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I'm going to give this a whirl, though I probably won't get to 31. And I think I'm going to try to do 31 films that I haven't seen (or at least not seen "properly"). First up for me, since I found it in Amazon Prime's horror section: Gojira. I've only seen the Raymond Burr inserted version before so I'm looking forward to how it's different.
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Oct 2, 2014 02:28
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So Gojira. It's been quite a while since I saw the American version but I know that I felt that inserting Burr into the film did a lot of damage to it. The narrative bridges are clunky, the inserts aren't effective, and taking away focus from the Japanese characters does a disservice to the film. Seeing it in the original Japanese, without heavy editing, and with a proper translation was worlds apart. As I watched, I mused on whether Gojira was a horror film. In the fifties the presence of a monster was enough to call something a horror movie, but pop culture is flooded with monsters now. Just because there's monsters in the 2014 Godzilla doesn't mean it's a horror film. Gojira is clearly a SF movie, its links to popular SF at the time are really blatant and would be exactly the kind of thing you'd find in a Gernsback SF magazine of forties. And Gojira wears its allegory on its sleeve; you'd have to be brain dead to not see how a Japanese movie goer in 1953 wouldn't be disturbed. But just because it could horrify in 1953 doesn't mean that it's a horror movie today. And as I sat there debating this topic and the shifting nature of genres in my head, I reached the scene where Godzilla attacks Tokyo and uses his atomic breathe. Going back to Godzilla 2014, it's sterile. There's visual chaos and destruction but in the end lives aren't shattered, people don't struggle with how to deal with the consequences, there's no impact. We see people scared by the attack but it's scared like being on a roller coaster at an amusement park. Buildings are smashed but there are no real emotional consequences. And this is replicated with a lot of the big action movies in recent years. There are monsters, but they're nothing that we should be terrified of. The attack scenes before this were visceral but not to the same extent. A smashed train and bridge. Some unfortunate passengers stepped on, out of sight. Then this scene comes along and Godzilla incinerates a street full of people in a shot that might as well have had a sign that said, "Just like the atomic bomb!" A woman cowers in a doorway holder her children and saying they'll soon be with daddy as embers from the burning city fall around them. There's no blood visible on screen, but this is not some bloodless romp. I don't think I can really call Gojira scary, but it's definitely effective. (Oh, and those kids cowering the doorway? They survive... and it's implied that they get radiation poisoning.) Dr.Caligari posted:I started with the Spanish version of Dracula. I've been curious about this one for a while and glad I finally got a chance to see it. There's another one I've never seen but have always meant to. I might have to add it to my list. Nemesis Of Moles posted:Tomorrow is Gojira, which is a wee bit of a cheat but should be good. Oh cool, I'll be interested in hearing what you think about it in the context of a horror movie. I was planning on holding off to avoid watching too many similar films close together, but I may watch Donovon's Brain tomorrow night. It's also a 1953 film that has a strong SF element while considered at the time a horror film. Stephen King called it one of the most significant horror movies, but he wrote that about it in 1980 right when horror as a genre really started shifting. Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Oct 2, 2014 |
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Oct 2, 2014 04:09
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Day 2 - Donovon's Brain is not your typical 1950's creature feature. You can see all the bits and pieces of those films, but the stakes are much more human. It gives the film a more interesting hook than most. The broad strokes of the plot are obvious enough: you've got a crusading scientist doing bold experiments who peppers in God's lo mein. His goal is to extract a brain from a monkey and keep it alive in a tank. On the day of his first success, a plane carrying the businessman Donovon crashes near his home. He can't save Donovon's life, so instead he decides to use the brain in his experiment. The brain survives, grows, and begins to dominate the scientist. And here's where the film gets interesting because the brain doesn't set out to conquor the world or get revenge on its creator. Instead, Donovon was an amoral businessman in life and decides to continue where he left off as everyone struggles to regain control. It's a fun concept that's not as well produced as I would have liked. Donovon is an interesting character but the rest of the main cast isn't. They try, and there's hints at a script that could have given them more to do (the alcoholic doctor who is essentially blackmailed into helping remove Donovon's brain sets up parallels with Donovon in the scientist blackmailing everyone). They just can't manage it. On the subject of the cast, I should mention its most famous alumn. Nancy Reagan plays the wife of the scientist. So is it a horror film? It's definitely SF, in fact the story it's based on was published in an SF magazine. But I also think it is horror. It is a story about possession by the malevolant dead and the innocent people who cannot escape it. As for worth watching... yeah, I'd say it is. Kind of a borderline case, but I think watching Donovon as the scientist be an evil dick to everyone is interesting. I'm not sure what I'm going to watch next. I did a quick poke through what's available on the subscription streaming services and the stuff that I haven't seen and I'm interested in are ones where I know/suspect are kind of borderline cases (I know something is up with the genre definitions on some films when Hulu puts Oldboy in in the horror section). After my first two days were movies on the borders of the genre, and may have even been well within those borders before they re-incorporated the limits for tax purposes, I feel the need to watch something very firmly in the horror genre. Maybe one of those endless sequels to some film that sane people don't realize went on forever. (Edit: Oh wow, digging really deep into Amazon Prime's horror catalog I found Daimajin, a film I've wanted to see forever. But from what I know I don't think it was even intended as a horror film when it came out, let alone how it would be viewed today.) Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Oct 2, 2014 |
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Oct 2, 2014 23:22
