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The last two 'Dead' movies were cashgrabs methinks. He can't seem to get any work unless it has the words '...of the Dead' in the title.
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Feb 26, 2012 05:02
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The Ring (2002) was the last movie to truly scare me. Oh, I've seen plenty of great suspenseful movies and creepy movies since then, but The Ring was the last one to really scare me in that visceral level. I'll echo that "Katie in the closet" is one of the best jump scares ever. It's also the moment where I realized this movie was not loving around when it came to pants-making GBS threads terror. The opening scene had some of that Scream-style 'fun' scariness (and I loving love Scream so that's not a diss), but even though we tend to think of jump scares as cheap, there was something incredibly unsettling aside from just the surprise. It's also interesting to note that in the Japanese Ringu as well as The Ring's own deleted scenes that jump scare was originally meant to be somewhere else. Naomi Watts is talking to her sister in her daughter's room asking if her daughter had been taking drugs; the sister gets frustrated and throws open the closet door and the micro-flashback happens then. The expository info from this scene was redundant so they deleted the scene... but moved the jump scare to an even more surprising scene. I like that the it's almost as if the micro-flashback was "recorded over" the movie we were watching, like a used VHS tape Samara's reveal is also one of the all-time great horror scenes. I know fans of the Japanese version disagree but I love that Samara still has a 'video' look even outside of the TV. Sometimes the image is scarier than reality, and I loved that the image was coming to life to kill you. I was in college staying at my grandmother's place at the time, and coming back from the theater, it was a wet autumn Kentucky night, I enter the house, gramdmother's asleep, the house dead silent aside from the light rain, and I had to walk all the way to the end of the house to reach my room, with all the antiquated furnishings throughout, most of the lights off, and when I finally reach my room it has an old TV from the 70s with the knobs and such. It was a loving terrifying evening. So, uh, yeah I kinda like The Ring! lizardman fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Mar 12, 2012 |
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Mar 12, 2012 22:30
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^^ Yes, I think the one inarguable inferior aspect of the US Ring is that it shows us Samara's face in monster mode. The rest we can all respectfully debate, but I think that one is a given.
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Mar 12, 2012 23:12
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Dissapointed Owl posted:It starts out with Mila Kunis from That 70s Show Awww, hasn't she at least graduated to "Mila Kunis from the lesbian scene from Black Swan" by now?
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Mar 13, 2012 01:37
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My parents did not seem to give a gently caress if I saw R-rated movies. I must have been 6 the first time I saw Predator and Robocop (though I think I wasn't really watching them so much as they were on while I was hanging around the living room). Though my parents would be wary of me watching something deemed "scary" (dunno why they didn't think of Predator since that's pretty drat freaky). I must have been (again) around 6 when my Dad took me and my brothers to see Arachnophobia which is only PG-13 or so, but it freaked us out so much that our parents let us each open a Christmas present early to cheer us up I had seen a few Friday the 13ths edited on basic cable but the first time I really got to go toe-to-toe with a straight-up horror movie in the theater was Scream. Now I know Scream isn't even meant to be scary so much as a fun suspense thrillride but tell that to 12-year-old me in that theater. To this day I've never been so scared watching a movie in my life and I was ready to poo poo my pants at any moment.
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Apr 10, 2012 04:25
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foodfight posted:With all the love that CitW is gettng I'm wondering if anyone went to see Detention this weekend? I know it got limited release in my town. Jesus, could they have picked a worse release date?
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Apr 16, 2012 17:07
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Black Christmas is pretty good but, uh, it is pretty primitive.
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Apr 27, 2012 01:56
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The Strangers is very well shot and directed (especially for such a fresh-faced newbie), but the script really lets it down, I think. It's a shame it's not more memorable than it is, but the movie does now pretty much wears the crown for greatest "killer appears nonchalantly in the background unbeknownst to victim in the foreground" shot.
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May 6, 2012 09:37
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Jarthus posted:I loved the first 3 Paranormal Activity movies. Seeing this one getting such horrible reviews really makes me not want to see it. I just don't want to be disappointed and it looks like that is what will happen. I knew it was bound to fall apart but it was a good series while it lasted. Well, if you love the series, go ahead and watch. It does the whole Paranormal Activity-spookiness well, and I think the ending is actually my favorite of the four (even if it's too short and plays like a "greatest hits" of the last three endings) but as someone who loved the first and was pleasantly surprised with 2 & 3, I just think this one is the first one that doesn't really justify its existence. You go in thinking "oh this is the big one, we're finally going to find out what happened to the kid!" but it winds up feeling like just a small step forward in the story. I have a feeling they're going to try to pull a final-wrap-everything-up-once-and-for-all Paranormal Activity 5... but that really should have been THIS one.
