low budget slashers, and it's surprisingly fun. I really expected something more tasteless than what it was. It is pretty low budget, but not like super low budget there's at least one excellent sequence. I have a couple of complaints in that there are some parts in the finale that aren't well...I dunno if blocked is the right word, but where and when characters are is a mess. Think that probably has to do with editing. It also looks and has the aesthetics of 80s/90s which is all well and good, but it takes place now and characters have cell phones, so it lacks the ambiguity of say It Follows, and is like reverse anachronistic. And I don't want to oversell the film. This isn't It Follows, or The Guest, but it is more thoughtful and well executed than some of the garbage on Tubi, or even some of the bad old slashers it's inspired by. Definitely reccomend checking it out, and it could be a future thanksgiving classic .5/518/31 haunt,bridge curse,#alive, the strings, amber's descent, papi ramirez vs giant scorpions, black lake, displaced, danni and the vampire, woman of the photographs, witches of hollywood, bleed with me, hell house, death drop gorgeous,A nightmare wakes, leni,occupants,last thanksgiving
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Oct 9, 2020 23:50
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Franchescanado posted:Fran Challenge #2: Short Cuts  Tainted Love (1985; dir. Peter Christopherson; 06m33s) I had a couple of ideas already for which films I wanted to put in this block, but I wanted to start off with something relatively somber to get me in the mood, and it had been a while since I'd seen this. The original video is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and the single on which this song was originally released is now recognized as the first AIDS benefit record. So, yeah, somber. Cutting between scenes of a man preparing an overly-sweet meal and his wheelchair trip to a hospital bed, this is hardly subtle, but it's consummately artistic in its expression. Marc Almond (of Soft Cell, whose cover of the Gloria Jones original repopularized the song, before Coil covered it themselves) makes a cameo as an Angel of Death figure in black leather. Vocalist Jhonn Balance's delivery uses off-rhythm intonations and plaintive tones, joining the low-toned bells and abrasive synth stabs for a deeply melancholic atmosphere. Given the band's own position in queer and gay experimentalism (musical and otherwise), it's all the more tragic, considering how many friends they were losing to the epidemic. A powerful piece, and with both of the founding members now passed away, one that moved me to tears by the end. Rating: 10/10 My house walk-through (2016; dir. nana825763; 12m00s) The first one to come to mind when the short-film challenge was announced. This film guides us through hallways of a Japanese house, with things changing subtly (and not-so-subtly) on subsequent cycles. Captures the feeling of being a trapped spirit incredibly well, not just through the thematics of that plot, but also with the nature of the things displayed in the house, and the way it's captured. It's camcorder grade footage, showing us water-damaged walls, paper walls with the paneling eaten away, dirty bathrooms with cracked mirrors, unlit paper lanterns, and so on. And small details are what this film is built on. The phrase “This is the longest hallway in my house,” is repeated numerous times (along with a few other recurring phrases), reinforcing the main story idea while echoing the locked-in situation of the guiding spirit. Other family members are referenced, but never seen in person. One doll collection is rotted away, another is well-preserved. Multiple altars are dotted throughout the hallway, but are clearly neglected. We are told that sutras are audible, but we cannot hear them ourselves. There is no escape, only learning to live with it, to live in it. Thanks for shoving a Ritz crackers ad in the middle of the video, Youtube. Rating: 9/10 In a corner (1998; dir. Takashi Shimizu; 03m24s) A trial run for the Ju-on films, this short focuses on two Japanese schoolgirls tasked with cleaning up trash. One cuts her finger, the other goes to get bandaging, and returns to find the school's animals killed, and her friend missing. Something is watching from a dark corner of the yard, and it turns out to be something very familiar from the ensuing decade or so of J-horror. Thing is, it's not alone. Decently acted and shot, with a well-sustained creepy vibe in spite of the inexplicable events. Rating: 7/10 KoKo's Haunted House (1928; dir. Dave Fleischer; 06m14s) A blend of animation and live action for this silent short, which has two cartoonists (brothers Max and Dave Fleischer) pitting their creations against each other. One has a house full of horrors, the other has KoKo the Clown. Intrepid KoKo and his doggy pal wander through the house, with its seemingly endless hallway of doors, encountering scare after scare. When things start slowing down, the house-maker puts a few gag props to work, further tormenting the cartoon creatures. A great exercise in creative spookiness and the Flesichers' fun with blending live and animated gags. Rating: 8/10 The Other Gods (2006; dir. Mike Boas; 05m44s) A fake 'lost film' done in the style of a '20s animation piece, adapting one of Lovecraft's shorter stories. The music is a bit overblown (though that's not out of character with what it's emulating), and the animation is too stiff and regular (in spite of ample film grain filter) to really land the '20s animation vibe, but it's still a fun effort. Text card inserts provide the story and dialogue, and once the story hits its climax, the real inventiveness (and obviousness of the computer animation) comes out to play. Some neat blending of elements, and it's thankfully short enough to keep the faults from overwhelming things. Rating: 6/10 Betty Boop's Hallowe'en Party (1933; dir. Dave Fleischer; 06m25s) Autumnal goofs galore as a scarecrow heads to a party at Betty Boop's place, meeting up with the squeaky-voiced host, her friends, and a beefy party-crasher. Some fun animation loops show Fleischer's clever mind at play, while a few bawdier gags are slipped in alongside the tamer stuff without fuss. The party-crasher gets his comeuppance thanks to Boop's holiday spirit and decorations, and the old wall-crash silhouette gag gets a neat twist. Rating: 6/10 The Fearless Vampire Killers: Vampires 101 (1966; dir. Michael Mindin, Jr.; 10m19s) A tie-in short for Polanski's horror comedy, this is basically a one-man show with a highly-decorated professor giving audiences the run-down on vampires, their dangers, and their weaknesses. Clips from the full film are used to pad out the run-time, but the main body of this short gets in some good jokes of its own (like garlic not working to deter Italian vampires). Good material to throw on between films in a horror marathon, but not substantial enough to make it worth watching on its own, unless you're really in the mood for some vampire jokes. Rating: 6/10 Outer Space (1999; dir. Peter Tscherkassky; 10m27s) Not at all recommended for those with photosensitive conditions. A hypnotically disorienting piece in black and white, following a woman into a house, and trailing her diffident path through the dark interior. Distortive effects lend things a nebulous vibe, and then the very fabric of the house starts to come apart, helped along by increasingly incoherent video treatment. Crashing items and cut-up vocals soundtrack the events, until the film practically eats itself, leading into a comparatively peaceful bit of melodic drone. And then we're back outside, looking in, with still more destruction and distortion to consume. Mirrors are not this woman's friend. Rating: 8/10Total time: 60m66s
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Oct 9, 2020 23:51
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Oct 9, 2020 23:58
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10. The House by the Cemetery (1981) A family moves into a house by a cemetery, despite being told explicitly not to... with spooky results. An Italian horror move that checks all the boxes: a nonsense plot, overacting, a terrible dub, LOUD tension, closeups of eyes, an attempt at being mysterious, women who decide to forget their bra in time to be menaced, 0% subtlety, insensitive men. I really can't say it's good. It takes a lot of time to kind of get nowhere. When the monster finally appears it looks cool and the practical effects are very good but it really just amounts to one scene that's not any more than any other slasher. 3/5 Skrillmub fucked around with this message at 00:42 on Oct 10, 2020 |
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Oct 10, 2020 00:34
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13) Fran Challenge 2: Various shorter pieces I didn't want to just pick over other people's lists, but I also don't really have much knowledge of short films. I picked one of the shorter MR James adaptations so as to minimally violate the spirit of the rules, and also decided that I'd go a bit over 60 minutes to make up for the "main event" being over 30. The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (36m) A clergyman professor and his student find clues left by a wicked priest of the 15th century that lead to a hidden treasure. Like all the BBC's 1970s adaptations of James, this entry is quality. It captures the antiquarian horror perfectly and maintains an air of quiet tension as it builds to a terrible revelation. Tuck Me In (1m) My only exception to the "no dupes" rule. It intrigued me enough to take a look, and I wasn't disappointed. It takes a single smart idea and presents it concisely. The Whistler (11m) One of a mighty four short films available on Shudder UK. It's in the traditional "adventures in babysitting" style and not hugely adventurous with it, but there's a few nice shots in there. Weyes Blood - Everyday (5m) Music video, but it qualifies. Natalie Mering and friends retreat to a log cabin for a poppy 70s ballad about romance and flirting. Then the axe murderer shows up and massacres the cast while Mering continues to perform oblivious to the carnage. Oru Velliyazhcha Rathri (13m) I think I win the "most recent film" award for this one; it premiered on YouTube nine hours before I watched it. It's a Malaysian short with no subtitles, but it's easy enough to follow. It does nothing new, but it's very effective and smooth. I recommend checking it out even if you've already completed this challenge. Total watch time: 66 minutes
