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DrVenkman posted:As for Zombie's 'Halloween', even without comparing it to Carpenter's version it doesn't really work at all. While I appreciate what Zombie wanted to do he just handled it so so badly. There's not a lot that actually WORKS in that film, even Malcom McDowall is wasted. It has more in common with House of 1000 Corpses than Devil's Rejects, but all Zombie's movies are about the American tendency to take serial killers and turn them into heroes or funhouse attractions. Halloween is less of a remake than it is a satire of the culture surrounding it. The added subplots all contribute to deliberately cheapening the original. The media report overly sensationalizes the killings, Loomis writes a cash-in novel, the first half of the movie feels like a bad TV biopic and the second feels like a bad remake/homage (which, of course, it is). The original is about Michael Myers as an alien, and the remake is Michael Myers as a celebrity. But the thing about explaining his insanity as a result of his crummy childhood is that it's exactly the type of deliberately unsatisfying Freudian nonsense that ended Psycho. I think Zombie was deliberately emulating Psycho, going for that anticlimactic effect, and in how both constantly shift audience identification from one protagonist to another (including the killer). So the movie is quite brilliantly written. The only problem is that, unlike Halloween, Psycho, or the Devil's Rejects, it's not funny or scary, so it just doesn't work. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Jan 3, 2009 |
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Jan 3, 2009 22:15
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 I don't want a huge chunk of black bars, so here's a spoiler warning for this post.I'm a big fan of the original Halloween and a Rob Zombie fan who considers the remake nearly as fascinating as the original, but for entirely different reasons. Original Michael had motivations, and was not all random. That's a myth. He takes a mask from his sister's lover, and then he stabs her to death, while nude, with a knife. You don't need to be a freudian psychologist to understand what's going on there. The cause of his psychosis is never explained in either movie. People say the remake explains it, but that's untrue. He begins H1 killing animals and already hosed up. What we're seeing instead, in both films, is the result of the pre-existing psychosis. It causes him to fall in love with his sister and to 'punish' adults for doing adult things (like taking his sister away from him). It basically causes him to be retarded, a manchild with too much strength. In Carpenter's Halloween, the victims are normal people who don't really deserve to die. They're just being regular teens, growing up, so you ask "why is Michael being so terrible?" H1 is completely different, because we want the victims to die. They're irredeemable assholes, child abusers, bullies. Everyone who dies in the movie deserves it according to slasher-movie logic. And, being slasher fans, we understand and agree with that logic. In Carpenter Halloween, Michael is an alien. In H1, he's an alien and he's the hero of the story. He kills these awful characters that nobody likes, so obviously he's the hero. And it's because he's psychotic and alien. H1 is all about how slasher fans come to identify with and cheer for the killers in horror films. It's the same idea Zombie explored in both House of 1000 Corpses and Devil's Rejects. That is, up until Danny Trejo's death. Trejo tells him to keep fighting, and to persevere. He's asking for it! But he's also likeable, and he hasn't done anything really wrong, by slasher standards. Trejo's death is where Michael goes too far, and the next third of the movie is told roughly from Loomis' point of view. He's turning Michael into a mythological celebrity by cashing in on the murders, but he's afraid of him. Loomis is a non-psychotic person who is fascinated by Michael's power and tries to turn him into a celebrity (again, like a horror fan). I think that the movie is ridiculing him for his trashy non-fiction book and his over-the-top proclamations. Finally, the last third is told from the victims' point of view. Michael is no longer understandable or likeable. He's just an alien, and we start thinking that he deserves to die. The ending is brilliant in that way, because it's this iconic shot of Laurie shooting him in the face, screaming, and then the scream merges into the sound of her crying as a baby. There you get the two big themes of the movie, all in one scene: -We, the audience, love killers. They are our celebrities, the way Ted Bundy is a kind of celebrity. By killing Michael, Laurie ascends to become the new heroic killer of the story. -The act of killing (and of dying) reduce you to being child-like. People who die in the movie will scream, and cry and crawl like babies. Michael kills them, like in the original, because he dislikes grown-ups and everything they represent. Killing them brings them down to his primal, instinctual level. Laurie is brought down to that same level when she is forced to kill in return. H1 is not a perfect movie. I think it has an extremely brilliant script, but Devil's Rejects messed with our concepts of good and evil far more effectively. H1 tries to tell the Rejects story in reverse (what happens when a likeable killer stops being likeable?) and it doesn't quite get us to sympathize with Laurie enough at the end to make that work. But both movies are still about childhood vs. adulthood, the fascinating alien-ness of insane people, human brutality vs. suburban domesticity, the origin/importance of "boogeyman" myths and so-on. It's partly Zombie's fault for choosing such iconic source material, but you need to accept that the remake is a totally different style, in order to see how similar they are in terms of meaning.