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Oct 20, 2012 07:04
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Volume posted:Because the current trope for ghost stories is that the ghost isn't evil or malevolent at all. It's the ghost of an abused child who wants to tell you that the dude across the street killed him. Or an old woman who just want's to give her grandchildren one last hug. I always loved how this got subverted in The Ring. "You helped her? You weren't supposed to help her!" Had a weird thought about Paranormal Activity 4 last night: why weren't any of the characters aware of Katie Featherstone, who at this point is surely infamous as the subject of three wide-release feature films and a notorious unexplainable circumstance and family murders/abduction caught on tape? You'd think, even if they had not seen the prior films themselves, they would have certainly seen ads and they would have thought of their predicament, "Say, this sounds like those Paranormal Activity movies, doesn't it? Those were real footage, right? Let's google what those were about." I can only think of a few explanations: 1. The family is extraordinarily closed off from pop culture (which I find unlikely given their savvy with media and use of Xbox). 2. The prior 3 Paranormal Activity movies were created but not released. Since the events captured in Paranormals 1 & 2 happened concurrently and the footage of Paranormal 3 was found during the events of Paranormal 2, it's possible all three were created at once and then were subsequently shelved (perhaps the studio got cold feet over exploiting a real-life tragedy). The problem with this explanation: why go ahead and make Paranormal 4? 3. The Paranormal Activity films wee not big hits (within its universe). This seems unlikely given that there were three of them released (and we're currently watching the fourth one). Also, the release of the films would have surely caused a firestorm of controversy, as the film features the actual deaths of innocent people as well as unexplainable, seemingly paranormal phenomena. Also, we know for sure that the Paranormal Activity movies were given wide release by a major studio within the films' universe (by the card "Paramount Pictures wishes to thank the families of the victims, etc.") and would have surely been accompanied by a major marketing campaign. 4. The Paranormal Activity films were released in 2012 (or later) within its universe. Perhaps Paramount (the Paramount studios within the universe of hte films) did not get its hands on the footage of all four films until 2012 or so and all four films were created at once in a large project, and thus were released after the events of Paranormal Activity 4. This has the strange after-effect of now knowing that, when we were watching the previous films during their real-world release, that we were actually watching a film that took place a couple years in the future (though of course the footage we were watching was from the past). Are there any other explanations I might be missing?
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Oct 20, 2012 21:40
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The rabbit hole goes deeper: if, within the Paranormal Activity universe, the film Paranormal Activity was not released in 2009, does that mean there was no subsequent surge of found footage movies? The more I think about it, the more I think it was a mistake for PA4 not to, in some way, elaborate on what's happened to the footage itself within the universe of movies. Even if they didn't want to go full-Scream style meta and have Paranormal Activity exist within itself, it's starting to become frustating that we're watching people in a universe where the found footage movie doesn't exist. PA4's extreme adherence to formula reminded me of those slasher sequels where we spend (at least) the first half of the movie waiting for the characters to catch up with us because we've seen parts 1-through-3 or whatever and they haven't. Say for the standard "Hey I googled this" scene, this time around they stumble on clips of the footage found in the previous films. Maybe the teens frantically present it to the parents because "the same thing happened to these people we gotta do something!" and the adults are nonplussed because "it's not real, they're just saying that but it's all just marketing bullshit like The Blair Wtich Project." Of course the teens know better and proceed to try to do something about their predicament, rather than the film just biding its time and having us wait for the inevitable ending. lizardman fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Oct 21, 2012 |
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Oct 21, 2012 00:19
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Toaster Beef posted:I'm pretty sure I'm the only person on the planet who legitimately enjoyed the second. I thought the third was a stretch, though. I think the fourth is closer to the second than the third. Oh I liked the second one, too, and thought its 'surprise this is a prequel kind of' plot was pretty clever. With both 2 and 3 I walked out thinking 'ok, THIS was pretty good, but they shouldn't make any more.'. 4 was the first one where I didn't come out thinking that, even if it is ok on a directoral/craftsmanship level.