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Oct 10, 2020 00:56
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#33: 1963 Blood Feast About 45 seconds in, when you first see the killer, I had to check to make sure this movie was actually made in 1963. When I saw that weird looking guy with the spray painted grey hair holding a piece of "gore" on his knife that was obviously just a piece of red rubber, I thought this has to be a parody. This must've been made in like 2016. And as the movie continued, I kept getting that feeling. But no, this was actually made in 1963. Wikipedia calls it the first splatter film, which is loving amazing. It's the first splatter movie and it also serves perfectly as a parody of splatter movies. Once I had established to my satisfaction that Blood Feast actually was made 57 years ago instead of 5 years ago, I started to think of it as a so-bad-it's-good movie. But as it went on I started to get the vibe that a lot of the humor was intentional. The acting is bad, but I feel like they knew it. They lean into the bad acting with bad lines like "Reading about all these murders really takes the fun out of things" delivered flawlessly terribly. And the ending is perfect. Check out Blood Feast, its a dumb goofy fun time. 33 Movies Watched: Dracula, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, King Kong, Son of Kong, The Bride of Frankenstein, Werewolf of London, Dracula's Daughter, Son of Frankenstein, The Mummy's Hand, Son of Ingagi 1, The Wolf Man, The Corpse Vanishes, The Ghost of Frankenstein, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, Son of Dracula, The Mummy's Ghost, The House of Frankenstein, The Mummy's Curse, The House of Dracula, She-Wolf of London, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Godzilla, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Godzilla Raids Again, Five Short Films About Bigfoot2, Abbot and Costello Meet The Mummy, Horror of Dracula, Psycho, King Kong vs Godzilla, Blood Feast
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Oct 10, 2020 01:08
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# 7 KWAIDAN (1964, Japanese theatrical) An anthology of Japanese ghost stories in the style of a David Lean epic. Based on a collection of tales by author Lafcadio Hearn, "Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things". Anticipating the long 183 minute runtime, I broke up each of the four stories into separate viewings, and this I feel had a positive impact on my experience with the film because it is undeniably slow-paced. Here we have a film that basks in its cinematography and matte paintings, unapologetically taking its time. It's beautiful to look at. At the same time, I sympathize with those who would find it a patience-testing experience. There are also at least three versions. The American cut eliminated an entire story which was my favorite - The Snow Woman. There is an international cut which apparently trimmed this story quite a bit. The original Japanese cut, available on the Criterion Channel and what I watched, is considered the complete version. Kwaidan is on par with the book in quality. It transports you to a pre-modern time when the woods and the wind was occupied by spirits. Ghosts were simply a fact of existence like a sunset or ocean wave. You stay inside at night at all costs. If not, be sure to pray. Lovely, lovely film. Haunting not so much on a visceral level but conceptually. Here we have ghosts in the true sense - lovers separated by tragic mistakes, entire groups of people (clans, families, nations) snuffed out by war & conflict - lingering in the human realm because they can't let go of what happened. These ghosts do not viciously attack their victims but play mind games with them, taunt them, and, in the Snow Woman's case, make bargains that are dangerous for them. GRADE: A *** # 8 Fran Challenge #2 - Short Cuts Not sure how many challenges I'll get to but this is too interesting to pass up. Bluebeard (1901) - 10 minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg_nWW-TgFg  A solid production. Great set pieces and doesn't hold back on the violence - the source material, after all, is quite violent. It looks like a well-produced play with basic special effects such as superimposition. Acting is flamboyant and fun. I'm excited I got to see such an early short in film history especially when my background on early 20th century film is lacking. Earlier this year I read a compilation of fairy tales called The Classic Fairy Tales by Maria Tartar. It contained essays about various European fairy tales often with a feminist perspective. One thing that stuck with me was the traditional interpretation that Blue Beard is a morality tale about the consequences of wives not obeying their husbands. Obviously, the real issue seems to be Blue Beard's chamber of corpses, not his wife's curiosity which uncovered them! * Autumn Harvest (2014) - 17 minutes https://vimeo.com/95991278 Oddly enough, here is another short film about a bearded man who murders people. . The Norwegian shoreline where he resides is barren, bleak, and not-so-beautiful. The coloration is washed out and ugly. How literal to take the events in the film are unclear to me. The man seems haunted by a woman who covers her face. At the end, in parallel to Leviathan (#4 in my horror challenge this year), a sea creature violently rips out of his body and finishes him off. Is this monster the man's guilt? Is the empty landscape a reflection of his soul? Don't ask me. * Munchausen - 15 minutes https://vimeo.com/156131637 I like both of Ari Aster's A24 releases (though I prefer Midsommar) so this was an appealing option. He does a great job capturing the superficial tranquility of Leave It To Beaver suburban life. The soon-to-be college kid has the most generic bedroom decorations possible to a point where it is humorous and unimaginable in today's world. The type of horror in this film boils down to lopsided human relationships - the mother is weirdly clingy to a point where she cannot say goodbye to her son and takes matters into her own hands to stop him. Indeed, control-freak parents - even creating sickness in their kids - may be a horror down your street, not in an awful nightmare. *  Coda - 9 minutes https://www.criterionchannel.com/coda The art style in this film brought to mind detailed drawings in chalk, very vibrant and minimalist. Characters are faceless and show emotion in their gestures. In one scene, a crowd gathers around a dead man - each gesturing solemnly in various ways. Death appears and takes the man on an odyssey, reviewing his life with flashes of surrealist imagery. Very melancholic. * The Black Case - 13 minutes https://www.criterionchannel.com/the-black-case Shadows; secrets; sickness. Horrors from the perspective of a child under quarantine. Go figure. A little girl is locked away in a prison-like hospital with hellish Catholic art on the walls. She hears a baby crying. A nurse and a doctor race to cover up a potential scandal of their making. They must deal with the consequences, and the little girl is a witness to what must be done, though she does not fully understand... Another all-too-human horror not outside the realm of possibility.
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Oct 10, 2020 02:21
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14. Mon mon mon monsters Based on the title and the cover image on Shudder I was expecting a goofy small monster movie. Instead I got, like, Taken with a classical tragedy "dig several hundred graves" perspective on revenge, but the hero is a flesh-eating monster and the villains are high school students. This is coupled with the story of an outcast boy learning what it takes to make friends and survive in society. I'm still thinking about this movie and I love it more every time I do - the scene I clipped above has like three really fun surface level things going on but the full motivation didn't really hit me until I was reflecting on it in the shower the next day. There's also a gleefully nihilistic ending. Please watch this, just keep in mind it's a little more of a rough watch than the package suggests.
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Oct 10, 2020 02:41
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 Christine, 1983 There's been plenty of evil car movies over the years and Christine is probably one of the most well known of the bunch. This one very much taps into the 50s nostalgia of the 80s with the car being a 1958 Plymouth Fury. There's no reason on how or why the car is alive and evil, it just came out of the factory that. Flash forwards to 1978 (no idea why that year, maybe that's when the book took place, too lazy to look it up) and some dweeb sees the old rusty car for sale and gets obsessed by it. He just have to have it and starts repairing it. Friends and family gets pushed to the side and he goes from a dork to a complete uncaring rear end in a top hat. The car becomes all that he care about. It is a fairly character driven movie without too much straight up horror. But when we get to the obvious horror scenes, then they loving rule. I mean, a car with a mind of its own. You just know we are going to get some nice violent action out of that. I'd say this is up there when it comes to classic 80s horror.