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Apr 26, 2009 19:53
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Ape Agitator posted:Laurie may be virginial but she's not innocent despite what the thesis says. She shares marijuana with her friend while they're riding around in the red car. At the time they're being pursued by Myers in his stolen wagon. It's after this that he goes on killing. The difference between the "final girls", in F13 Part 2 and Halloween, is in how they survive: one evolves into a mother figure, while the other regresses and starts crying about the boogeyman. Jason is about punishing immaturity, while Michael is about punishing puberty. They both target teens, but for entirely different reasons. Jason is a kid who wants people to grow up. Michael is a kid who hates grown-ups.
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Apr 28, 2009 17:01
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H1 was a clusterfuck, but it was a fascinating one. H1's only flaw was that it was entirely an intellectual exercise, with little emotional engagement. I don't expect H2 will be any less of a fascinating mess, and certainly not 'worse'. Final Destination will probably be identical to every other movie in that series though. And wasn't the point of the first movie to be a big postmodern joke about horror movies being predictable? I'm going to reward Rob Zombie because he's taking chances and doing something unique, even if it's unpopular with most horror fans. Good or bad, H1 doesn't resemble any other movie I've seen, and that's worth ten bucks to experience.
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Jun 19, 2009 22:35
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HankMcCoy posted:gotta say, i'm digging the H2 trailer. Is it vastly different looking the then original series? yea, but that's not a bad thing. The worse part about the original series was the strict copying of the original's formula with much less talented directors. This actually looks like a Rob Zombie Halloween movie. Highly stylized and not-adherent at all to the original, addressing what was the biggest problem of his remake. This is what makes it a good remake, even if it's not a 'good' remake. He's not slavishly copying the original while also dumbing it down and including in-jokey references. It's like the thing or the fly - completely different, but thematically similar enough to justify keeping the name.
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Jun 25, 2009 05:48
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w00bi posted:If anything it just shows how much he's trying to rewrite the character and make it fit in with his personal style (Corpses and Devil Rejects. That's kind of the point of doing a remake. The original Halloween has been the basic template for horror films since it first came out, so repeating it is redundant. But Zombie doesn't change the character anyways. He changes the context. While the first remake was emotionally distant, it did mostly succeed as an intellectual exercise, as a deconstruction of the original's themes and legacy. It also functioned pretty well as a "superhero origin movie" satire. The Halloween remakes take place in a world where Myers is a sensationalized Manson-like celebrity criminal, and that's the change that makes it worth watching. The actual character of Michael Myers is left basically unchanged.
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Aug 28, 2009 06:52
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Slasherfan posted:Not a slasher but I wanted to show this poster, pretty cool and couldn't think of a place to put it. Not worth it's own topic. Holy poo poo, they're making a movie out of The Horror of the Heights. That's like my dream project. This better be good. For reference, here's the short story. It was written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1913, so I guess they're piggybacking this on the assumption that the new Holmes movie will do well: http://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff3/heights.htm e: actually it turns out it's more like a mashup of that story with the langoleirs or something.
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Nov 2, 2009 10:09
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Whispering Machines posted:
The Human Centipede (First Sequence) is nothing if not remarkably mature throughout. Like the entire film is spent meditating on the philosophical implications of the subject matter. This includes the poo poo-eating. The presentation isn't sensationalistic at all.
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Jun 8, 2011 07:48
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Anyone else think that Human Centipede and its sequel sound kind of like the poo poo (no pun intended) that adolescent/teenage boys would come up with to disgust each other?
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Stop caring enough to actually make an effort to write & post dumb opinions.
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Jun 8, 2011 19:15
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FoneBone posted:Yeah, doesn't exactly change my mind. The problem with a prequel centering on the Norwegian team is that there's basically nothing that can be done but rehash the same scenario in (basically) the same setting, only with different characters. I would've honestly rather seen a remake, which at least wouldn't be confined by the specifics of the original film. It's not rehashing the Carpenter version though. It's more closely based on the Hawkes/Nyby version, done in the style of the Carpenter version. And being told from the perspective of Nyby's female scientist character. There are actually a lot of differences here, like for example there are very few (or no) shots of the creature just up and grabbing someone from out of the shadows in Carpenter's film. That all happens offscreen. By that point, it's much more subtle and stealthy. Carpenter's film takes place in the spooky aftermath of some horrible event, while here it's the messier first-contact scenario. The point seems to be the amalgamation of every previous thing story, including probably aspects of the original short story, into a single whole. The brilliant thing is that it's still called The Thing. No matter how much the thing assimilates, mutates and changes, it's always The Thing.