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Franco Potente posted:Tonight was The Lair of the White Worm, which is an intensely silly movie that I have enormous amounts of affection for. Peter Capaldi battling zombies with his bagpipes! Amanda Donoghue chewing absolutely every inch of scenery! Hugh Grant at his Hugh Grant-est! It's incredibly campy, and not particularly scary at all, but man, it is extremely fun. And a catchy theme tune, too! That is such a brilliantly terrible and yet amazingly memorable movie. It's like someone was trying for "true art" despite not being very good at it and everyone else was going, "Yeah, we're making a horror film!" I wonder if the DVD has a commentary because it would almost be worth a rewatch to hear the people who made it try to explain it. sithwitch13 posted:#2 was House on Haunted Hill (1959). I love Vincent Price. It's not precisely a good movie, but it's fun. Also, who the hell keeps a trap door full of acid in their basement? I have dreams of one day doing a William Castle marathon with some friends but rigging up all the gimmicks in advance and making them buy life insurance policies in case they die of fright while watching the movies. Or offer a free coffin if anyone does. The trick with this one would be concealing the skeleton until the right moment... Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 04:33 on Oct 3, 2014 |
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Oct 3, 2014 04:28
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Day 3 - There's no denying that Brian de Palma's Carrie is an exceptional film. Unfortunately, I watched the remake. When they announced that they were remaking Carrie my reaction was, like most people, "Why? The original is just as relevant today as it was in the 70's. Will shoehorning in social media really add anything to the story?" As I was watching the movie, I was thinking that it was a decent enough version on the strength of the story but not really distinct enough to justify the remake. But the longer it went on, the more I felt like it lost strength. I think there were to things where Carrie failed for me. One was the cast. Standard Hollywood casting of pretty twenty-somethings as high school students undermined the main theme of the story. De Palma has similar problems but not to the extent that this version does. The other problem was that Carrie feels more like a superhero than an out of control force. I also felt like there wasn't a likable character for me to latch onto and follow the thread through the movie. It seems like Carrie herself is supposed to be that, but the foreknowledge that she's going to go crazy and kill everyone at the prom makes it hard to like her. The character Sue in the original film had this role, but she's so diminished in this version that the movie doesn't even need her. In a vacuum, I probably would have liked this movie better. But it has to be compared to a great movie. On it's own, I'd say it was okay with a really great theme, but why watch this version when the original exists? Tomorrow for me is The Brood.
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Oct 4, 2014 00:16
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Day 4 - I've seen all of Cronenberg's output from the 80's onward, but I've never seen his early work so I was really looking forward to The Brood. I could definitely tell it was a Cronenberg movie, especially the ending. Quick plot summary: there's a couple whose marriage is in shambles. The wife has had some kind of break down and is receiving a revolutionary therapy that requires her removal from all of her family except her daughter. The husband notices strange things afoot and soon people around him are being killed by feral little people. I have some real doubts about the hook of the film. Events are triggered when a parent finds that his very young daughter has been beaten when visiting his institutionalized wife. And apparently he can't do anything about it except find proof on his own? I was initially thinking that he was trying to avoid hurting his separated wife further by going to the law, but the movie quickly makes it clear that's not the case. The whole thing should be resolved by going to police immediately, but the film insists that the law will take the wife's side. But if people did the logical thing and go to the authorities as soon as they should then no one would ever get macheted. The therapy scenes are really bad. They're like something a college student would write and performed just as well. It's a lot of really trite, "let me explain how my character got screwed up" dialog. However, it did lead to a terrific sequence where it reveals that the daughter has just been left in the care of an abusive woman. I also didn't like the characterization of the wife. There was no sign of happier times in the movie. And the therapy sessions were the majority of her screen time. At the end, a lot of it comes down to "She sure is baby crazy!" Given the themes of the story I think it's okay here, but I needed something more. Enough negatives. This is a weird and creepy movie all about broken homes, child abuse, and quack therapies. This came out the same year as Kramer vs Kramer; I had to look because I felt like it was a Cronenbergian horror take on custody battles. I wonder if was big news back in 1977 and it just influenced the development of both movies. Next up for me is Suicide Club. I may watch it tonight and get myself a day ahead!
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Oct 4, 2014 22:25
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I absolutely love Kwaidan. It's such a beautiful, striking movie.
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Oct 5, 2014 02:57
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Day 5 - One evening in Tokyo a pack of over fifty giggling school girls enters a busy train stations. They link hands to form a chain and on the count of three, all step in front of a moving train. Their deaths are part of a larger pattern of suicides and someone has to figure them out to stop it. Suicide Club feels like a movie based on that old question, "If all of your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?" I was enjoying the movie a lot with it's escalating sense of doom. The strange, sudden suicides. The contrast of the outwardly happy and the end of their lives. There's cheerful tunes that play over scenes of carnage. It's creepy and off putting and fascinating. Then out of nowhere a glam rock band appears to do a musical number over a rape-murder. It's like the plot of another, much worse movie was suddenly dropped into the one I was watching. I was wrapped up in the interesting themes and strong atmosphere and then this comes out of literally nowhere. Once that subplot wraps up there's an abrupt conclusion that does nothing for the film. The first hour and fifteen minutes of Suicide Club are fantastic. The last third is a disaster that ruins the entire movie. I think the next one up for me is Ravenous.