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Oct 10, 2020 03:17
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6. Predator I decided to try to watch some of the movies I own on physical media, especially ones that have sat around for a few months since I bought them. Still a rip-roaring good time. I love how stupid the first part of the movie is. Arnold and his gang of Incredibly Discrete Totally Not Assassins slaughter an entire camp of faceless “rebels” in the most gratuitous way possible and for some reason get miffed when it’s all an intelligence op instead of a Good Guy hostage rescue. The fictional “cabinet minister” was probably installed by the CIA anyway after they overthrew the democratically elected government for being too lefty. Everything is so ludicrously macho and over-the-top it’s impossible not to read it as a satire. Preddie shows up and picks them off one-by-one in the beefiest of 80s slashers. Of course his noble Hunter’s Code nonsense gets thrown out the minute he feels he’s in danger and he ends spraying-and-praying plasma bolts over half the forest. It’s only after Arnie runs out of toys that he’s willing to go Mano a Monster with him, keeping some massive blades and a wrist nuke around of course. Even intergalactic hunters end up being cowards and sore losers (more commentary?). This movie also looks much better than I expected on UHD.
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Oct 10, 2020 03:58
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I was worried that the specter haunting Something Awful would never leave. As the months rolled on and we approached October, I was getting pretty concerned that I’d miss the challenge which is always a ton of fun. Then Jeffery announced that we were one very easy step away from getting rid of him. So I decided to hold out and write my reviews in the hope that we’d be rid of it. As it has been for every year, my challenge is 31 movies at the rate of one a day. All movies are new to me. I have been watching movies and writing reviews at the one a day rate, but you’ve got to get a dump here first to catch up to the date. I will do any extra challenges posted to the thread, but they will not count toward my 31 film challenge. I thought about stacking something extra this year, but I couldn’t exactly go out to thrift stores to look for DVD box sets. I considered doing an alphabet round, but there’s too many films on my list to be able to do that and cover what I want to get to. I will be watching all of the remaining Hammer Frankenstein and Dracula movies this year which is going to be a big chunk of my month. Sorry Dracula 1972AD fans, that was the first Hammer Dracula film I saw and I even watched it projected. Now the witching hour is upon us and the dead stir in graves. Let the feast of Samhain commence! October 1 - Hereditary First movie of the month and my first long standing backlog item filled. Going in, I remember people talking about the first half being super slow and there being a gruesome car accident. I know there’s stuff about family secrets. But that’s where I come to an end. I’m kind of concerned on the pacing; I’ve watched a lot of movies that try to walk the line of “atmospheric” and wind up just being turgid with lots of slow shots of nothing in particular. Time to start watching.  Okay, people who said this is a slow movie are stupid. It is a deeply uncomfortable movie, but it’s not slow. A well off family that is already on edge is pushed over the brink by a series of tragedies. But maybe there’s something sinister behind it all... If this wasn’t filed under horror, the first hour would feel like a dysfunctional family drama. Everyone having deep seated resentment against everyone else, percolating and unwilling to do anything about it. This is a family that should not be together, but they are anyways. When you know it’s a horror movie, though, then every action and statement takes on a sinister air. So when the mother of the family talks about her abusive upbringing at a support group, you can feel that there’s something worse behind it. When the young daughter wanders off, there’s a threat implied in her isolation. Knowledge of the genre makes Hereditary work because it gives the film a sense of impending doom. That turn at the halfway mark plunges the movie firmly into horror and in a way that feels familiar but still has its own spin. Yeah, we’ve seen this kind of story before but it feels like there were four different horror stories taking place and they all fell out into one at the very end. The fact that this isn’t just an enormous mess is amazing and I think it gives the movie some texture that a straight up demonic possession story wouldn’t. My biggest complaint about the movie is I feel like Alex Wolff isn’t able to carry his role as the son. He’s not able to cry convincingly and the film calls on him to despair a lot. There’s a lot of broadly played emotions in Hereditary and that works from the other actors. He sounds like someone imitating an infant at the moments of high drama. Hereditary is a film all about mood and that’s what works in it. There was a lot of “Oh, that’s creepy” going on in this movie and it was really effective that way. I actually want to watch it again so I can pick up on the more subtle things in it. (As an aside as I type this up, IMDB has after 25 years abandoned the us.imdb.com URL which is still what I habitually type to go there. RIP us.imdb.com .) October 2 - Frankenstein Created Woman Back in the Hammer saddle again. Last year I think I watched ten Hammer horror movies but for whatever reason there was only one Frankenstein film and no Dracs in them at all. I’m actually a bit concerned that some of the movies I have blocked out are ones that I’ve seen before and I just don’t remember watching them. But I know I haven’t seen this one which people often point to as a high point in the Frankenstein franchise, so I’m looking forward to it.  Aw, that was disappointing. It was a big step up from The Evil of Frankenstein which was just a mess, though. This outing has the problem of basically abandoning the foundational premise of the series and it winds up feeling like a left over ghost story script that they shoehorned Baron Frankenstein into. The Baron has set up shop in a village where he’s working with a doctor to cheat death. He’s moved on from reanimating the dead to trapping souls. His young assistant is wrongly accused of a murder that was committed by the local rich jerks and is put to death, so Frankenstein uses the opportunity to trap the assistant’s soul. His lover drowns herself after the execution and Frankenstein leaps on the chance when he has a perfectly good soul and a reasonably good body. Then the things you’d expect to happen occur. I got nervous when the movie reached the point that they were putting a man’s soul in a woman’s body. Was it time for some good old fashioned transphobia? Nope! It’s not even a “kinda progressive for the late 60’s” situation because they don’t even engage with the concept at all! The woman is still herself, she just talks to her dead boyfriend’s severed head which is commanding her to kill. Why do it at all if you’re not going to do anything with it? It might as well have been his ghost haunting her. And that’s why the movie doesn’t feel like a Frankenstein film. There is no “creature” here (though she’s referred to as one by the local authorities). Frankenstein doesn’t create anything. It doesn’t even feel like he’s tampering in god’s domain. This is a ghost story, not a Frankenstein story. As always, Peter Cushing is great. When I started working my way through the Hammer catalog I thought it would be Christopher Lee that would be the best actor, but the further I get from those initial Dracula movies, the more if feels like Lee isn’t doing much (I know about how low his Dracula films get and that’s coming up for me this month). Cushing, on the other hand, is always giving a great performance. He makes even the weaker movies worth watching. So all in all, a movie that felt like a middle of the road gothic picture that tried to sneak a Frankeinstein in to get some attention. It’s really beginning to feel like the only Hammer Frankenstein movies you need to watch are Curse and Revenge. October 3 - A Page of Madness Time for the first of three silent movies on my list for the month. These have been on my list to watch for a while and what is October for if not for catching up on your backlog. I know that this is a Japanese film set in an insane asylum and is supposed to have striking visuals.  A janitor in an insane asylum loves a woman who can’t stop dancing. She was his wife and he tries to reconnect with her despite her madness. His attempts are stymied by the doctor as well as some of the patients. But he dreams of possibilities. Alright, confession time. At half an hour in I had to look up a plot synopsis because I could not figure out what was happening in the movie. There’s no interstitials, and the version I watched didn’t even have a score. Some of the scenes were long, silent conversations with no context at all. Turns out that I was missing a large chunk of the movie: originally, it was screened with a storyteller filling in the plot.. So I was getting half the experience. Visually, A Page of Madness feeds forty years ahead of its time. The editing in some scenes feels like French New Wave rather than something from the 1920’s. It’s got some amazing images and beautiful moments. But in the end it’s still half a film for me. I’d definitely watch it again in a presentation closer to the original intent because I could see some impressive performances. I might as well have watched a highlight reel, though, since it was all without context. Fran Challenge #1 - Def By Temptation I meant to get around to this movie last year and couldn’t squeeze it in. But now is a perfect opportunity to check out this movie, the first film in the Ernest Dickerson horror trilogy (the other two being the excellent Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight and the visually great Bones).  