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Jul 14, 2011 21:07
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:That's the thing that bothers me about the trailer. It even steals the final shot of REC/Quarantine, right at the end of it. Quarantine owns though, so I don't have much of a problem with that. It does the 'woman surrounded by untrustworthy men in a genre crisis' plot/subtext better than most. It was very important in Carpenter's film that there were no women, because the de facto female character was the thing itself (equated to the female-voiced chess computer). But in Nyby's version, the inclusion of a woman is crucial, as that film stresses the alien's asexuality. I believe that in this prequel, we're going to see the monster transition from something like Nyby's "sentient carrot" to the lovecraftian flesh-mound we know and love.
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Jul 14, 2011 21:27
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:The sentient vegetable/protean flesh is a hell of a lot more interesting than insectoid stalker/slasher villain, which is what this trailer seems to be implying. "Stein's scheme helps to explain the suddenness with which things seem to assert their presence and power: you cut your finger on a sheet of paper, you trip over some toy, you get bopped on the head by a falling nut. These are occasions outside the scene of phenomenological attention that nonetheless teach you that you're "caught up in things" and that the "body is a thing among things." They are occasions of contingency-the chance interruption-that disclose a physicality of things. [...] On the one hand, then, the thing baldly encountered. On the other, some thing not quite apprehended. Could you clarify this matter of things by starting again and imagining them, first, as the amorphousness out of which objects are materialized by the (ap)perceiving subject, the anterior physicality of the physical world emerging, perhaps, as an aftereffect of the mutual constitution of subject and object, a retroprojection? You could imagine things, second, as what is excessive in objects, as what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects-their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence, the magic by which objects become values, fetishes, idols, and totems. Temporalized as the before and after of the object, thingness amounts to a latency (the not yet formed or the not yet formable) and to an excess (what remains physically or metaphysically irreducible to objects). But this temporality obscures the all-at-onceness, the simultaneity, of the object/thing dialectic and the fact that, all at once, the thing seems to name the object just as it is even as it names some thing else." -Bill Brown, Thing Theory http://faculty.virginia.edu/theorygroup/docs/brown.thing-theory.2001.pdf
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Jul 14, 2011 21:44
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Xenomrph posted:While that's an interesting interpretation, ultimately I don't buy it. Carpenter didn't include any female characters because he recognized that the "damsel in distress"/sexual tension/male-female power dynamic would ultimately hurt the story and draw attention away from the fear/paranoia aspects he wanted to explore. The original story had no female characters, so he was staying true to that as well. These goals aren't mutually exclusive. They're the same goal. The original story describes McReady as a bronzed apollonian (I'm pretty sure that exact adjective is used) Adonis who is ultimately humbled by the alien's viral nature and then by its atomic technology, and other weird invisible forces like telepathy. The thing challenges masculine agency in a very straightforward way. It questions how much of your behavior is governed by tiny things outside your control. Even in Nyby's version, the hero is frequently compared to the alien, and repeatedly humbled by his lover. In the end, the situation goes well outside his control and he's like "ah well". As in the other versions, he's been "feminized". Hendry: "I've given all the orders I want to give for the rest of my life." Nikki: "If I thought that was true I'd ask you to marry me." This is actually very similar to the subtext in Quarantine, although that's more psychological (not so much in REC).
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Jul 14, 2011 22:02
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Xenomrph posted:I can understand that, but how does that make the Thing "female"? If I'm understanding you right, the Thing removes agency from the protagonists, but that isn't necessarily male agency, since you could assume the same outcome (distrust/assimilation/death) would come about whether the characters were male or female. "Who Goes There?" and all subsequent versions of the story rely heavily on Prometheus/Pandora archetype. That's why you see so many flamethrowers, and why The Thing is considered "artificially intelligent". (See: the chess computer.)