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Oct 5, 2014 18:38
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Basebf555 posted:I've watched a bunch of anthologies this week and I think I've decided that the magic number is 5. Each story gets 15-25 minutes and if you have one that is a little weak it doesn't have enough time to bring the rest down. I think because of this I have changed my mind and decided that I like Creepshow better than Creepshow 2. I know people love "The Raft", but I feel that Creepshow is better overall than Creepshow 2. Amber Sweet posted:Any other Asian horror movie recs? They're usually full of ghosts so they always catch my interest, but the slow moving trait a lot of them seem to have turns me off. Well, Kwaidan was mentioned earlier in the thread and it's a cinema classic for a reason. I liked Pulse but it's pretty weird. I've actually got a small list of Asian films to watch this month since Hulu seems to have a good number of them available. The Coffin is on my list, though I don't know if I'd recommend it.
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Oct 6, 2014 20:43
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Day 6 - I didn't realize what I was getting into with Ravenous. I was expecting something like a more brutal version of Alive with a psuedo-Donner Party backstory. It turned out to be completely different, and constantly shifting in tone and threat. I wound up liking it a lot. The set up does sound a lot like a horror film version of the Donner party. A weak man stumbles into a tiny fort in the northern California mountains and tells a story of a doomed expedition that has been forced to cannibalism to survive. A rescue party sets out from the fort and things go wrong. And then they go wrong in other ways. I almost feel like Ravenous approaches a vampire movie. The way that the consumption of flesh triggers a transformation into supernatural monsters that are devoured by their own hungers. And then they insinuate themselves into society in a position of authority/nobility to eat the enlisted/peasants. Speaking of vampires, next film for me is going to be Cronos.
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Oct 7, 2014 02:45
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axleblaze posted:11) Devil's Pass D+ Directed by Renny Harlan and yet it lacks any of the flare he tends to bring to things. That was a huge disappointment for me. Also, those people are the most incompetent crew of documentarians ever. Sure, let's go high into the mountains to a place best known for trapping experienced wilderness explorers, but I think we should wait for the dead of winter before leaving! Considering the footage found, their movie was going to be really lovely.
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Oct 7, 2014 14:50
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Basebf555 posted:Have you never seen the Herzog version? If not please, please watch it. Its so goddamned good. I'll be watching and I'm sure posting about it sometime next week. I like both versions of Nosferatu, but I think it's better to watch the silent version before the updated one just for the context.
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Oct 7, 2014 17:16
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I got drat lucky that I watched Ravenous yesterday since this week's We Hate Movies podcast spoiled it in the first ten minutes. I can't really complain about spoiling a fifteen year old film, of course, I'm just glad I saw it then. Day 7 - Right after I finished watching Cronos, I put on an interview with del Toro and he said something that really summed up the movie: the monster is the pitiful character in it (he also compares it to Twilight which I think is hilarious). And it really brings home the theme of the movie. This is a tragedy. It's a tragedy to become a vampire, something that even movies where the vampires are the monsters and villains often fails to convey. It's the story of an old antique dealer, his wife, and their granddaughter dealing with their lives being overturned. The dealer finds a mechanical device created by a sixteenth century alchemist that can grant eternal life. The old man accidentally triggers it and it changes him while creating a need to use it further. Making things worse, dying criminal is after the device. The mix of Spanish and English threw me a bit since there didn't seem to be a rhythm to it. I feel like it would have been better to just stick with Spanish just for consistency. As you'd expect from a del Toro film, there's a lot of striking images in it. The bathroom scene is amazing to watch and the look of the film is incredible. I was expecting more action in the movie, but that's not really a strike against Cronos. It's a sad, slow decline at the end of a life. I'm not sure what I'll watch next but I think I want to watch something lighter. Maybe The Legend of Hell House...
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Oct 8, 2014 03:24
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Jay Dub posted:Does putting the Leprechaun in space and/or The Hood make the series any better, or at least more entertaining? Or am I better off finding another series to marathon? They're definitely more interesting in a "How crazy can this film get?" kind of way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGa3R9VvDVs&t=24s
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Oct 8, 2014 18:15
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Day 8 - The Legend of Hell House wasn't very original even when it was new. It's very formulaic, but it does that formula very well and I wound up enjoying it. Stop me if you've heard this one before. There's an evil house that's supposed to be packed to the rafters with ghosts. Lots of strange deaths have occurred there over the years. Wanting to get to the bottom of these phenomenon, a scientist brings in some psychics and they stay at the house. The ghostly manifestations start soon after they arrive and then escalate until a violent climax occurs. Not a lot to say about this one since it is so basic. I liked the scientific ghostbusting machine. It also seemed to me that a lot of the psuedoscience was based on popular bullshit that psychics were spewing at the time, which made it feel a little awkward since they change their stories about every ten years (physical and mental mediums? I've never even heard of that kind of divide before). Still, a fun romp. I think tomorrow I'm going to watch The Golem. It's just about the only major silent horror film I haven't seen.
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Oct 9, 2014 00:53
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Pigbog posted:Also, is it just me or was the character Theodora pretty obviously gay? It felt like they kept dropping little hints, which is pretty progressive for 1963. Although on the other hand Nell does call her a "freak of nature" at one point, but it's implied that she is being controlled by the house at that point. I'd definitely recommend it, I found it pretty effecting especially considering it's age. The Haunting was what I was thinking about the whole time I was watching Hell House since they're very similar movies. The Haunting is better for mood, I think, but that isn't to slight Hell House. And yes, Theodora is gay.