Something is stalking the nightclubs of New York, seducing dishonest men, and killing them. Joel is a wannabe preacher from a small town who is questioning his life and heads to the big city to get some experiences. Joel meets a woman named Natas and sparks fly. You know what the scariest phrase in horror movies is? “Writer/Actor/Director/Producer.” If the lead actor wrote and directed the film, you’ve got some red flags. And that’s James Bond III in this movie. It’s the only film that he worked on in any position other than a bit acting part, too. Supposedly, most of the direction was actually performed by Dickerson and I can kind of see that in some parts. There’s a lot of clunky parts, too, and those I’ll blame on Bond. Someone could write a paper on the portrayal of sexuality in this movie. Setting aside that the woman is a demon from hell there to enslave men, there’s a lot of sex scenes but no female nudity. There is full frontal male nudity, though. There’s also some bondage, rough sex, and anal going on. It’s like the devil is into anything that’s not vanilla sex. Combine that with some obsessively Christian themes in the movie and you don’t have to dig very deep to tell that some writer/actor/director/producer might have some issues. It’s kind of weird, but the Skinemax style sexy first half of the movie is much better than the spooky monster second half and I think that’s on the script. There’s one interesting kill in the second half and a lot of goofy stuff. There’s also something where the government has been tracking monsters killing people and not doing anything about it, but they do visit a psychic for help. The second half just doesn’t make a lot of sense and starts spinning while the first half where the succubus is ensnaring terrible men is focused. I think I’m left with a positive opinion of Def By Temptation, but it’s a borderline one. I’d say you didn’t need to watch the second half, but Samuel L. Jackson plays Joel’s dead father and doesn’t show up until late in the film. October 4 - It’s Alive That’s one of the all time great movie posters, isn’t it? And despite seeing that poster so many times, I still hadn’t watched the movie. Well, time to rectify that.  That was nothing like I was expecting and was pretty wild. I mean, I should have expected something kind of subversive from Larry Cohen, but this went hog wild. It would make a great double feature with The Stuff. The Davises are a typical suburban couple expecting their second child. The mother gives birth to a monstrosity that kills everyone in the delivery room except her. Then the Davises deal with the public shame of having a child that wasn’t “right” while the infant kills its way across the city. The infant isn’t around very much in the movie. That’s good since the puppet looks terrible even when they try to cover it up. Instead, It’s Alive is about people reacting to the birth. The public’s hunger for the gory details, the doctors’ scientific curiosity, the pharmaceutical company exec’s need to cover up, and the family breaking. It changes the tone of the movie from a creature feature to something different. This is a deeply misogynistic film and yet I also think that misogyny improves the movie. By being so deep into how hard it is on the man for child birth to go wrong, it feels like it’s subverting that. This is a movie chock full of toxic masculinity and it comes across like its tearing it down because it’s a subversive movie in other ways. Either way, It’s Alive is deeply embedded in the attitudes of the early 70’s. There’s a scene where a bunch of cops are holding drawn guns on an infant and I’m thinking, “This was probably too crazy to be believed in 1972…” It’s Alive has plenty of rough edges. None of the acting stands out and Cohen’s never been a visually striking director. I still thought it was pretty good. A quirky movie that isn’t subtle, but is a lot of fun. October 5 - Dracula Has Risen From the Grave Obviously.  Now that was more like it. After Frankenstein Created Woman turned out to be a ghost story with the Baron hanging around the periphery of it, I was concerned I was getting into the “flailing wildly” era of Hammer productions. I know that a lot of what I’m going to watch this month are going to be the sloppier productions, but it was great to have a solid Dracula film first. Dracula was killed one year ago, but the superstitious villagers still fear him. A bishop doesn’t take kindly to this and drags the village priest up the mountain to perform an exorcism on Castle Dracula. The priest gets a knock on his head letting some blood flow into the vampire’s mouth and before you know it Dracula has risen from the grave. The Count isn’t happy about someone barring the door to his castle with a big cross, so he heads off to get some revenge. The bishop’s niece and her atheist boyfriend get wrapped up in that. Christopher Lee is back as Dracula and I can kind of feel his weariness over the role since the Count feels a lot more passive in this movie than he did in previous outings. He mainly stands around and mesmerizes people with his bloody eyes. He does get a few amazing scenes where people are trying to kill him, though. Really the weakest link in the cast is the boyfriend. He’s dull as dishwater, delivers lines in a pretty flat way. I assume he was cast because of how he looks with his shirt off and I’m not going to begrudge that in a series of films full of heaving bosoms. I’m also not fond of the “atheist turns to Christianity when they encounter the supernatural” story arc that you see turn up in horror movies. Despite that, this movie is a lot of fun. It delivers on what you want to see in a Dracula movie and does it solidly. There’s some cool vampire antics and women in nightgowns being seduced by the vampire. I think Dracula: Prince of Darkness was the better film in the series, but this isn’t a bad pick. One more bad thing I have to mention: there’s some absolutely atrocious day-for-night photography in this movie. It’s not day-for-night so much as day-for-slightly-dimmer-day with clear shots of the blue sky and obviously natural lighting. That’s something I’ve encountered in Hammer films before and it always looks terrible. October 6 - The Addams Family(2019) I had something bigger on tap for tonight, but I spent the day running around and it had gotten late before I knew it, so I decided to go for something simple. Popping open a few streaming services, I went, “Oh yeah, they made an Addams Family animated movie last year!” which I think sums up everyone’s reaction to it.  It’s really hard to separate this from the original television series and compare, but I’m going to try. It would be really easy to slam this film as “They didn’t get The Addams Family at all!” There’s plenty of other reasons to slam the film, though. Morticia and Gomez are chased off by an angry mob on their wedding day. After hitting escaped mental patient Lurch with their car, they settle into the long abandoned insane asylum he escaped from (?) to start a new life and raise a family. Years later, Wednesday is entering a teenage ennui phase, Pugsley is not taking his lessons seriously to prepare for a rite of manhood coming up, and a home decorating reality show star is beautifying the neighborhood by making everything the same. I’m going to get the nice things out of the way first and that’s most of Wednesday’s story. Her rebellious phase consists of things like getting a unicorn hair clip and going to public school. One of the few times in the movie I said, “Okay, this is cute,” was when she built a Frankenstein apparatus and revived the frog she was dissecting in biology class. But that’s a good example of where the movie missteps, in a way similar to a lot of low tier animated movies, because instead of just reviving her frog, the lighting shoots out and revives all the frogs in the class. Start with a funny gag, and then smother it to death by extending it way too far: it’s the way of bad children’s movies. Now that’s out of the way: imagine the most blandly generic animated movie about a spooky family and that’s what this film was. The movie takes the obvious path of having a moral about being true to yourself. It’s literally the first thing that anyone who was adapting The Addams Family would come up with. And it never goes any further than that statement. The movie takes the direction that the Addams aren’t just eccentric and morbid, they’re actual supernatural monsters. Also, they gave Thing an “eye” by having one appear on the Apple watch he wears. So terminally unfunny, boring story, and bland to look at. It really made me wonder why they even bothered reviving The Addams Family if this was what they were going to do with it. Fran Challenge #2 My first thought was trying to do this with all nineteenth century horror. Then it occurred to me that I had already watched The Haunted Castle (the very first horror film) a few years ago as part of one of these threads. If I’m not going to include that, if felt like going very early horror wasn’t right. Then it occurred to me that I watched an animated movie yesterday, so why not animated horror shorts? La Noria (13:00) - A boy who has recently lost his father finds monsters in his house that are taking bits and pieces of it away. I get the impression that this kickstarter backed film exists solely to be an animation showcase. It has some impressive animation. And everything else about the movie is awful. There’s a turn halfway through that doesn’t make a lick of sense in the context of the previous scenes and solely exists to try to be emotionally manipulative. And I say “try” because it’s so ham handed and transparent that it totally fails. Foxed! (4:38) - A girl who was abducted by foxes and forced to work in their mine, finds her way back home. The youtube title for this movie included “Best Ever Animated Horror Short” and I think everyone here knows that’s a huge red flag. This movie was fine, but as the four minute run time suggests, it’s pretty slight and once it gets going you know exactly where it’s winding up. Again, the animation was pretty good. It’s really feeling like I’m encountering the cartoon equivalent of special effects artists directing one movie. Yeah, it might wind up with some neat