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Oct 21, 2012 03:28
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SlenderWhore posted:I just saw PA4 and I have to say, I actually enjoyed it and don't get the people critizing it for being "more of the same". Of COURSE it was more of the same. It's a horror movie series. At this point I view the series in the same way that I view, say, Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th. Just like I might expect Jason or Freddy in one of the aforementioned movies, I knew what to expect when I watch the Paranormal Activity movies and I got what I expected. A lot of people thought it was stupid back then, too. Even so, this is the point where we can see the puppet strings and we can tell the movie is just jerking us around and stretching things out as long as it can. It breaks a lot of the illusion and gets a lot less fun as a result.
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Oct 21, 2012 04:03
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Dissapointed Owl posted:Man, people always totally skip that Japanese sequel to Paranormal Activity which I think was the only PA worth watching along with the first. That one had some really memorable bits, and tied into the first PA in a pretty funny way. Was this ever released outside Japan?
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Oct 21, 2012 09:32
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OldTennisCourt posted:Was Paranormal Activity: Tokyo Nights an actual entry in the series or something in the realm of those Asylum knockoffs? If it's part of the same series, the idea that PA4 might be pushing doesn't seem so strange. It is. In fact, in Japan "Tokyo Night" replaced PA2 entirely: "Tokyo Nights" was billed as the true sequel while PA2 went straight to video. Checking Amazon, there's a Region 2 DVD of Tokyo Night is available but it looks like it was never officially was released in North America (yet). I oughta check it out. EDIT: According to Deadline Paranormal 5 is a go for next Halloween (no surprise there) but apparently we could be getting the Latin Paranormal Activity spinoff as soon as this spring (!). lizardman fucked around with this message at 03:34 on Oct 22, 2012 |
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Oct 22, 2012 03:26
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Toaster Beef posted:Watched The Ring for the first time in about seven or eight years last night. I forgot how much that movie rattled me the first time around, and even now it managed to keep me awake for a bit. I know it's not a masterpiece, but I really enjoyed it. The Ring is a masterpiece. 
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Oct 23, 2012 07:24
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foodfight posted:Watched Scream last night for the first time in 15 years or so. Its still pretty great after all these years even though it was a bit of 90s nostalgia overload. Cell phones are a major plot point in the movie and at one point someone uses their computer to dial 911. I didn't realize this until I saw it on Blu Ray but the "dialing 911 with the computer" scene is actually some kind of TTDY text-to-speach program thing for deaf people. Of course it's still odd because they never mention why Sidney has this (I guess she has a deaf friend we never get to see or hear about) or why we need to watch it in HD to even know what the hell it is, but I don't think it was meant to be a "look at this amazing modern technology" moment
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Oct 26, 2012 08:31
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quote:Halloween II chat This Halloween I did something I always wanted to: watch Halloween I and II back-to-back. I've got to hand it to 'em; the transition between the two films is pretty seamless, and even the big cheat they pull (in II Myers falls off the balcony into the front yard; in I he had fallen into the back yard) would have gone completely unnoticed by me had I not been looking for it. Despite that, however, the two never did gel into 'one' movie (not that it was meant to); the second film introducing and following a completely new set of characters and the new hospital setting gave it a permanent separation from the first film. Also, the subtle difference between the late 70s and the early 80s is very perceptable if you've watched a lot of movies from those eras. Still, despite the pretty dumb story and revelations, II gets by on the fact that it looks and feels like the first film (it's still the only one of the sequels to accomplish this, IMO), and it nails the 'Michael Myers is creepily standing in the background!' stuff as well as the solid suspense of the end. I like it and always have despite the serious flaws. A friend who had never seen the films before asked me "So how do they eventually kill Michael Myers in the end?" and it got me thinking: my God, is there any series whose continuity is more screwed up than Halloween's? II follows up I pretty well, then III ignores both of them entirely, then IV ignores III and ostensibly picks up after the first two but pulls a MASSIVE retcon on the ending of II (Loomis and Myers survive that massive explosion and fire with just a few scars, eh? Yeah I don't think so), and then V has to downplay the ending of IV in order to work. VI doesn't outright contradict the prior two films (far as I know) but has such a wacky out-of-nowhere background plot that it feels completely out of place with the series. Then H2O ignores the last three films but CONTINUES IV's retcon of the ending of II. Then Res has to bend over backwards and come up with a ridiculous explanation to reconcile itself with ending of H2O. And then the whole thing gets rebooted with Rob Zombie's Halloweens I and II but the series plays so fast and loose with itself anyway, oh and both of those turn out pretty differently depending on which version of the film you watched. So that's the saga of Halloween, everybody!