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Oct 9, 2014 03:27
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Day 9 - The Golem seems to mainly come up as the afterthought in silent picture lists. "There's Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and... uh... The Golem, I guess." That kind of thing. And as you'd expect from a perennial afterthought, it's not as interesting as the films that come to mind first. The Jews are all going to be kicked out of Prague, but a rabbi uses the magic powers that all rabbis have to animate a clay statue. Unfortunately, he didn't read the directions since after a while the statue becomes evil. As a horror movie, The Golem doesn't really kick in until the end when creation goes bad. Then there's one scene with real menace and that's it. Before that, the scariest the Golem gets is that he stands in front of a fire exit. There is one nicely atmospheric scene toward the beginning where the rabbi uses his Jewish powers to summon a demon for information. The copy I watched off of Amazon Prime had a real problem with the tinting. I'm familiar with the concept of tinting prints in the black and white era but in my experience tinting done in modern days to these black and white films is done very poorly. Here everything is supersaturated, overly bright, and overused. It's like they just cranked the color correction all the way to one side. So besides the modern butchery, the film looked great. The sets were all very textured like everything in the ghetto was made of baked clay and not just the golem. Tomorrow I think I'm going to watch Friday the Thirteenth Part VII.
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Oct 9, 2014 23:42
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Day 10 - I've never understood the popularity of Jason as a horror movie icon. Besides my general dislike of slashers in general, Jason is a personalityless shell. There's nothing to him beside the mask and dislike of teenagers. He's boring and the Friday the Thirteenth movies that I've seen are boring. But this month would feel incomplete without watching an entry from a major franchise like that and this is the Friday closest to a thirteenth. I was actually kind of hopeful at the beginning since it was about a girl with psychic powers going to a cabin at Crystal Lake (site of the biggest drop in property values in America). She has some kind of psychic tantrum which wakes Jason up and unfortunately it happens to be next to a house full of underaged drinking and teenaged sex. "Aha!" I thought, "Rather than the usual formula, she'll try to undo the damage by fighting Jason with her mind powers as the throughline for the film. Or maybe they'll change the formula by having everyone try to defend their vacation cabin against Jason." There isn't a plot to this movie. There's isolated scenes where Jason stumbles across the next pair of teenagers who have become isolated from the group. He kills them and moves on to the next pair. It might as well have been titled "Generic Slasher Movie" and it's boring as hell. Eventually it reaches the exact climax that you'd expect it to reach. The attempts to scare in this film are so bog standard that at one point a cat not seen before in the film or after that scene somehow got locked in a linen closet so they could jump out at the victim. That's the level of creativity on display here. Everything about the way the film is shot or acted or written is just lazy. As a bonus, I've been watching Never Sleep Again in small chunks before I go to sleep and there was a woman they interviewed who was wearing clown makeup and who had either her sex slave or pet woman kneeling in front of her the entire time. That was probably the freakiest thing I've seen in the horror movie challenge so far. The next film for me is The Coffin. I've never seen a Thai horror movie so I'm looking forward it.
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Oct 10, 2014 22:26
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Day 11 - When I dug through the streaming services looking for horror films that I hadn't seen and sounded interesting, I stumbled across The Coffin. The description got me really interested and I was looking forward to this one. The execution wound up letting it down in ways that I could have never predicted. In Thailand there is a good luck ritual performed where people sleep in a coffin and receive prayers for the dead. Some people with cancer go through this ritual. Their cancer is cured, but they've passed their karma along to others near them and brought the dead back with them. The movie hints that in a Poltergeist-esque movie, the people performing the ritual moved some bodies and kept the coffins. That sounds pretty freaky, right? It's a great set up for creepy horror movie hijinks. And there are some shots in the film that are pretty clever or evocative. There's one shot where a woman is drowning in blood, the camera whip-pans to her boyfriend running to help and as it pans back over there's nothing there. There's a woman with no mouth that stalks one of the survivors for a few scenes. What goes wrong is that the film is really disjointed. It's essentially two movies badly welded together and not really interacting a lot. Half of it is more interesting than the other half. The direction has some pretty big problems. There's a blue filter over the whole movie. Initially I thought that it was just really bad day-for-night photography but it quickly became apparent that they just decided to color the whole film blue. It actually ruins the mood for me because it is so distracting. The acting is also especially bad. The film is about 70% in English, probably due to having a bit of an international cast. The dialog isn't great to begin with but it's delivered so flatly and dispassionately that it has no chance of saving it. There are some good shots and good moments in the film, but it's not the hidden gem I was hoping for. Up tomorrow for me is Tenebrae.
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Oct 11, 2014 19:08
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NuclearPotato posted:1: Is Never Sleep Again a good watch if you haven't seen any of the Nightmare on Elm Street films? It's interesting in how it digs into the low budget horror film making in the 1980's, but I'd recommend watching a few of the movies before seeing it just because it'll give context. And the series is a lot of fun for 80's horror films. I'd unhesitantly recommend watching 1, 3, or 4. Unfortunately, Netflix only has the especially bad and awkward second film up for streaming.