effect, but they tend to not think too deeply on all of the other elements of the film. And I’m getting movies by animators specifically made to show off their animation with no consideration of anything else. So, time to switch gears. I put “30’s cartoon ghost” into google and watched things I hadn’t seen before. The Skeleton Dance (5:32) - Spooky scary skeletons send shivers down your spine. Oh the irony of jumping back in time to avoid shorts that exist solely as an animation showcase to this one which exists solely as an animation showcase. This is a 1929 film and there’s only some music and sound effects so I suspect that it was intended to be screened both at the modern cinemas and those who hadn’t upgraded to show those new-fangled “talkies” yet. Skeletons come out, they dance, audiences are impressed by drawings moving on screen, the end. It’s a good example of early animation if you want to see that, though I think it’s not much more than that. The Haunted House (6:41) - One Micholas J. Mouse goes to a spooky house where he finds a ghost that makes him entertain a skeleton party. Also, racism. So this wound up feeling like the leftover bits of The Skeleton Dance with a marketable character in them. The two are from the same year so I don’t know who was first and who was second. When I was growing up, the black and white Mickey Mouse cartoons were never shown so I missed out on them and now I’m not a Disney fan so I never bothered going back to watch them. And this is making me think it was okay to skip. The Al Jolson impression proves that cartoons pointlessly referencing pop culture is as old as the form itself. I think this is the point where this challenge started swerving into self-harm. The Friendly Ghost (8:00) - Casper is the damned soul of a child who did unspeakable acts. He is cursed to wander the earth until he makes a single friend. However, meeting Casper causes people to confront their own mortality and become aware that that there is an existence beyond death and that realization drives them mad. Will Casper ever make a friend? I actually had to check if this was a theatrical short rather than something made for television and it was the very first Casper cartoon. Of course, Casper is a one joke character who somehow dragged that single joke out across decades. This short would be fine in a vacuum, kind of middle-tier 40’s stuff, but in the context of so many Casper cartoons and they’re all exactly the same as this, it gets dragged down. Toe (7:22) - A stop motion animated version of the old ghost story that most people here are probably familiar from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. That is one gross looking toe. Finally, one of these shorts that I’d say was genuinely great. It looks beautiful (and clearly was inspired by Eraserhead) and hits the mood and beats of the story perfectly. It’s exactly as unpleasant as you want it to be and if you showed it to a kid they would definitely freak out which I think is the standard you have to apply to all adaptations of folkstories. (BTW, there’s less than 6000 views on this one which was at the creator’s youtube channel. Seriously, this was super good and I’d like to see them get some attention for it.) [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZR4dbb68rQ]Memoria (7:20) - A guy on a date remembers his relationship with a stripper he murdered. The animation on this Danish film is rough. It's more animatic than animation and it feels like they're animating on the 8s. It's also very poorly told. The line there was my take away, but I did the foolish thing and scrolled down to the comments and it was all people trying to figure out what the movie was about. Ghost Wanted (7:13) - A young ghost answers a "ghost wanted" ad for a house to haunt, but first he has to pass the interview. Hey, a Chuck Jones cartoon I haven't seen before! And I can tell why. This is a pretty weak WB cartoon. Most of the jokes are puns like "The Saturday Evening Ghost" and there's not a whole lot of incidents happening. The jerk boss ghost doesn't even get his comeuppance in the end. Scrappy's Ghost Story - You remember the Scrappy cartoons from the 30's, right? Well in this outing he tells a spooky story to his baby brother. The story is about a ghost who has the obligatory musical number. Also racism because 1930's cartoon. The ghost's song mainly consists of "I'm a ghost! WoooooOOOOO!" October 7 - The Lighthouse I found The VVitch to be interesting, but flawed. I appreciated the effort that went into making it as natural as possible, but felt that the film’s structure wasn’t quite right (in fact, I think I said that I would have wanted another half-hour of it). The Lighthouse follows the same path, so is this when Robert Eggers comes together for me?  An assistant comes to one of the most remote lighthouses in the north Atlantic for a short stint. The keeper is a grumpy old man who won’t let him near the light. The two of them clash, commiserate, and clash again. And the isolation brings madness with it. I missed seeing The Lighthouse in theaters last fall. After watching it I feel a bit disappointed in that. This would have been an incredible movie to see in the theater. I think I’ve mentioned it before in these threads, but black and white film making is not taking your digital camera and turning down the saturation. Pretty much every single black and white movie I’ve seen from the past ten years is just poorly shot; everything looks flat and pale. Shooting in black and white requires totally different approaches to lighting and design and cinematography. The Lighthouse gets it right. It’s easy to talk about using old lenses and film stock, but that’s the stuff around the hard work that’s not visible to get the movie to look this good. It’s been said more times than this, but Pattinson and DeFoe are amazing. It’s a movie about two damaged personalities colliding hard in a place where they cannot get away from each other and that doesn’t work without some amazing acting. I feel like The Lighthouse did everything The Witch did, only it was executed perfectly here. The same uncertain perspectives. The same breakdown of the group. The same drawing upon legend as texture. The biggest difference is that I think The Lighthouse handled time better than The Witch did. The Witch was often disorientating in ways that felt it was because there were scenes missing; like there were pieces missing from a relatively straightforward narrative. The Lighthouse feels like it’s intentionally bending perception. October 8 - Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed So I was disappointed with the last Frankenstein outing and as I’m reaching the end of the 60’s, I am getting a bit concerned that there’s no good Frankenstein left. But I must see this through to the end and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (obviously).  Okay, that was a good Frankenstein movie. I don’t think it was as good as Revenge, but it delivered on Baron Frankenstein being a totally evil rear end in a top hat to everyone he meets until his hubris finally catches up with him. There’s a lot of darkly comic stuff, Cushing is absolutely great, and there’s even a creature in this one. For this outing Frankenstein has moved to London to live among the most British people who ever Britished. He’s there to get the assistance of another scientist that also pursued the secrets of life and death, but that doctor was driven mad. Frankenstein blackmails a new doctor at the asylum along with the doctor’s wife into assisting him with his plan to abduct the scientist and transplant his brain to another body. This is a much more gruesome film than Hammer had been getting before. There’s severed heads, some not very well done bloody make up, corpses erupting from the ground. There’s also a totally unnecessary rape scene where the Baron takes the wife that is never mentioned afterward. That scene should have been cut since it adds absolutely nothing to the film, it’s just in 1969 October 9 - Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? The Criterion Channel just added this today and I've been meaning to watch it forever. I've heard some mixed things about this over the years, though. Will it turn out to be a showcase of two classic actresses or a mess of a movie? Still there's something appropriate in watching a movie about domestic abuse today.  Holy gently caress, that was amazing. It's not flawless, Victor Buono was not on the same level as Crawford and Davis and his part in the script wasn't great and I think it stumbles pretty hard at the very end, but Bette Davis being an irredeemable monster to Joan Crawford was the best. This would have made a great pairing with The Lighthouse as it's a mirror of that film. Baby Jane is darkly comic movie with moments of suspenseful madness while The Lighthouse is suspenseful madness with moments of dark comedy. Baby Jane Hudson was a child vaudeville star in the style of Shirley Temple. Blanche Hudson was her little sister living in her shadow. Twenty years later, their roles are reversed as Blanche is the biggest star in Hollywood while her sister's films can't even get distribution. A car accident ends Blanche's career leaving her paralyzed from the waste down. The two live together for decades with Blanche stuck in her upstairs room and Jane tormenting her. Jane has plans for a comeback, though, and she just has to make sure her sister can't do anything. The script is so good with too many brilliant lines to even try to quote them. I feel like Bette Davis as Jane was getting to have more fun with the role as she goes so over the top I think she achieved orbit. Joan Crawford was solid, but she's there mainly to act as the target of Jane's aggression and that makes her come across as a lot more passive. I'm short on time but there's a lot to talk about in this one. The changing nature of entertainment as a theme, the self destruction of child stars, the infamous real-life feud between Crawford and Davis that fueled the movie, those incredible meals. I had a great time with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. Now to catch up on a lot of posts in this thread...