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Nov 3, 2012 07:12
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^^Yeah it's apparent that they originally planned for H2O to tie-in to parts 4-6 but halfway through thought "ah, gently caress it."
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Nov 3, 2012 22:06
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Xandoom posted:Ah ok, after reading your posts and re-watching bits of it, I think I understand it a bit better. I also watched it after not having slept for 3 days so I was probably not fully into it...is the sequel worth watching? To this day I'm still completely baffled that they didn't just make a straightforward sequel to Blair Witch in the found footage style. I mean, I understand why they didn't (the movie suffered a scathing backlash against the hype) but the movie had enough people that loved it that a "real" sequel could have easily made at least half the money of the first, which would still be fabulous cash for a horror film, especially in 1999 money. I almost want to applaud the studio for not just making the same movie over again until I remember that what they wanted to do was even worse, moving backwards: to turn Blair Witch into a 'regular movie.' DrVenkman posted:...but when I did film studies and we could pick a scene to write about (From a set list of horror scenes - including the excellent, much more thematically resonant, opening to Scream 2)... Scream 2's opening is pretty drat great, and not just because "they get killed in a movie theater hurrr" (actually, the series in general is kind of so-overrated-that-it's-underrated-again) The end of the scene in particular might just be my favorite fourth-wall breaking moment in a horror movie I can think of, or any movie for that matter. lizardman fucked around with this message at 08:00 on Dec 29, 2012 |
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Dec 29, 2012 07:51
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The Something Awful Forums > The finer Arts > Cinema Discusso > "I have A LOT of anger issues and mental illnesses" The Horror Megathread!
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Jan 6, 2013 07:44
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SubG posted:Nah, strongly disagree. All of the humour in Return of the Living Dead or Evil Dead II isn't distance, it's affection. Every laugh in Evil Dead II is all about Raimi and Spiegel having the absolute loving time of their lives. Same with Creepshow---its the work of people who are on absolute intimate terms with the entire schtick of genre horror, have internalised it, and are totally wired to the funhouse catharsis of it all. I think the lot of us are mostly in agreeance with each other and are mostly getting hung up on what it means to be 'ironic' (hi, Alanis!). Personally, when I think of an 'ironic movie' I think of movies like Hobo With a Shotgun, Grindhouse or House of the Devil where, in their attempts to recreate an aesthetic, the very act of being a recreation means there is always a distance from the original material and they can never truly become the material. The affection is the distance (we'll leave behind for the moment whether we want to call it 'ironic' distance or not). And while they're nowhere near as extreme as the ironic films of the prior decade, I would consider Return of the Living Dead and, by its description (I haven't seen it so I can't be sure), Evil Dead II to be in this category, and even to a degree movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first Star Wars, and Briand DePalma's Hitchock-aping thrillers. Return of the Living Dead is a "zombie movie" rather than just a zombie movie. On a reverse of this, I actually think Scream (and even Cabin in the Woods to an extent and in a different way) is a case that's been grossly misunderstood: I don't think it's an ironic movie at all. I think because of its comic relief and general smartallecky-ness a lot of people think it as such, but it's actually a VERY sincere horror movie (in fact, on a recent re-watch I was struck by how sad and dramatic a lot of the movie is). I get an 'anti-irony' reading from the film, the general message being the slasher film of the late 80s used detachment and constant celebration of formula (see the Friday and Elm Street entries of the time among others) to distance themselves from what the films were actually saying - in this case misogyny. Of course the girls are all sluts that get naked and get butchered while the virgin lives, it's all a part of the formula, it's all in good fun, it's not that deep. Scream, while being about irony, is itself a straight horror movie, and not a "horror movie." I think that played a part in why it was a mainstream breakthrough in its time.
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Jan 8, 2013 07:15
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Re: Craven chat, I get the impression he got into being a predominantly horror director mostly by accident, and so he has a lot of talent but doesn't have the instincts of someone who had genuine passion for the genre from the start. Also this means he phones it in A LOT. As for Scream in particular, I confess I'm a fan of the series. The original is a bona fide genre classic: I always say that if Carpenter made horror's 'Superman,' then Craven made its 'Watchmen' with Scream. Scream 2 kicks rear end and while the script is a step down from the first I think, this is actually the best direction of the series and likely Craven's best directed movie of all. Scream 3 is the obvious weak link, but honestly if this is the nadir of your horror series you can't be doing too badly. A little surprised at the Scream 4 hate, I do wish that it felt 'bigger' than it does but I think it's a return to form for the series and I loving LOVE the twist it pulls.