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Jul 14, 2011 22:16
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Cubone posted:Sorry, I'm completely lost as to what you're trying to convey here. "In critical theory, the posthuman is a speculative being that represents or seeks to enact a re-writing of what is generally conceived of as human. It is the object of posthumanist criticism, which critically questions Renaissance humanism, a branch of humanist philosophy which claims that human nature is a universal state from which the human being emerges; human nature is autonomous, rational, capable of free will, and unified in itself as the apex of existence. Thus, the posthuman recognizes imperfectability and disunity within him or herself, instead understanding the world through context and heterogeneous perspectives while maintaining intellectual rigour and a dedication to objective observations of the world. Key to this posthuman practice is the ability to fluidly change perspectives and manifest oneself through different identities. The posthuman, for critical theorists of the subject, has an emergent ontology rather than a stable one; in other words, the posthuman is not a singular, defined individual, but rather one who can "become" or embody different identities and understand the world from multiple, heterogeneous perspectives." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posthuman#Posthuman_in_posthumanism As noted before, the protagonists in each of the Thing stories - although especially in Carpenter's version and Who Goes There? - are self-styled, rugged individualists pitted against nature. These are a traditional/stereotypical/archetypical masculine roles. The posthumanism that challenges these attitudes is kinda important to feminist theory, for hopefully obvious reasons. Prometheus is an archetypal scientist character. Pandora, however, is the archetypal anti-scientist - an impulsive naif whose curiosity unleashes disorder and chaos. She is also an 'artificial person' created by the gods, much like the fire Prometheus stole. There is obvious similarity to Eve, crafted from Adam's rib. This is working in an old dichotomy between man and nature. Women are "more natural". Men conquer nature with progress. For example, they can survive deadly temperatures with nifty arctic bases. They can fly helicopters thousands of miles over the ocean. In The Thing, the alien screws with all this technology. It confuses the men's rational goals with paranoia and sleep-deprivation (see also: invasion of the body snatchers). It's a revolt by the body and its various prosthetic technologies against the mind. And of course the body wins. Cubone posted:If the Thing was artificially intelligent, which incidentally is a really weird concept to just submit without support or qualification, what does an artificially intelligent antagonist have to do with the Prometheus archetype? Again, Pandora is the artificial woman sent down to punish mankind for its trespasses. Prometheus controls nature with technology. Pandora messes up that power dynamic. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 11:44 on Jul 16, 2011 |
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Jul 15, 2011 10:30
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That's like the worst possible explanation for a creative decision. Like in Predator, there's no female commando, I guess, because John McTiernan wanted to eliminate 'woman cliches' - not because he was making a film about hypermasculine imperialistic dudes getting their comeuppance by a grotesque, racially and sexually ambiguous other. He just didn't want to have a woman accidentally baking a pie in his film or something. Oh and "that's just how it was originally written", which of course shunts the obvious question of why there weren't any women in Who Goes There? either. People making claims based on artist's intent always presume the artist to be an idiot.
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Jul 15, 2011 21:37
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Xenomrph posted:Exactly. The design was literally done because James Cameron thought it would look cool, and he offhandedly suggested it to Stan Winston while on a plane ride. Again, this is dodging the question. Why did James Cameron think the yoni-faced design would be the best choice for the film? James Cameron is a skilled concept artist and production designer, most notably for his science-fiction films. Presumably he knew the basic premise of the film (powerful modern supermen vs. demonic genderfucking Guatemalan cave-spaceman.) Presumably, he suggested a design that would fit that premise. Presumably, Mcteirnan agreed that it was a good choice for the film he was making. As did the whole loving production team responsible for the finished film. This goes beyond stated intent and into basic competence. You would have it that these professional artists had effectively no control over their output. That these professional communicators are bad at communicating. Don't look for intent in DVD supplementals. Like try finding the word "posthumanism" or the name "Turing" in The Thing's commentary track, even though both are referenced explicitly in the text itself. Hand a camera or a paintbrush to a guy on the street, by the way, and ask him to just do whatever looks cool. See how far that gets you. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 10:18 on Jul 16, 2011 |
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Jul 16, 2011 10:11
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In short: The authors 'wrote' something. We are 'reading' it.
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Jul 16, 2011 10:40
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This is like some bizarre supercombo of the author intent thing and the solipsistic "everything is subjective and so nothing is real" argument. The films are the product of human beings. Those humans are a product of society. In the case of professional filmmakers, most are college-educated. they are trained to communicate ideas with sounds and images. They are not operating in a vacuum and they are not just operating on random whims. they are people. How can an Alien superfan not identify Promethean imagery? The next Alien film is called Prometheus, and that's not a novel development. Ridley Scott did not just call the film Prometheus that because the name sounded cool. John Carpenter did not put a chess computer scene in The Thing - as the introduction to the lead character - because he had a minute of screen-time to kill. Artists work within technical limitations. They don't just fart and poo poo if something is 'imperfect'.