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Oct 10, 2020 04:37
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14: Hocus Pocus I hadn't actually seen this one until last year, so I don't have the nostalgia for it that a lot of people do. It's certainly still likable though, makes SJP look hot which is some real movie magic. Spends a lot of time discussing the main character's virginity for a kids movie. 15: The Boy Bit of a pleasant surprise. I knew about the twist but it was still a pretty good one. Nice to watch something with some production values again. This was a lot better than I expected, and man oh man is Lauren Cohen pretty
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Oct 10, 2020 05:04
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7. Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Roger Corman produced Freddy Kruger ripoff do-wop musical (???) sequel to the kind-of subversive, kind-of classic original. Weirdly, one of the first horror sequels to be "about" the trauma of the earlier movie on the survivor (eat your heart out Rob Zombie and David Gordon Green!) although this is an especially weird choice given that the killer is someone entirely different and all of the characters are played by different actresses. In fact "weird choice" is pretty much the M.O. for this movie given that its villain is a Rockabilly guy with a drill guitar who only shows up outside of dream sequences in the last fifteen minutes, which are also a dream sequence. Also contains possibly the least narratively justified toplessness in movie history. This is barely a movie but I had a good time. 3/5  8. Ringu (1998)  Probably my biggest horror blind spot, as it's hard to get excited to watch a mystery film you already know every beat of. Undeniably, this couldn't have as much of an impact on me as the American remake as I was already familiar with both the mythology and the Big Scene. That said, there's a tonal mastery here that's maybe missing from its flashier, more intense American cousin. I particularly like how well this film evokes that "working at 2am" feeling with its characters engaged in hour upon hour of videotape autopsy, pointedly not trying to think about the ticking clock over their heads. Also love the pacing in this version as it has the sense to wrap things up very quickly after that final big scare, a problem in the new version. It's a subtler, more mournful film and I think better for it. Verbinski's closet reveal at the beginning was definitely better though, gotta give him that one. 4/5  9. The Leopard Man (1943)  The other Jacques Tourneur/ Val Lewton production about a killer who is possibly a giant feline where you never actually see anything happen. This is unfortunately their weakest collaboration that I've seen, with an underwhelming mystery story at its heart and a romance subplot that never really grabbed me. Where this comes alive of course are those trademark scenes of frightened women, wandering through dense shadows, aware of danger but unsure where or what form it will strike in. Those of you who've seen Cat People or Night of the Demon know how good Tourneur is at this, and the lengthy opening in particular is haunting. It's well worth watching, but I feel like this might have been on par with other films from this pair if it had ditched its protagonists and been more about the community's collective reaction to the killings, as the unique New Mexico setting is the film's other big selling point. 3.5/5 
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Oct 10, 2020 05:25
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15. Cold Skin - The Lighthouse, but with less madness and more Brits gunning down the natives. And the mermaid lives with them. It's okay - pretty scenery, but I wasn't really in the mood for morose British guy narrating stuff and that's like a third of the movie. And mermen are still kind of boring. If you want lighthouses and fishfucking, though, this is definitely one of the top three movies released since 2017 that you should watch to satisfy those desires.
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Oct 10, 2020 06:05
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#12: Murder Party (2007) Christopher's an average, boring dude with nothing to do on Halloween. He stumbles onto a mysterious invitation to "Murder Party" with the only information being an address and instructions to come alone. At the last minute he decides to be bold and go check it out, only to discover that the invitation is a bit more literal than he realized. Murder Party feels like a lived experience. Everyone from the collective has their own drug of choice, artistic medium, motivation, and baggage. They're all both brought together and kept apart by their shared anxieties and competitive insecurities, and going completely apeshit is maybe the healthiest thing any of them do over the course of the night. Even after their situation explodes outward, the entire rest of the world is at best oblivious and at worse indifferent. It's life or death to the main characters, but just the artistic process to everyone else. It's also extremely funny. Lots of great setups, lines, and physical gags. Not everything hits, but a lot of it does. Art? Challenges (2/2): Movies Watched: 1. #Alive (2020), 2. Misery (1990), 3. Stay Alive (2006), 4. Blacula (1972), 5. The Wailing (2016), 6. 30 Days of Night (2007), 7. Dead Alive (1992), 8. Diabolique (1955), 9. Viy (1967), 10. Oculus (2013), 11. The People Under the Stairs (1991), 12. Murder Party
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Oct 10, 2020 06:36
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#12: Beyond the Door/The Devil Inside Her Did they have Markov chain generators in 1974? Because this movie plays like it was procedurally generated. The beginning, with the Devil addressing the audience and then a guy making some kind of bargain with said Devil to live longer, is simple enough, but things really get weird when we meet the family at the center of this possession tale. This is one of those movies where the baseline portrayal of human behavior is just off, like it was made by aliens or robots. The young son drinks from cans of pea soup (and has a painting of a pea soup can on his wall), the daughter drags around over a dozen identical paperback copies of Love Story, from which she has apparently learned swear words, the father is a record producer, and the mom is Juliet Mills, who is very suddenly expecting a baby, and things start going wrong from the moment she's spitting up blood in the bathroom. The story never gets terribly complicated, but every dialogue choice or bit of stage direction or editing just raises questions. There are several points where the image just freezes for a second, and it's random enough that I wondered if Shudder was acting up, but it's apparently a thing. There's scenes with the kids' toys moving on their own and such, and the boy having an invisible friend, but it's never clear how this ties into the possession. There's also a scene of a hand towel catching fire in a bathroom, but nobody actually sees it or reacts to it. Everyone being very obviously dubbed helps add to the weirdness, though obviously that's nothing unusual for Italian horror. This is also an Exorcist ripoff, enough so that the producers had to settle a suit with Warner Bros. Yes, we get the projectile vomit, and the possessed mother gobbing up green sludge at multiple points, and she does the head turn, etc. Unfortunately the film does kinda slow down in the later scenes where it's just the demon mom being confronted, and also I was getting a little tired so my attention drifted (which did allow one good scare to hit extra hard.) That said, it does rally long enough for an extended scene where the father is accosted by street performers, most prominently one man playing a woodwind instrument with his nose. This goes on for literal minutes. As far as surreal horror goes, I wouldn't put this on the same level of artistry as something like House, or even The Visitor (to which it bears a certain resemblance). But it's just loopy enough that it's worth a look. If you're going to rip off a recent blockbuster you should at least have the decency to go completely off the deep end with it.