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Oct 11, 2014 23:54
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Day 12 - Italian horror films have never done it for me, but I feel like I should appreciate them more. So I gave Argento's Tenebre a try. And the result was the same as past attempts, I could see some things that people like in them but it wasn't for me. An American author heads to Rome on a book tour, but before his plane lands someone has killed a woman following the method from his book and stuffing pages from that book into the victim's mouth. The bodies pile up as the police try to figure out the connection between the author and the killer. The violence was often well shot, but I felt like the theme of the art influencing the world wasn't really explored. I could see the outline of what they were going for by having an author following killings done in reflection of his work, but it seems like that vanishes early on in the movie. And for a movie that emphasizes its connection to traditional murder mysteries, the mystery at the center of the plot just gives me a headache. I've got another Italian horror classic on my list of films to check out this month and I'm hoping that I'll enjoy that one more since I think it's more straightforward. But who knows? I'm still debating what to watch tomorrow. I'm probably going to go with Shivers unless something else catches my eye.
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Oct 13, 2014 03:48
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Franchescanado posted:So I had to watch Bordello of Blood. It's not surprising that he'd grate a bit since Dennis Miller was essentially playing himself.
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Oct 13, 2014 15:29
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Day 13 - Well, I started watching Shivers but the video on Netflix had some absurdly bad interlacing problems. The worst I've ever seen. So I could watch people who were 50% there anytime they moved and cut into huge ribbons in the process, or I could pick something else. So I went to another film I was looking forward to mainly because I heard it was insane: The Visitor. It's The Omen by way of Scientology. God and the devil were space aliens and the devil has a lot of descendants walking the earth. God goes around dealing with them while other people seek to exploit them. I thought going in that this would be more scifi than horror which made me hesitant to watch it as a horror movie. I shouldn't have worried. Once there very long backstory monologue at the beginning is over with, you're into devil child tormenting and killing everyone around her territory and the film does much better with those scenes than it does with the Space Jesus stuff. The editing in this film is weird. The way the reaction shots are cut in is just incongruous. Not-Damian's mother is fighting for her life, cutting back and forth between the operating table and a gymnastics class that apparently takes place months later. Not-Damian's birthday party goes awry; cut to her smirking and shrugging. One issue I had with the video streaming on Amazon Prime (my day for streaming issues I guess) is the sound mix was super-quiet. I was watching on a portable device and with the volume cranked all the way up I could barely hear the dialog. The Visitor is gloriously over the top. It's not a good movie, but it's one of those movies where things just go crazy and you don't know where it's going to end. The film opens with people using the antichrist to fix basketball games. There's a scene where God plays pong with the Antichrist (sadly, the fate of the world is not at stake). There's an amazing bird attack scene where a raptor rips out the eyes of a guy driving a car. I can't say the film does a lot of things well, but it's really ambitious. Also, the little girl playing the Space Antichrist is suitably creepy. I can believe that she'd push someone down a flight of steps. I think I'll watch Day of the Dead tomorrow. I always heard that it was really weak compared to Night and Dawn so I hadn't bothered checking it out...
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Oct 14, 2014 04:21
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Day 14 - I didn't intend to start a debate when I mentioned Day of the Dead, but here we are. I watched it and though I thought it started strong and had a lot of good moments, I don't think it's as good of movie as Night or Dawn. The biggest problem for me is just how disconnected the scenario in the film is. The group here might as well have been the stock characters from a 1950's creature feature. I couldn't connect with the travails of scientists researching zombies while under the thumb of a ruthless military commandant and locked in a vast underground storage facility (in Florida? You don't build anything underground in Florida unless you want it to be an indoor pool within a week). Compare that to Night and Dawn where regardless of how you feel about the characters, you can place yourself in their situation. Yeah, I'll never have to fend off hoards of the walking dead, but if they were coming to get me then I could see myself hiding in a house or mall. And that brings up what makes zombie films effective (and overdone at this point). There's an empathy to the survivalist nature of them. My sister-in-law who about as far removed from your average horror buff as you can get likes zombie films for that exact reason. It's hard to empathize with these characters even on a basic human level. But like I said, there's good moments. The opening sequence is really nifty. I liked the end of Bub's arc, though I thought a lot of the material around him up to that point was really weak. It's got descent gore if that's what you're looking for, though since those effects are by Tom Savini that was a given. I'm not sorry I watched it. I'd just watch the first two films in the series and Return of the Living Dead before watching this one again. I think tomorrow I'm going to hit up Monkey Shines, from the subgenre of horror where I have a genuine phobia.