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Feb 5, 2013 03:27
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Well, call me gullible, but I went into the movie absolutely convinced one of them was gonna bite it, and I really didn't want them to. So the movie was absolutely harrowing for me on first watch. honestly, the single biggest surprise of the movie for me was Gale making it out alive, it REALLY felt like they were setting her up to be offed, and having Sidney and Dewey rally in "it's just you and me now" way I mean, can you imagine watching a reunion of a favorite cast of characters of yours and dangle the possibility of their meeting their gruesome end in a bloody murder and you've got a recipe for a fan heart attack.
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Feb 5, 2013 04:51
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timeandtide posted:Scream is much more "genuine" than anyone gives it credit for; the tone that people think of when they think Scream really starts in Scream 2's smug opening scene. It's also probably Craven's best directing, the stand outs being the opening (re-watching it last year, it's really much more brutal and sad than I recall it being - Barrymore's death is actually played for its humanity, not just a shock) and the amazing final chase. haha, I was just saying all this a few pages back, about Scream not being an ironic movie like it's always purported to being. On your note about Sidney losing her virginity (and remember she actually does go all the way, there's no 'almost'), remember how troughout the first half of the movie Billy keeps trying to get Sidney to have sex with him? He's doing it because he wants to kill her.
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Feb 5, 2013 05:27
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timeandtide posted:For Scream 4, they needed to commit. Don't call it Scream 4, call it "Scream." Have the original cast, but only as minor roles or cameos to hand it off to the next generation; besides it getting a bit ridiculous that these people are magnets for copycat killers, it's draining the tension since they keep living and the other option, killing them off, is honestly too crude at this point since they've survived so many films and people are attached to them. Let Sidney, etc., move on. Scream 4 could certainly be improved upon but I'll defend its central idea to the end. It speaks volumes that Scream 4 is the only one of the series to refuse to become the movie it's about. Let a movie series run indefinitely and it risks losing all meaning, so Scream 4 says "just kidding, we're not gonna make a Scream 5, we're not gonna reboot Scream, we're stopping this nonsense before it gets any further." And it does that by killing off the chqracters that would be its heirs.
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Feb 5, 2013 06:03
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Tenterhooks posted:Scream gave a fairly healthy boot in the butt to the popularity of horror films. Besides spawning a ton of bandwagon-y type stuff (I Know What You Did... etc), it also kinda polished up the genre for cool 90s / 00s cats. In all honesty, I don't think there's any period that would satisfy that criteria. Horror is a niche genre, and while it's a very BIG niche, it's still a niche all the same. I'm not sure there was ever a time horror was 'the hot thing' in Hollywood. Closest that comes to mind would be the 80s slasher boom and the post Scream late 90s horror resurgence. You could maaaayybe make a case for the recent post-Paranormal Activity found footage craze or the 70s demonic horror* period as well. Maybe. *On a sidenote, can I get a 'holy poo poo' for how huge The Exorcist was? A hard-R horror flick doing Avatar-level business, I don't think we'll ever see anything like that again.
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Jun 24, 2013 00:03
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Getting back to Carrie chat for a quick sec, am I the only one a little amazed at how readily everyone is to consider it a horror movie? I mean, yeah, supernatural powers and a chick covered in blood and all, but literally nothing scary or suspenseful happens in the movie until the climax. It's pretty much a straight drama until that point. As for the remake, man, blood-soaked Carrie looked WAY cooler in the 70s one. I mean, here her face looks mostly clean with some streaks coming down. Come on, drench her in that poo poo!
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Aug 1, 2013 11:01
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I've never seen the movie (or much about it, really), but The Conjuring is the biggest horror movie in literally years and I'm curious what's set it apart for audiences, especially since it hasn't garnered much talk here in CD.