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Oct 10, 2020 07:52
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 12. The Addams Family/The Addams Family Values Nostalgia might be clouding my judgement, but I absolutely loved this eminently charming pair of movies starring the most functional dysfunctional family in film. I was surprised by how well they hold up. I didn't remember how horny these films are, though. I loved all the clever little morbid jokes, and the sight gags (e.g. the little man in the train) really bring it to another level. The cast is fantastic. I can't even imagine anyone else in these roles. Most notably, Angelica Houston is absolutely regal and self-possessed. Her portrayal of Morticia epitomized grace and femininity to me when I was younger. Raul Julia is perfect as the good-natured, mischievous Gomez. Christina Ricci is so good as Wednesday, especially considering how young she was. I could literally go on. Everyone is great. They give a lot of heart to these comic caricatures. The Addams Family Values is a solid sequel, although its production budget seems to have been smaller (Thing, in particular, looks really bad compared to the first one). The comedic aspects are a bit more broad and schlocky in this one. While I preferred the first one, the second one made me laugh out loud a little more. Debbie is such a fun villain. The rap at the end manages to be even worse than the rap at the end of the first one, so that's a feat. Fran Challenge #2. D Is For Deloused (4:33) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_8BQzB9TZA&has_verified=1 Robert Morgan's extremely moist, waxy aesthetic always gives me just the right amount of heebie-jeebies. This is exactly the kind of repulsive body horror nonsense I desire. The Cat with Hands (3:31) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUATv_B2Otg This was genuinely disquieting. It uses its three minutes to create an effective narrative that's genuinely scary. Many of the shorts I attempted to watch couldn't do as much despite being three times the length. Madame Tutli-Putli (17:15) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGyLP6R4HTE This short had a very interesting style. I loved how they composited very expressive eyes on the cartoony characters. It starts off like a Pixar film, but quickly veers into an unexpected direction. It’s very suspenseful in parts. The Quiet Room (28) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7193218/ This has been on my Shudder list for a while. I tend to like films that explore mental illness, and I liked that it starred a black gay protagonist. There are also cameos by Katya and Alaska of Rupaul’s Drag Race fame. While it is nicely shot, the acting is really rough. The story is unremarkable. While it was only 28 minutes, it somehow felt longer than a lot of full-length films. The specter looked cool. Skin tight (15:42) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt1UrUjFNGw I don't know if I'm just overly picky or something, but, once again, the acting was not great. The short builds tension pretty well, and the premise is really interesting. I’d like to see more movies about racism in a horror context, but the execution could have been better.
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Oct 10, 2020 08:03
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Dave Made a Maze (2017) Dave made a maze out of cardboard in his living room but gets lost. His friends go in to rescue him but this is a labyrinth full of deadly traps and monsters. It's a really good concept and one that can be done effectively on a modest budget. There's a lot of creativity in the set design and it's often very funny. I liked the forced perspective room and puppet sequences My main issue with the film is it's a bit too self-aware. I think it would have benefited from leaning more into the horror side and taking things a little more seriously. It's a fun watch though. Watchlist: Tenebrae; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Body Melt; In Search of Darkness; The Monster Club; Twilight; The Beyond; Scream Blacula Scream FC#1; Raw; The Invisible Man (2020); Hotel Transylvania; a bunch of shorts FC#2; Sharknado; Vampires vs. the Bronx; Dave Made a Maze (total: 14ish) bitterandtwisted fucked around with this message at 10:52 on Oct 10, 2020 |
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Oct 10, 2020 10:48
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 16) Paganini Horror (1989) Trailer Seen on: free on Tubi and can also be found on YouTube A female rock band is looking for a new hit song to revitalize their fortunes. When they come into possession of sheet music for an unperformed song authored by composer Niccolò Paganini - who signed a deal with the devil for fame - they decide to use the song as their next hit. While shooting the video for the song at a mansion with a dark secret, they become trapped by devilish forces and have to figure out how to survive the night. The Wikipedia article for the film has a lot of info on its development, and it's kind of comical - director Luigi Cozzi planned this movie based on the release of a more serious film on Paganini that was supposed to be successful, but the original producer bailed and the one that eventually ended up producing it wanted the gore removed. They made the poster (shown above) before the script. Cozzi also had actress Daria Nicolodi contribute ideas to the story. As the Wikipedia article summarizes, "In his book Italian Horror Film Directors, Louis Paul retrospectively noted that 'nobody likes Paganini Horror, Cozzi included.'" It really feels like it was messed with, because Paganini Horror is all over the place - it does have its moments but Cozzi was clearly throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck. The girls' band performs what sounds like a legally distinct version of Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name"; they namedrop Michael Jackson and "Thriller" as the inspiration for their video and song. There's a dream sequence that turns out to be them filming the video, which works a little, I guess. Oh yeah, Donald Pleasance is in this for five minutes and, man, does he look rough. There's one or two moments of gore and grue here that are pretty good but mostly people are just stabbed to death or die off-screen. In the last 20 minutes, Cozzi tries to introduce some sci-fi elements into the film involving music, mathematics and time loops but it's too little, too late and not integrated well.  17) The Dark Side of the Moon (1990) Trailer Seen on: free on Tubi; can also be found free on YouTube Look out folks, we have an absolutely unneeded title crawl here! "The year, 2022. The maintenance ship SPACECORE 1 is on a routine "refab" mission. The refabs are fixers. Their purpose is to repair nuclear-armed satellites orbiting high above the earth. Due to the atomic capabilities of these satellites, refabbing is considered dangerous... very dangerous." So anyway, the crew of Spacecore 1 runs into some trouble when their systems short out and the ship drifts over to the dark side of the moon. While there, they run into the shuttle Discovery, which disappeared after a splashdown in the Bermuda Triangle years before. With few options facing them for survival, they dock with the shuttle to get parts for repairs...but something else is waiting for them on the shuttle as well. Stop me if you've heard this one before: a spaceship crewed by a bunch of everyday space truckers docks with a strange ship that has reappeared after being mysteriously gone for a long time and has brought Hell with it. Hey, it's Event Horizon like seven years before Event Horizon! Well, not really, but it definitely has the same vibe. The premise behind this one is really silly (the shot at the end of the film and which I believe now adorns the DVD boxes was likely conceived first and they built the movie around it), the science is nonsensical (the shuttle is gigantic on the inside and has rooms filled with salt water, dead fish and seaweed, and machine guns are liberally used inside of spacecraft with no ill effects on the environment), and there are some really goofy design choices here (the Spacecore's computer AI is...represented by a sexy android woman sitting in a chair in the computer room). And yet...I actually kind of enjoyed this. The actors are decent (including Robert Sampson from Re-Animator and Joe Turkell from The Shining and Blade Runner), the spaceship miniatures and gore effects are pretty good for a low-budget, direct-to-video film, and the movie works really hard to have a creepy atmosphere, and kind of succeeds in spots. Sure, it's DTV fare, but it's on the upper end of that kind of entertainment, as far as I'm concerned.
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Oct 10, 2020 11:17
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Entry #6: Movies 13-15 13. The Cleansing Hour (Damien LeVeck, 2019) [Shudder, 1st viewing] An exorcism movie that blends horror, comedy, and social commentary into one exciting and gory experience. The movie integrates modern technology and social media into the presentation and story, allowing for a slightly different and fresh setting and perspective. The characters may be a little plain, and some of the events were not exactly shocking, but they are well acted and the story is engaging enough where I felt myself actively rooting for them. There are some really cool effects, original and creative moments, and sustained periods of tense excitement. And at the same time, there are some genuinely funny moments that don't rely on making fun of the movie itself or the horror genre as is so common. One of the ways this was done is by switching from the center of the action to the various viewers at home watching their broadcast. It allowed both for those tension breaking moments of humor as well as some variety from the single room where most of the movie takes place. While I think the secondary story and commentary is the weakest element, it's at least something a little different and the well done horror parts certainly make up for it. 4/5  14. Scare Package (Courtney Andujar, 2020) [Shudder, 1st viewing] People like myself and a lot of folks in this thread are pretty much the target audience for this movie, as anyone who loves horror will likely enjoy this anthology. The frame narrative is set in a horror-themed video rental store and it sets up the rest of the shorts in the movie quite well. There are a lot of pieces to the anthology, something that seems risky since just one poor segment one can break the momentum, but I personally found them all good to great. Each one is a blood-soaked tribute to various types of horror movies. The meta style of making fun of horror is pretty tired, something the movie even acknowledges, but it's very well done here and by people who seem to genuinely love the genre. What I liked as well was the fact that the frame narrative is not only interesting but actually has a solid start, middle, and fantastic conclusion rather than existing solely to serve as a setup piece. In fact, the conclusion is possibly the best part of the movie. Overall this was way above my expectations. The buckets of blood, the fantastic synth soundtrack as a tribute to horror music, and the frequent actual laugh out loud moments all equated to one of the best anthologies I've seen in a while. 4.5/5 One specific spoiler thought: The Corey Feldman bit nearly killed me.  15. The Babysitter: Killer Queen (McG, 2020) [Netflix, 1st viewing] For its positive and negatives, this movie is pretty much the same as the first movie. Picking up two years after the first, The Babysitter: Killer Queen maintains the stylish, creative, and comedic horror themes of the original. If you enjoyed the first, then you will likely be able to enjoy this one, even if it's not quite as good. By staying strictly on the same path as the first, some of plot points and the kills can be predictable, but the charming style is persuasive and enjoyable. There is an attempt to add a little more depth to the characters and story than the original, which won't win any awards, but the effort at least makes the sequel feasible and exciting enough. It's almost as much of a funny, blood-soaked , charming movie as the first, and the soundtrack is killer again. 3.5/5 Number of movies: 15 Number of first-time viewings: 13
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Oct 10, 2020 12:01
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Darthemed posted:
Interesting tidbit, going from folklore Italian vampires aren't effected by garlic. Makes sense when you think about it.