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Oct 15, 2014 00:11
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Day 15 - I had completely forgotten that Romero directed Monkey Shines when I picked it as my next movie. Now I'm thinking I should watch the third movie in my pool of options he directed tomorrow just for the sake of a mini-Romero film festival. I mentioned yesterday that I've got a real phobia in films like this. The thing is that as a small child I was mauled by a pack of wild dogs and it left me really nervous around animals. And once you have that you become very aware of all the horrible things that even domesticated animals and pets can do to people. You want to be grossed out? Do a google image search for survivors of monkey attacks. For an added bit of fun, work out the noses to face ratio, it'll be significantly less than the nearly 1:1 you find in the general population. In Monkey Shines a quadriplegic man gets a lab animal as his helper monkey. They bond and the monkey goes on a murder spree. So the obvious question here is how do the animal attacks stand up. And it's not as freaky as it could be just because the behavior in this movie is so unnatural. A friendly monkey turning on me to tear my face off freaks me out, a monkey setting my house on fire doesn't. Give the monkey a knife and I get nervous. Have it cut the phone lines and I'm chill. There's good moments, and the monkey actor works relatively well in most scenes (though it's goofy when it suddenly becomes a stuffed doll). I was going to try Shivers again from a different streaming service, but since I did two Romero movies in a row I think I'm going to go for three and watch Season of the Witch tomorrow. I got lucky on the podcast front again. Right after I finished watching Monkey Shines I listed to this week's How Did This Get Made and they announced that their next full episode is Monkey Shines. Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 02:26 on Oct 16, 2014 |
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Oct 16, 2014 02:19
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Basebf555 posted:I was hoping to at least discover one new favorite but now I'm down to just The Conjuring and the Carrie remake so my hopes aren't very high. The Carrie remake would be an okay film if it existed all by itself, but it is inherently tied to a movie that's one of the titans in the genre and it isn't as good as it. Day 16 - I suppose it was bound to happen with picking films out from the genre categories in streaming sites. I have hit a movie that was not even remotely in the genre that had been misfiled. Season of the Witch from the description sounds like a horror movie and it comes from George Romero so you'd expect a horror movie, but it's a really flat suburban drama about a housewife who takes up Wicca. To quote Wikipedia, "In 1973, Romero described the film as "not really" being a horror film, but as a film that deals with the occult peripherally." The reason I went to Wikipedia is that something feels really off with Season of the Witch so I went around looking up information on it. What I found makes me think that my suspicions from watching it are correct; I think that after a bad initial reception someone went back and edited in some not very well done "spooky" stuff to try to rebrand it as a horror film. From what I can find, the film was originally 130 minutes(!) long and then was recut after its initial release (which is now lost) to 89 minutes. I don't want to think about the 130 minute cut because this film is a slog at 89 minutes. Maybe Romero was trying to capture the boring life of the suburban housewife, but in the end it's just boring. I usually try to give a bit of plot summary as a hook for anyone interesting in watching the film, but there's really nothing to this film. It's meaningless incidents drawn out. I don't even want to get into the multiple dream sequences with their incredibly heavy-handed, spelled-out symbolism. Season of the Witch is the most 70's film I've ever seen. About the only thing it was missing was some kind of key party. At one point the main character's daughter runs away with a boy who drives "One of those new cars. A Pinto or something like that." So I guess those characters died in a fiery rear end collision somewhere off screen. The most interesting thing about Season of the Witch (and I'm really stretching the meaning of the word "interesting" here) is the somewhat realistic portray of Wicca. They don't have magic powers and they aren't evil haters of Christianity. The spells cast seem more suggestive and coincidental than actually supernatural. For tomorrow, I have confirmed that the copy of Shivers up for Amazon streaming doesn't have the problems the Netflix one had for me so I'll finally watch it.
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Oct 16, 2014 23:41
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Pope Guilty posted:4. The Ninth Gate [...] but the thing that drives me nuts is watching people who have no reason not to know better reading a rare or unique book while eating and smoking a cigarette. I disagree on the well-written and well-shot parts (there's one sequence where the attempts to "artistic" with the cinematography is so ham-handed that it's distracting to me), but the book props and how they were handled drove me insane. Maybe part of it is that I collect antique books (nothing valuable, just things I find interesting) so it bothered me more seeing blinding white, clean, perfect pages in a centuries old book that they handle with their bare hands and toss around like it's the latest airport fiction they picked up at their library. As for Carrie, it felt kind of teen soap opera-ish to me. That's not necessarily a bad thing given the theme of the movie, but it makes the whole thing feel a bit more shallow. But that theme is is a strong one and I think if there wasn't a much better version of the exact same movie to compare it to then people would probably appreciate it more.
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Oct 17, 2014 17:23
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Day 17 - If you took the credits off Shivers and asked me who directed it, I'd immediately say David Cronenberg. It doesn't look as nice as his films will, he's working off Canadian Film Trust money here, but Shivers is essentially his career summed up right at the start of it. Sex, horrible things happening to the human body, and often both at once. There's luxury condos on a small island just outside of Montreal and due to the bad practices of the Canadian health system a doctor got money to make super parasites. These works sexually assault people and then once inside them cause their victims to sexually assault people. They quickly multiply out of control and the building descends into an orgy of rape. I was constantly asking myself as I watched this movie, "Is Cronenberg trying to titillate or horrify?" and there isn't an easy answer to that. With reflect and thought, I think he was trying to make that as uncomfortable as possible and thus horrify his audience, but at the same time I can easily see people coming to the conclusion that he was trying to entice the viewers with sex and then throwing in the violence as a horror film. One problem I had with this movie is that there's not much of a plot. I feel like it needed some kind of arc that we just don't get. There's some basic preliminary set up and then suddenly it's rape everywhere as the main character just runs around looking to get help. Not any particular help or any particular goal beyond that, just looking for help. It makes the last half of the film just him running from hallways filled with sexy zombies. I'm not sure what I'm watching tomorrow. Something light since I'm pretty busy. I'm annoyed at how whoever holds the rights to the Hammer films has been determined to not allow them anywhere near streaming services. I've seen exactly one movie from their big two series and it was Dracula 1972 so that wasn't doing them any favors. Also for those of you looking for a different kind of horror film, I noticed that Amazon Prime has Foodfight categorized as horror. It's hard to argue with that...
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Oct 18, 2014 01:03
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Benito Cereno posted:The Vampire Lovers is on Netflix, but that's not exactly tier one Hammer stuff. If you're into lesbian vampires, it's not too bad, though. Actually, that's a subgenre I wanted to include this month but I didn't have anything standing out for me. I think I'll watch it tomorrow.
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Oct 18, 2014 02:00
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cthulusnewzulubbq posted:13) The Old Dark House (1932) I still haven't seen that one and it sounds like a lot of fun. I think I'll toss that on my list.