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Aug 19, 2013 06:06
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If I remember right, their actions in the first Ring led to Samara being able to possess people. In The Ring Two, she tries to take over the kid's body so Naomi Watts will be her new mother. It was lame, but hey that plot led to that "I'm not your loving mommy!" line at the end, so I got some enjoyment out of it. In the context of the first film by itself, I think the the kid was just trying to say something like, "Why in the hell did you HELP her? Didn't you know she's evil??" and not necessarily because of any particular effect. lizardman fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Aug 21, 2013 |
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Aug 21, 2013 16:45
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Glamorama26 posted:Oh hey, I'm like God knows how late on a response to this, but yeah, totally watch the original Halloween 2. The cinematography totally makes up for the poo poo plot. Michael slowly fading in and out of the background is textbook "scare the poo poo out of a person without a jumpscare" horror that you just don't get anymore and Donald Pleasance just goes nuts for 100 minutes. It's a typical slasher at the end, but God, is it ever pretty and well timed. I'll second this. I've said it before (maybe even in this very thread) that Halloween II has a stupid script but it's saved by the mere fact that it still looks and feels like the original. It's a spooky flick in spite of itself. And speaking of which, why does it seem like it's so hard to get Michael Myers's look right? Only Halloween II and the Rob Zombie ones ever get his mask to look like it does in the original. Myers in 4 & 5 looks like Data from Star Trek (which is funny because the mask is supposed to be Kirk from Star Trek). 'Curse of Michael Myers' kiiiiind of gets it right but looks off somehow, and then H2O had a notoriously difficult time, where they switched masks like three times during production (and even had to resort to that CGI mask posted earlier for one shot in order to fix it), and he also looks goofy in Resurrection. What gives?
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Sep 23, 2013 10:28
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Halloween II re-uses the exact mask from the first. A different stuntman is wearing it, though, and I think the mask conforms to the shape of the wearer's head a bit. The other movies don't get this pass, though, especially 4 & 5, since their masks have issues before you even get to that point. Edit: While we're talking about Halloween movies, I'll just throw out that the sequels kind of remind me of Bond movies in that it feels like they're constantly chasing trends and wind up always being a year or two behind the times. It seems like it's a property that studios keep in storage until they see something cool and go "Hey, why don't we throw that into a Halloween movie! It'll update it for modern audiences!" lizardman fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Sep 23, 2013 |
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Sep 23, 2013 13:26
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Timeless Appeal posted:I never really found the ending scary or shocking in the way its intended. It's shocking for the sheer audacity and absurdness of it all. And yeah, I did read some transphobia] into it. It tied into the weird depiction of character of color, the gross depiction of homosexuality, and the general grossness of the film. I think Sleepaway Camp actually imbues quite a bit of sympathy for the Angela character, freaky final shot notwithstanding. She's about the only character who isn't a complete rear end in a top hat (aside from being the killer, of course) and her alienation in the camp is basically the central point of the movie. The camp is basically a hyper, grotesque caricature of the whole straight sexual culture, especially at adolescence: I think anyone who's not straight can sort of remember that period of youth when you started noticing all your friends suddenly playing this kind of 'game' that seemed to cause all the boys to become competitive and aggressive and for all the girls to be catty and stuck up...and you might have even felt them start eyeing you with suspicion or distancing themselves from you if they picked up that you weren't playing that same game yourself. Hell, I think most any social outcast could probably identify with the movie, if you were bad at playing the game you didn't have a good time, either (wasn't there a nerdy kid that got picked on in that movie, too?). The whole camp depiction was the uncomfortable (and dare I say 'scary') part of watching Sleepaway Camp for me rather than the murders (which weren't actually filmed with much suspense or scariness).
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Sep 26, 2013 02:05
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Scream 4 and The Ward are both solid when it comes to directing. It's the scripts that let them down (I still say Scream 4 has both a great beginning and end, just a mediocre mid-section).
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Sep 27, 2013 19:44
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Craven is such a weird case because he basically fell into being a "master of horror!" almost rear end-backwards after his first few successes were horror movies and in turn that was all he could get funding for. He likes horror but it was never really a passion of his or anything, so he winds up doing a LOT of work-for-hire hack stuff. But dammit, I say when he's on he is ON. Scream 2's suspense scenes are just awesome, and even though Scream 4's suspense scenes are mostly all of the "IS THE KILLER BEHIND THE DOOR?" variety, he sure knows how to milk that poo poo. I actually think he got better as time went on. I mean, have you SEEN Last House on the Left? Speaking of Craven, I recently saw Deadly Blessing on Netflix expecting another early-Craven shlock, but I was pleasantly surprised. It's not great, mind you, but there's a sheen of professionalism to the movie that wasn't usually there in this period of his career and foreshadows at what was to come with Nightmare and Scream, and it also has early-career turns from Sharon Stone and James Horner(!).