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Jul 16, 2011 22:25
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Mr.Graves posted:Predator wasn't about male/female. It was about techno-savagery. I'm not sure how one aspect cancels out the other. The alien in the film is based around counter-intuitive pairings of concepts. It is advanced and primitive, and it is also simultaneously masculine and feminine. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Jul 18, 2011 |
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Jul 18, 2011 04:42
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Well it's possible J-Bod has some feminist quality that these other films do not, and that this was misinterpreted by Horror fans as a negative thing. (I haven't seen it). But we'd need someone to elucidate that. Diablo Cody's dialogue is irritating, but there is more to writing than dialogue. Juno had complex characters and interesting dynamics between them. Those qualities were just overwhelmed by the hamburger phones and other gimmickry. While that poo poo does effectively convey exactly how shallow and teenager-y Juno actually is, it also made her extremely unpleasant as a protagonist. And it's arguable whether she grows into anything better. Her parents are well-meaning but idiotic, and Jason Bateman is supposed to be a somewhat of a manchild. Basically all Juno's characters are flawed, but Cody's dialogue pushes them over into the reprehensible. They're brazenly terrible, and nobody tells them to shut up or to grow up. All the real adults are marginalized or even insulted, like Jennifer Garner's character, or the ultrasound technician. It might have been the direction, but Juno ultimately sides with the idiots.
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Jul 21, 2011 09:48
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People are talking about last Exorcism's plot and not the presentation. The ending is self-consciously fake - violating the rules of the found-footage genre and arguing, effectively, that God does not exist ("if you believe in Jesus, you must believe in demons too"). The non-existence of the demons is, simply, far more complex than Cotton's smug rationality can handle. The void left by the death of god and the failure logic is irrational and threatening beyond the scope of any science or christian theology. The horror in the film is incomprehensible to the point of being un-filmable. The pagan ritual shows us only a crude, theatrical mock-up of the true god. "To put it in an even more pointed way: pagans were not celebrating images, they were well aware that the images they were making remained inadequate copies of the true divinity (recall the old Hindu statues of gods with dozens of hands, etc. - a clear example of how any attempt to render divinity in a sensual/material form fails by way of turning into a half-ridiculous exaggeration). In contrast to the pagans, it was the Jews themselves who believed/assumed that the (sensual/material) image of the divine Person would show too much, rendering visible some horrifying secret better left in shadow, which is why they had to prohibit it - the Jewish prohibition only has sense against the background of this fear that the image would reveal something shattering, that, in an unbearable way, it would be true and adequate." -Slavoj Zizek, "From Proto-Reality to the Act" http://www.lacan.com/zizproto.htm
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Aug 3, 2011 03:43
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justlikedunkirk posted:I'm glad that Noroi is getting a mention here since it's one of the most overlooked J-horror titles. It definitely has its flaws and the whole thing falls apart by the end but it did such a fantastic job at creating an unsettling atmosphere. I found Noroi interesting for the opposite reason: the false-document tabloid ghosthunter show format cheapened the events even though the ghostly poo poo was unambiguously 'real'. It's akin to a highly factual true crime story told by a hack writer. While a real show would certainly insert slow-motion replays of any ghostly footage (for example), it doesn't make much dramatic sense. It's the fictional filmmakers reviewing their actual ghost footage, and then saying "let's throw in some effects to make it better for our cheesy show". It's not comedy, but it definitely reads as satirical commentary on bad TV, intentionally or not. Like you can tell what they were going for with the girl on the game-show being forced to perform, and how they bring the tinfoil guy on stage for a laugh, only to have him freak out. It's your usual 'toying with forces you don't understand' message. The question then becomes whether the protagonist is distinct from the exploiters or just more of the same. The lack of ambiguity in the story points towards the latter, because he really has 'failed' to convey the true scope of what's happening, beyond a schematic, fact-based approach. He believes in the ghosts, but belief alone doesn't constitute respect. The final scene is a reversal of that, where it's suddenly intensely personal, but it's kinda stagey compared to other films in the genre. This doesn't make the film bad, but it does make it not-too-scary. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Aug 7, 2011 |
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Aug 7, 2011 20:24
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Alhazred posted:The Exorcist is good, the Exorcism of Emily Rose is bad. Emily Rose is indeed garbage. Watch Hans-Christian Schmid's Requiem instead. It's the same story, but an infinitely more mature presentation.