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Oct 10, 2020 12:22
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 Midsommar I’m sure a lot has been said about this movie, but this is one I judged by the cover and was more accurate than I hoped I would have been. Drawn out and heady. This one was a real chore to get through and did not get me in the Halloween spirit . /5 Moon Stalker An absolute shameless F13 pot boiler . Pop keeps his maniac son , Bernie, chained up in his camper. Occasionally, he will let him out to kill campers, but when Pop dies of a heart attack Bernie is unleashed. This happens near a camp for camp counselors and you know the rest of the movie. For reasons unknown , after Pop dies, Bernie trades his burlap sack hood and straight-jacket for an outfit of a flannel shirt, aviators and a giant cowboy hat. This happens so sudden that for a minute I thought perhaps there were two maniacs unknowingly stalking the same camp, which is a movie I want to see now. The end features a scene that is sort of memorable only in how it’s so dumb it’s funny. Everything else is a rip off. A score that sounds a lot like the Halloween theme, the F13 plot and even an axe through the door ala The Shining It passes the time , but very bland /5 Seedpeople Continuing my unintentional ‘aliens taking over the human body’ theme is this feature I found randomly on Tubi. The Full Moon opening gives you an idea of what you’re in for and far exceeds those expectations. A geologist travels back to his home town of Comet Valley to investigate a meteor that has crashed to the earth. He finds this meteor has brought seeds with it that are turning locals into emotionless zombies. This movie uses practical effects that are a hoot to watch . The story is engaging and this was entirely a ‘comfort’ movie. /5 Fatal Games In this one , a javelin throwing maniac is killing kids at a high school which trains kids for the Olympics. The strange premise is added to when it’s learned a doctor is experimenting with injecting the kids with steroids. Since everyone is killed with a javelin , the kills quickly become monotonous and cheesy. The ending is pretty tacky and got a groan from me. This movie seems more interested in the ample nudity than in any tension or scares. /5Have seen; The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), The Thing From Another World, They Don’t Cut The Grass Anymore , Midsommar, Moon Stalker, Seed People, Fatal Games Total ; 8 Dr.Caligari fucked around with this message at 12:58 on Oct 10, 2020 |
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Oct 10, 2020 12:54
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Slipped a bit with reviews yesterday, should be caught up now. 114) Curse of the Aztec Mummy - 1957 - TubiTV My soft spot for non-Egyptian mummies is no secret. One of the things I love about the Aztec Mummy series is Popoca is not generally a villain. First film, he was a little confused, the rest he's up against the real villain. Throw in some luchadores and this is a good watch.  115) Gammera the Invincible - 1966 - TubiTV I'd seen the original so I was curious about this one because I vaguely remember sitting through a Gamera film where he wasn't so much a friend to children everywhere. It's okay enough on the scale of things.  116) The Sorcerers - 1967 - Prime I haven't come across many who've seen this interesting gem. Here we have an elderly couple using medical hypnosis in an experiment to experience what another person feels. Of course this is going to take a wrong turn as the film goes on. Apparently the original screenplay was much different than the finished movie and with some legal kerfluffle regarding the original writer getting demoted to an 'idea by', the original screenplay was novelized in 2013. I need to track that down. I thought this was a bit of fresh air compared to how much of the usual supernatural entries were going on at the time. I do recommend this.  117) The Atomic Brain - 1963 - Archive.org Also known under its other title Monstrosity, this one despite being standard B movie drive in fare, does touch on some timely considerations. Here we have a wealthy elderly woman determined to cheat fate, funds a mad scientist to transplant her brain into a youthful body. He's already had success transplanting animal brains into a human body and is close to the human to human transplant. The women candidates for the transplant are from other countries under the premise they're applying to become new servants for the elderly rich woman. The elderly woman is presented as pure nastiness, and the other women are depicted as sexualized parts which fits for how they're percieved by the others. The elderly woman's only interested in being young and sexy again. Being how desperate we've seen rich people become to hold onto their wealth, it's plausible that if it was possible to swap brains and keep going, they certainly would and anyone poor would be looked at as potential body resources for the right fee. While some parts of the film don't quite mesh such as brain sizes between species in relation to skulls, and the score's not quite a good fit, it is an interesting and uncomfortable at times watch. I do still smirk at the cat getting a spot in the credits and on the poster.  118) Werewolves on Wheels - 1971 - TubiTV Werewolves and bikers, that's a natural combo up there with peanut butter and jelly. However with this film, the ratio's off. The biker aspect of the film's quite good. It's where the werewolves come in where it's a bit disappointing. They look fine, it's just you don't see them until the near end, and we only get one werewolf tearing around on a motorcycle. I'd like to think I'm not being unrealistic in my expectations in watching a movie with the title Werewolves on Wheels, that there should be a scene or two of a full biker posse in Bark at the Moon mode tearing down a road full throat howling. This is the equivalent of ordering ice cream, expecting a nice decadent full fat ice cream and ending up with generic ice milk using skim. Apparently the MPAA spit a fit over the amount of gore and objectionable language used in the film, so I'm not sure if there's an edited version and unedited version out there. Despite my gripes, the film's not bad though I wasn't a fan of the cat sacrifice.
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Oct 10, 2020 14:02
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 Halloween III: Season of the Witch - rewatchWatched on the Scream Stream. Saw this for the Challenge last year and fell in love. It was a blast seeing it with a bunch of folks who weren't expecting the nutso moments and absolutely loving them. I can't imagine how much of a bummer it would be to watch this with someone who doesn't appreciate the particular brand of fun that is on display here. It may not be the best Halloween movie (key word: may) but it's certainly my favorite. It's just fun. Fun, fun, fun. Lots of inventive ideas, lots of great moments of gore, lots of Tom Atkins, lots of Halloween atmosphere, lots of weirdness. Sure, it probably isn't paced the best and yeah there may not be that much tension in the story but come on who cares when the film is this delightful? 10/10 Gremlins 2: 10/10, The Green Slime: 6/10, American Movie 10/10, Earth vs. The Spider 6/10, The Abominable Dr. Phibes: 8/10, Halloween III: 10/10
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Oct 10, 2020 14:17
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11. Southbound Watched On: Hulu I was looking forward to watching this one for the challenge and was not disappointed. This movie does the Trick r' Treat style of interweaving anthology segments, but a lot gnarlier. Honestly, they felt more like vignettes than full complete stories, but that's not a bad thing. Each segment is like a brief window into the current protagonist's situation, dipping out after it feels like its work is accomplished. Each of the segments aren't super clear or coherent, but they are absolutely DRIPPING with atmosphere: creepy cults, upsettingly prescient 911 operators and the overwhelming feeling throughout all the segments that you can't escape from the horrible situation that you are trapped in.
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Oct 10, 2020 14:38
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