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Sep 27, 2013 20:05
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weekly font posted:Every Scream movie movies farther away from what makes the first great. Scream has a conceit you can only really pull off once in a movie series. Scream is "what if a slasher movie happened in real life?" So as soon as the second film starts you've already diverged from The Real World because the movie 'Scream' doesn't exist in-universe. The 'Stab' movies are a hilarious product of the universe trying to correct itself (a la JJ Abrams' Star Trek movies) but it can never quite get it right as reality is altered even further every time a new killer emerges, to the point where it's arguable whether Scream 4 even 'happens' or if it's some kind of movie within a movie (for my money I say it does, I think as long as Sidney is still alive the movie's universe is still intact.) The sequels are like venturing further and further into a hall of mirrors. I wrote a book about this... DrVenkman posted:Scream 4...It's a shame it has the same ending Scream 4's ending rocks.
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Sep 27, 2013 22:10
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Volume posted:I really liked Scream 4 actually. I thought it brought it back to what made the first one so drat good. I mean when Sidney get's attacked and she just delivers three kicks right to his face really pushed the idea of "slasher in the real world" because after three drat events of this you're drat right she would have taken some self defense classes There's also a neat moment where the killer and Sidney are up on the roof and they both kind of... hesitate for a second, like they're trying to anticipate each other's next move. It's clever choreography. I like that the killer isn't infallible like Jason or Michael Myers. It might make him less scary in absolute sense but it actually makes things more tense as it's a legitimate question as to whether his targets will survive or not.
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Sep 27, 2013 22:59
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SALT CURES HAM posted:The problem is, it stops actually doing anything with that for like a solid 45 minutes of the movie. Between Tatum's death and the reveal at the end, it just makes clunky allusions to other movies while Sidney runs away from Ghostface and a couple of people die (in significantly less interesting ways than in the earlier parts). And when it seems to finally remember that it's about rape culture, it picks up on the less interesting part of that analogy (Sidney's mother's death, versus the situation Sidney herself is in) and muddles it up a lot with its incessant winking at the audience. I dunno if that's fair, I think we can forgive a slasher movie giving us a long and involved chase scene in the third act, and even then, that stretch of the film also features the sex scene as well as Randy's "Rule number one: you can never have sex" monologue, so it's not like the movie forgot about its themes. A friend of mine told me once that Scream was her favorite horror movie because it exploits (in her opinion) every young woman's biggest fear: the idea that every man, deep down, only wants sex from you and will manipulate your emotions to get it.
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Oct 4, 2013 22:34
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A lot of people are going to tell you that Poltergeist II sucks, and while it IS quite a step down from the first, I think it's worth a watch. It really seems to lose something moving the setting to Arizona, the whole desert motif doesn't suit the movie, IMO. Also, it has a cool poster that I'd post if imgur wasn't giving me problems (the poster that's all black except for the girl on the toy phone in the bottom-right corner). If you were around in the late 80s/ early 90s and the phrase "He's/ She's/ They're bAAAAAaaaack" was a meme, it's worth noting that it came from this movie.
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Oct 6, 2013 02:30
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Captain Mog posted:I just watched Poltergeist for the first time ever and am nearly speechless. It was that good. What a work of horror art. I'm floored it didn't get at least nominated for an Oscar when it was released. Going back to Poltergeist chat for a second, it really has fallen off the pop culture map a bit, hasn't it? Despite the fact the movie was a smash and is arguably the all-time greatest haunted house flick (I'm sure people can site a few they like better, but most 'haunting' movies since have been more specialized in a way while Poltergeist is a very all-encompassing affair, if that makes sense. It feels like THE haunted house flick while most others are a type of haunted house flick). I think a lot of horror fans haven't really claimed the movie (it's a summer blockbuster, like Jurassic Park except with ghosts instead of dinosaurs) so it gets somewhat overlooked as a genre classic. It's other possible claim to fame, as 'the Steven Spielberg haunted house movie', is also a bit muddled as it's technically not his film even though his influence is everywhere on it. I feel like the movie 's fallen through the cracks in the collective cultural memory and doesn't get its due.
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Oct 6, 2013 07:41
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