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Aug 9, 2011 00:31
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Le0 posted:So what Found footage movie would you guys recommend watching? Funnily enough, REC isn't a found-footage film. It doesn't fully simulate a false document, just using the aesthetic trappings to enhance the story. This becomes more overt in REC 2, which is just flat-out ridiculous(-ly good). Quarantine remakes REC as an actual found-footage film, and despite people's protests I consider it the best film in the genre besides Blair Witch, with Cloverfield taking third place. It's actually an entirely different film - like I said, an entirely different genre. The Tunnel is also very solid, meshing the found-footage approach with the pseudo-documentary 'talking head' approach. it's not terribly original, basically an amalgam of everything good in these other films, but it works very well and is the first argument for Found-Footage being a full-fledged genre with recognizable archetypes beyond simply holding the camera. It's the found-footage equivalent of a well-made archetypal slasher. The Last Exorcist is, meanwhile, the first to deconstruct the genre. Even if they are inherently postmodern, self-referential films, Last Exorcist takes a closer look at how they work. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 10:04 on Aug 10, 2011 |
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Aug 10, 2011 10:01
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RichterIX posted:It's been discussed fairly recently, but as far as the "found footage" movies go, I really loved Noroi. It kind of goes off the rails at a certain point, although I think SMG disagrees with me a little on that point, but the premise (the "found footage" is footage filmed for a SyFy Channel-style "Ghosthunters" TV show) works really well and it has some really scary moments. Well, it's certainly 'better' than its next-closest equivalent, The Fourth Kind. But then, the Fourth Kind is more interesting for precisely the things that make it 'bad'. It's an extremely bizarre film that I can't say I've really seen the likes of elsewhere. Noroi is almost too good of replicating the style of bad TV. The TV style eliminates the 'rawness' that makes these films appealing to me, while the implausible stuff going on removes whatever limited appeal comes from watching an authentically hacky show on the paranormal. In the case of these particular films, 'truth' is stranger than fiction. In a sense, Cloverfield has more verisimilitude, because the stuff going on is totally ridiculous and yet it's simply presented as-is. This is the case in the best of these films, I find. Blair Witch, Cloverfield and Quarantine deliberately omit any definitive explanation, and their narrative arcs are wholly concerned with how the characters respond to the incomprehensible. In Noroi, everything is clearly plotted, while the characters don't really have clear arcs, besides the host becoming slightly less objective over time. (He never really attempts journalistic objectivity, but does subtly become more personally involved in the story.) Noroi and The Fourth Kind both lack what experts call 'high strangeness' events. Things that don't fit into the unusual UFO/ghost narrative, or contradict them entirely. Crazy poo poo like in that Mothman Prophecies movie, which was itself significantly de-weirded from its nonfiction source. The footage is simply too 'good' to be true - too clear, too comprehensive. The Fourth Kind, for example, would have worked much better were it not a tightly plotted narrative. Based around a very simplified version of the alien abduction mythology, it says either that its aliens are real and we are locked in an epic Good vs. Evil struggle against them or life is just incomprehensible and pointless. No other options are presented or really considered. The universe of the film ends up feeling constricted and inauthentic. The fascinating thing is that, with some exceptions near the end, its found footage is much less plausible than its dramatic re-enactments, which are not only better acted, but imply the omission of crucial details by the simple fact that they are re-enactments. They're inherently mysterious, where the found footage is strictly take-it-or-leave-it - either it's fake (and therefore the entire narrative is a hoax) or it's not. The best part of the found-footage in FK are actually the subtitles that really don't seem to match the sounds at all. It seems to recognize that the subtle biases of the director are more unsettling than any aliens. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Aug 16, 2011 |
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Aug 16, 2011 20:31
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:I wish I had archived because there was another poster here who articulated the extreme artificiality of the way psychiatry, "real events", re-enactments and "acting" are portrayed in the film that actually made the bizarre insistence that it was "real" make a lot of sense narratively. It's extremely weird because there's the 'Shyamalan Twist' where they reveal she's actually insane and the alien story is probably just a coping mechanism, but that's deliberately contradicted by the video evidence, no matter how distorted it gets. (The distortion itself is a form of evidence, as the one good idea in Contact demonstrated. It's almost too bad that they showed a few seconds of the saucer and whatnot.) When you can reliably snap people's necks and cause normal cameras to malfunction drastically, on a whim, that's proof enough that the aliens are real. The Fourth Kind is loaded with great moments, even though the entire film doesn't cohere. It's fun at the very least for the game of spotting all the times no recording device is present and, therefore, it's all based on the memory of a very unreliable narrator. Including the whole Shyamalan twist scene!
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Aug 17, 2011 00:46
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Go watch Apollo 18 while it's still in theatres. It's really great and unique found-footage cinema, and you shouldn't believe the anti-hype surrounding it.
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Sep 8, 2011 21:37
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The Paranormal Activity films are terrible at making sense on any level or approaching anything like psychological truth, so they end up being comedies about impossibly stupid subhumans. I guess with this new one their excuse will be that the filmmakers are literally 6 years old. I mean really, the most effective moments are when you forget that they even have characters and the cameraman just films things like a normal person. My favorite example of PA-ineptitude is the Ring-"inspired" ending of the first one where the demon literally enters the tape and uses it to spread worldwide via the theaters because it gains power from being watched. Because it was so poorly conveyed that I'm pretty sure no-one recognized that's what happened. Instead, people kinda wonder why the demon bites the camera and think "eh, biting the camera is creepy I guess". And then 2 drops that angle completely - or possibly, like the audience, never knew that it existed in the first place.