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Oct 18, 2014 15:16
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usb teledildonics posted:This month is all video nasties for me. Someone should update the OP to include Cannibal Holocaust on Hulu. That's a fun theme to go with! And speaking of British censorship... Day 18 - I've actually read Carmilla, the story that The Vampire Lovers is based on. In fact, I read it twenty years ago this very month. However, I barely remember it at all. There's a reason that people talk about Dracula while Carmilla is a footnote most notable for having lesbian vampires and pre-dating Dracula. In this movie there's a sexy vampiress who moves in with women and then has softcore love scenes with them until they eventually die. Somewhere in the background, a generic vampire movie plot is taking place. There's three things that I think The Vampire Lovers is trying to do and it succeeds at only one of them. The first is to present a horror story and this movie has about as much atmosphere as the moon. It's boilerplate stuff and after making twenty years of vampire pictures I can't say I'm surprised that Hammer would just be going through the motions with it at this point. The second thing that they seem to be trying to do is present the story of the love between women and I don't get that in this film, probably because it's at odds with their third goal. There's no chemistry in the relationships. I don't get any sense of passion from the characters or even manipulation from the vampire. The only feeling I'm getting from them is "Well, if I want a paycheck I guess we better make out a bit when the director says action." The obvious third goal was titillation. If I was a thirteen year old with no access to the Internet and came across this in the middle of the night on Also, was that supposed to be Dracula hanging around in those random cutaways? He never actually gets into the action, he's just there.
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Oct 18, 2014 22:52
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Day 19 - I am so glad that they put the text crawl in front of The Old Dark House letting me know that the mute big guy in it was played by the same Boris Karloff who played Frankenstein's monster. There was another person next to me who swore that it had to be a different Karloff and I was on the verge of asking him to step outside so we could settle it like gentlemen, but then there was that crawl and I got to be smug. The Old Dark House is almost the ur-horror movie. A bunch of people are caught by a storm and take shelter at a house on top of a mountain where a strange family lives. I seriously wasn't certain if that was a cliche by 1932 or not. I'm think it was, but then this is also partially a comedy. Karloff is wasted in this film since he doesn't get a lot to do, but Ernest Thesiger's Horace steals the show. When he eventually vanishes from the film I kept waiting for him to come back. His passive aggressive nastiness toward his family is so much fun. I found it fascinating how much they seemed to be manually shifting the camera in this movie. The film is almost wobbly. I've never seen a film from the 30's with this kind of camera work. I don't think it was effective, it was just too unstable and didn't seem to match up with the storm they way they wanted it to, but it was interesting to me. I'd put The Old Dark House at the bottom of the James Whale horror films, but it was still enjoyable to watch. Next time I'm going to make another stab (ha ha) at Italian horror with Bay of Blood.
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Oct 20, 2014 02:54
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Day 20 - Bay of Blood didn't do a lot to make me go, "Yes, I now get Italian horror and I have to go seek out more." It's not for me, and that's fair enough. A developer wants to turn a bay from wilderness to a party resort and a lot of people kill a lot of other people over this. It winds up being a lot more complicated than that (did we really need multiple teams of killers?), but really it's just an excuse for a lot of stabbings. I've heard that this film was extremely influential on the slasher genre and I can see that. There's a pack of kids who don't have a lot to do with the rest of the film who just show up at One more thing, that ending was one of the most absurd, audacious things I think I've seen. It wasn't worth sitting through the rest of the movie for it from my perspective, but that was something that made me go, "Yeah, I could see how someone would talk that up." After getting away with murder including murdering a bunch of other murderers who were murdering for most of the same reasons, a couple is gunned down by their young children out of nowhere. The kids were referred to when these characters were introduced pretty late into the movie, had one line of dialog before that ending, and then suddenly a rifle appears in the shot and they kill their parents.
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Oct 21, 2014 01:04
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Day 21 - At the beginning of this month I watched the remake of Carrie, a movie that begged the question, "Do we really need a remake of a classic?" For similar reasons, I had never gotten around to watching the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The original is fantastic, why do we need an update? Well, as it turns out, the 1978 version is pretty good. It's John Carpenter's The Thing to the Howard Hawks's The Thing. Want to know the plot? It's the title. Okay, moving on. Alright a tiny amount more since I want to give anyone unfamiliar with these movies a general idea of what they're about; one morning people wake up and someone they know has changed. They no longer act quite the same. And then this effect starts spreading. The biggest change I noticed is the difference in context for the movies. In 1958 people were afraid of the communists but by 1978 that threat was buried. Instead it's about the breakdown of relationships and families. Yet another movie I've watched this month from the late 70's where that was a major theme. The atmosphere in this version is a lot more bleak than the original. In the original movie, things are bad but it's a small town and the changes are happening slowly. It feels like things can be contained. It's clear very quickly in this one that the problem is growing exponentially and humanity's lifespan can be measured in days. Any victory is obviously going to be short lived. Between the two movies, I think I prefer the original slightly because the second half of the movie is a bit stronger, but the remake is better shot, has a fantastic cast, and the build up is much better. Once everything is out in the open, a lot of the tension is drained away, though there are some great moments ("We'll be right there, Mr. Bennell.").