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Sep 21, 2011 08:36
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The answer is Martyrs. That, or House of the Devil.
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Sep 21, 2011 09:39
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OldTennisCourt posted:Wait, how is that ending [to Paranormal Activity] implied at all? I'm not attacking your point at all, I'm honestly curious because I've never thought of that implication with the film. Through the whole film, the idea is that ignoring the demon will make it go away. It feeds off the attention, the fear and whatnot, which is why Micah is constantly shat on for trying to film it.* When the demon is filmed, it grows in power, which is represented by that trademark annoying 'demon noise'. At the end of the film, the demon possesses Katie, stares directly into the camera, then jumps at it, ending the film. What people miss is that it's actually jumping into the camera - the "demon noise" plays loud over the sound-system after the film has ended and the screen is blank. The idea is that the theatre and its audience are now 'possessed'. The demon noise isn't actually 'on the tape' - nobody in the film mentions the annoying-rear end sound they recorded each night - it's an extra-diegetic sound meant to be coming from "inside the theatre". The idea is that the audience's fear and fascination is further empowering the demon ghost. (This rather cleverly ties in with the "ask to see this film in your area!" ad campaign - the idea is literally that you're asking for it.) *This angle is completely reversed for no reason in PA2, where ignoring the demon represses it and consequently makes it grow stronger until it's literally and figuratively "exorcized". SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Sep 21, 2011 |
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Sep 21, 2011 22:07
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weekly font posted:I'd be fine with the premise of Martyrs if that were the premise for more than 45% of the movie. The premise of Martyrs is the deconstruct the horror genre - "torture porn" specifically - and determine the intrinsic appeal. This is, not-coincidentally, pretty much the antagonists' motivation as well. Since the entire movie is a horror film, the premise covers 100% of it. The entire film is about how pain and violence produce altered states of consciousness that are analogous to horror film tropes.
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Sep 22, 2011 01:41
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Honestly "you're a bad person for liking our film" is always going to be a tired, lovely tactic. Better to make a horror movie that defies the tropes you see as regressive or bad filmmaking or whatever than indulge in them just so you can rub peoples' noses in it. The film simply isn't that didactic because, although there is an analogy drawn between the villains and many horror audiences, the film really produces a profound level of empathy for its main character(s). It's extremely well-directed. Its deconstruction of "torture porn" doesn't declare the genre inherently irredeemable (therefore damning itself), but rather highlights its enormous potential. The film plays around with audience expectation and identification more than Psycho does. No-one would argue Psycho's message was that horror films are worthless - few would argue you're a bad person for finding the killer sympathetic. That would be ridiculously over-simplifying a very complex film. In this case, one you haven't even watched.
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Sep 22, 2011 11:47
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LtKenFrankenstein posted:Really? I can't picture a world where he didn't know what he was doing there, it's pretty overt. Rob Zombie is the Zack Snyder of horror. No matter what he does, there's a 'Z' in his name - so people will accuse him of subhuman intelligence and claim all his techniques are errors.
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Sep 22, 2011 19:57
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weekly font posted:The Halloween remakes are almost equally bad but mostly because they're made by a guy who, though he claims to love the original, doesn't really get what made the first great. They're entirely different by design. Myers is the protagonist in Zombie's Halloween. The stuff about him having a bad childhood or whatever is a red herring, shown most overtly by Malcom MacDowell's satirical approach to the Dr. Loomis character. Zombie's argument is that neither nature or nurture can explain Myers. He practically beats you over the head with this notion in Halloween II.
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Sep 22, 2011 20:56
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Darko posted:you remove the terror that the first film had with many people It's wrongheaded to approach a remake (or, really, any film) from the standpoint of what was "removed", or what it "doesn't have". Because Cronenberg's Fly remake features a bachelor protagonist and is set in a warehouse instead of a basement, it "removes" the subversion of 1950s domesticity. This point would be very noteworthy, were it not for the fact that it's an entirely different film with only the basic premise in common. Despite your disclaimer about there being nothing wrong with difference, that's really the whole basis of your thought surrounding Halloweens 1 and 2. It's "boring" and etc. because it's not X. There's little to no attention paid to what it actually is. In this case, those darn kids have it entirely right. Zombie's film is brutal in ways that most slashers are not. It's also not scary at all, because that's not even what they're trying to do. The fake dichotomy between scary or boring in a horror film is enormously reductive, like there's only one emotion in 'serious' horror. [I could count on one hand the number of films that have actually frightened me (as opposed to simply being startled).] The entirety of the Halloween duo is spent generating unease over the audience's complicity in the action. Myers is an empty shell who kills people because they're annoying. But, crucially, they're annoying to the audience. He's indifferent - because Halloween is a superhero origin story, and Myers becomes "more than just a man ... an idea", much like goon-favorite Batman. His heroic purpose is to become an iconic slasher "villain", just as Stallone in Rambo 4 willingly drops all pretense of humanity and ascends to action-hero godhood. The Halloween films systematically eliminate the reductive explanations for what Myers is or should be. He kills the ghost because he's not a ghost. In the same sense, he's not a Frankenstein - nor a rapist (as Jason Voorhees is), nor the other things represented by his victims. The 'horror' of Halloween is that the void put into relief by these symbolic kills is an attractive one. These films are absolutely wonderful to watch when you're having a stressful day. This all serves as commentary on Carpenter's film, as Zombie makes no attempt to replicate it. His Halloweens are film essays about Carpenter's Halloween - its meaning and its cultural legacy. By default, like Zack Snyder's Watchmen, it couldn't be similar to the original if it tried - so it doesn't. Grendels Dad posted:While I liked Devil's Rejects a lot I'm still not sure how it's a sequel to House of 1000 Corpses. It starts in a house where there are a lot of corpses, sure enough. And there are maybe 3 1/2 characters that are kind of like characters from Corpses, but other than that I felt the two movies weren't connected, at all. House of 1000 Corpses is told as the extremely sensationalized "funhouse" version of the "actual events" (hence why the film frequently cuts to mundane video footage). While it's extremely arguable that Devil's Rejects is "more real", it's definitely more naturalistic due to the change in genre. Doctor Satan may not have even existed, and was simply an embellishment added to the real story. Both films explore the distinctly American fascination with celebrity serial killers (see also: the Zombie Halloweens' deconstruction of Myers' slasher-franchise stardom). SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 11:04 on Sep 23, 2011 |
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Sep 23, 2011 10:54
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Hakkesshu posted:What are they? The Blair Witch Project, Capturing the Friedmans, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Them!, Trigger Man, Very Bad Things, Incident at Lake County (Original Cut), Martyrs. Okay, so that's technically two hands. I suppose it depends on your definition of fear though. Throughout Zombie's Halloweens, I was afraid I would sympathize too much with Michael Myers, that the film was going places I didn't want to. I'm frequently afraid of films in this way.
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Sep 23, 2011 11:32
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Dissapointed Owl posted:This is a fun pick. The one you can find online (on google video and whatnot) is the "director's cut" which is longer and notably inferior. When the film was initially aired on TV, the studio feared that it had a bomb on its hands and substantially edited it from 90 minutes down to a lean 60-ish minutes. In the process, they removed pretty much everything that detracted from the naturalism of it. This meant all the weakest acting and the weakest effects, and specifically the way too on-the-nose social commentary that reduced the characters to one-trait wonders (one is a drunk, one is a racist, etc.) - and reduced most of the events to capital-S Symbolism. In removing the 'artistry' from the film, the studio's bastard cut resembles a real videotape more than most films in the genre. The people simply act like people in a crisis, and the events are abstract instead of a forced commentary on America and The American Family. The pacing is quicker, the story is entirely different, and even the basic plot was changed, with an entirely different ending. It's like if some editor miraculously transformed Paranormal Activity 2 into The Blair Witch Project. The original version was aired only once as far as I can tell, since its success led to a release of the dumb director's cut version for all subsequent airings.
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Sep 23, 2011 13:19
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Darko posted:When you explore why a remake fails to have the same impact as an original, a compare and contrast exploration, as well as an exploration of the change in social attitude between the two films, is relevant. Again: Zombie's film doesn't "fail to have the same impact". It succeeds at having a different impact. (Unless by 'impact' you mean like popularity and box-office, in which case gently caress off.) I actually saw Zombie's Halloween before seeing Carpenter's version, and I've never bothered with its sequels. Its appeal doesn't rest solely (or really at all) on deconstructing one franchise, but about deconstructing horror in general. All the things I've been talking about are the product not of in-jokes by some really great filmmaking that simply eschews naturalism in favor of camp. Dissapointed Owl posted:Any non SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 22:01 on Sep 23, 2011 |
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Sep 23, 2011 21:58
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way to get it?
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 09:18 |
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The hype and hate for Human Centipede 1 was totally based around the premise, and not its actual appeal of extremely good acting and cinematography.
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Sep 28, 2011 15:56
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