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Oct 22, 2014 01:45
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Day 22 - The take away lesson of Japanese horror films is that ghosts are assholes. They're less like the vengeance seeking ghosts of western media where they're usually after someone and a bunch of unfortunate people get caught up in the wake, and more like petulant Greek gods who once they notice you will gently caress with you until they're bored and kill you. Ju-On 2 is a pretty standard Japanese horror film from the early 2000's. It hits all the notes that you expect, does them well enough, and doesn't really bring anything new to the table. After the events of the first movie, the haunted house is still there. And because Japanese ghosts are assholes, they just hang out around the house waiting for someone like a television show crew to stick their head in the door and then go around tormenting and killing all of them. Also because Japanese ghosts are assholes with no sense of time or proportion, they do this pre-emptively to some of the people that the crew know who don't even go to the house. It's not a strike against the film, but I always have to wonder about the consequences of living in a world like the one in the movie. It is, essentially, the world that the ghost hunter television shows think they are living in, only cranked up to eleven. Even without the massive amounts of evidence, the fact that anyone who even delivers a paper to that house winds murdered in improbable ways would make the most jaded skeptic go, "Huh, I wonder if there's something to that ghost thing." And there doesn't seem to be a time limit on these toxic ghost spills; the Japanese equivalent of the ghost EPA would have to cordon off the house for centuries. And what about all the other people who die miserably? There must be hundreds of thousands of deaths each year in this world where the medical examiner had to list the cause of death as "haunting". Does the life insurance still pay out in those cases even if you accidentally caused someone's death and then they ghosts you to death? And can you sue the person who caused the haunting that killed your loved ones before the rear end in a top hat ghost haunts you to death too? Back to the actual movie instead of the movie I created in my head. They don't do anything interesting with the film crew concept; they mainly seem to be there to provide a fresh batch of victims. The movie is suitably creepy, lots of freaky things happen, and the way it's framed into smaller vignettes means that the weakness of the overall plot doesn't hurt the movie that much. It's even watchable if you've never seen the original one, thought I wouldn't watch them back to back since they hit all the same notes. Shockingly, I might have a new winner for my weirdest ending of the month. At the end the ghost makes a woman pregnant, sends her into labor, crawls out of her vagina in the delivery room scaring all the doctors and nurses in the room to death, turns into an infant, then waits five years to shove the woman down a flight of steps. Japanese ghosts are real assholes. Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Oct 23, 2014 |
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Oct 23, 2014 00:04
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Choco1980 posted:This is why I think the series reached an early zenith with the second TV movie, and it and the movie Kairo someone else viewed this thread are probably the best J-ghost films, as that concept of becoming a target under the smallest of associations gets taken to its logical extreme. Both of these movies are worth watching imho. I always considered Pulse to be the logical end of the Japanese ghost genre. Eventually there's just too many ghosts and everybody dies. Edit: And looking it up, Kairo was the original title of Pulse. So I guess we agree!
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Oct 23, 2014 05:12
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Choco1980 posted:We sure do, ghost buddy! Ugh. No. Ick. It's just my Kairo DVD has the title Pulse on it.
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Oct 23, 2014 15:48
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cthulusnewzulubbq posted:Do you have a means of acquiring House/Hausu (1977)? That movie is like an enema. FWIW, this movie is available on Hulu Plus as part of their Criterion collection. I showed it my brother and his wife last year and prefaced it with, "This is going to be either brilliant or horrible, but either way you will remember this movie forever."
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Oct 23, 2014 18:07
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Speaking of House, I noticed that Hulu has a short film by the same director about vampies called Emotion. I'm trying to stick to feature length movies but I might have to make an exception for that one. Day 23 - The Asphyx felt a lot like a stage play to me. It's a very low budget film that if you told me it was originally made a television movie for the BBC I'd believe it. I think you've got about six sets and five actors total. While I don't think they ever really exceeded their limitations, The Asphyx winds up being a pretty respectable little picture. A Victorian scientist has noticed an odd smear when he takes pictures of dying people with specially prepared film. With more experimentation he finds that this smear is a specter of death and he is able to trap it. Tragedy ensues. The effects are bad, the acting weak, the story alternating between obvious and ludicrous, but I still wound up enjoying the theatricality of this film. It reminds me of a cross between H. P. Lovecraft (there's these things hidden among us and you can only see them with this special light) and those early SF stories where it's all about figuring out the phenomenon that the scientist has run into. The scene where he kills his daughter throws me for a loop because everything he did there was exactly wrong. He's going to trap her death which means that he has to actually take the action to kill her; no half steps or take backs. So the method of death he chooses if a guillotine? He doesn't see the minor problem where even if he succeeds, she has to lose her head since the death won't come unless she's actually going to die? The Asphyx is a different kind of horror movie and given how similar a lot of these are I appreciated it just for that. Tomorrow I'm watching Kuroneko, a film I've been wanting to watch forever but I always get it mixed up with Onibaba...
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Oct 24, 2014 00:12
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STAC Goat posted:I started to watch The Last Exorcism Part II but when I realized that (a) it was movie #31 and (b) it looked like crap I stopped. I'll watch it sometime over the next week but for #31 I want to make it a winner. I'm leaning towards Let The Right One In, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or maybe just going with the documentary Never Sleep Again you guys have been all talking about. Either way I'm surprised I'm at 31 with a week left of this so I'm curious to see how many I actually end up racking up because I still have a bunch of movies I planned to watch. I just watched a lot of B movie "warm ups" the last week that end up boosting my numbers. Well, if you haven't watched Let the Right One In before, I strongly recommend it. It's an amazing film.
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Oct 24, 2014 15:04
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