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I'm watching The Den (2013) for my Oct. 1 spot and I just have to say, the bike guy is one of the most darkly hilarious goddamn things. It's not even relevant to the plot, it's just this random cool thing Elizabeth comes across then out of nowhere  e: what the gently caress why didn't anyone tell me this was pretty much found-footage Videodrome? SALT CURES HAM fucked around with this message at 04:13 on Oct 2, 2014 |
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Oct 2, 2014 04:07
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Oct. 1: The Den (2013, dir. Zachary Donohue, d.p. Bernard Hunt) This is a hell of a loving movie.  I was expecting something along the lines of Megan is Missing, and to come in here being all like "no gently caress this movie why do you all like this garbage so much," but I was pleasantly surprised. This isn't a morality play or even really all that exploitative; what it is, however, is Lovecraftian horror about humankind attempting to know the unknowable and being punished by cosmic forces for it. The one thing I really hate about this movie is the last minute and a half or so. It was a lot more interesting when the villains were faceless ghosts, sprung up from the internet to enact vengeance on the interloper for attempting to study it (and inevitably tame it), than when it was revealed as a Hostel-type deal. The movie up to that point felt like a millenial take on Videodrome, but that last little bit undermined it and really brought me down. That said, I'm still pretty sure this is one of the only cyberpunk horror movies ever made (and it briefly steals the visual style of the other big one, Tetsuo: the Iron Man (1989) [dir. Shinya Tsukamoto, d.p. Kei Fujiwara], for a couple of shots!) so I can dig it. It's tense as gently caress, it's incredibly dark and mean (the comic relief is a man on a bicycle getting splattered by a truck), and it's probably one of the most interesting horror flicks of the last few years. Final Grade: B Closing Thoughts: - Seriously, this movie is fantastic at doing black comedy when it wants to. - This probably would have been an A or A+, except that it chickens out on its premise at the last second in favor of a more mundane and less interesting one. - This movie is really goddamn uncomfortable to watch. It's not really scary (though there's a couple of jump scares), it's just really good at building an atmosphere of overbearing dread. October Challenge Table of Contents Oct. 1: The Den (2013) (B) / Oct. 2: The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976) (C) / Oct. 3: The Last Days on Mars (2013) (C+) SALT CURES HAM fucked around with this message at 09:04 on Oct 11, 2014 |
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Oct 2, 2014 05:39
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axleblaze posted:I also watched this tonight and I'll post more later but I just want to say that I felt the opposite. I wasn't fully on board until the ending. Contextualizing the whole thing as a crappy little porn site complete with lovely animated gif banner ads and bullet points of features of the videos brought the whole thing home for me. It took it from something that just seemed to be about how horrible the internet was (a noble message) to something more broadly about the sexual exploitation of people for profit online. It brougth the ridiculousness of the movie and just sort it tied it down to a mundane reality and I found it really effective. I really love that last shot of the kid walking in on his dad starting to watch a snuff film and him just quickly closing the window like he had been caught looking at porn. Skywalker OG posted:The Den is Internet the Movie and I think the ending brings the whole thing to its logical conclusion. That being said, the opinion that the film may have been better without that last part is very plausible. I don't disagree with any of what you said, axleblaze, but really my biggest thing was that the movie seemed to be setting up a really out-there explanation for the events then pulled out something really mundane at the last second. It still works as subtext, I would just be much happier about the movie if they'd paid off on it. Really, the key to the Lovecraftian aspect is that the protagonist is attempting to study and understand the seedy side of the internet; the killer is one of the first people the site brings her to, almost by divine providence. It's really no different than At the Mountains of Madness, except it's Chatroulette instead of Antarctica; the expedition crew attempts to chart that which cannot be charted by human minds, and end up hoist by their own petards. They learn nothing, except that they should have stayed complacent in ignorance to avoid the consequences they brought on themselves.
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Oct 2, 2014 22:30
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October 2: The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976, dir. Charles B. Pierce, d.p. Jim Roberson) I'm really not sure how I feel about this movie. The basic gist, as many here probably know, is that Texarkana, TX, immediately following World War II, is terrorized by a serial killer who wears a sackcloth bag over his head, and police attempt to stop him. The problem with The Town that Dreaded Sundown is that it feels like two different movies kludged together by a faux-documentary narrative laid over them; the half that deals with the killer carrying out his crimes is largely fantastic, and rivals (and slightly resembles) The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, dir. Tobe Hooper, d.p. Daniel Pearl). The half that deals with the cops trying to find them, however, is absolute loving excrement. In theory, it's a good idea. Especially since the case is noteworthy for being an unsolved mystery in real life, it helps to have the cops as characters working out how to catch him. The problem is, the scenes with them are largely comic relief, and it's extremely jarring comic relief. The stuff with the killer is horrifying, and yet it immediately precedes a brutal murder with a crossdressing joke that comes uncomfortably close to being a sexual assault joke. Even when it's not making uncomfortable and crass jokes, the B-plot with the police is just outright boring; it's essentially them just kind of sitting there going "do we have anything yet?" "no, we don't have anything yet" or trading clunky exposition (the scene where the Texas Ranger protagonist is introduced must be seen to be believed) or driving around doing one of the aforementioned things. It's bad, it's really goddamn bad, and it drags this movie down a huge amount. That said, though, when this movie is firing on all cylinders, it's the best goddamn thing ever. The murders have actual dramatic tension, which seems rare in a movie like this; not every victim dies, the killer isn't invincible, and even though we're not given a lot of time to get to know each target, we're given just enough to hope that they get away. It really does feel like a different film, to the point where it's even more technically well-executed than the police segments- in one murder scene, the bits where we're seeing the victims are filmed at night in the rain, then when the cops catch wind of it, suddenly we only hear the rain and it's a (terrible-looking) day for night effect. That pretty much sums the film up in a nutshell, I think; it's half of a movie that someone gave a lot of a gently caress about, and half of a movie that nobody gave a gently caress about at all. Final Grade: C Final Thoughts: - It gets a C because it's half an A+ and half an F. - My dad is from Texarkana, so I feel like this should have been more interesting to me on that level, but it didn't seem to really do much with its setting. Shame. October Challenge Table of Contents Oct. 1: The Den (2013) (B) / Oct. 2: The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976) (C) / Oct. 3: The Last Days on Mars (2013) (C+) SALT CURES HAM fucked around with this message at 09:07 on Oct 11, 2014 |
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Oct 3, 2014 05:42
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Hellraiser 2 owns. Last Days on Mars is okay.
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Oct 4, 2014 09:03
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This movie really, really wants to be another Alien. e: Seriously, the core cast of characters is exactly the same except there's two Dallases, two Lamberts and no Jones, and the first act is really riffing hard on the first act of Alien. SALT CURES HAM fucked around with this message at 09:23 on Oct 4, 2014 |
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Oct 4, 2014 09:16
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Oct. 3: The Last Days on Mars (2013, dir. Ruairķ Robinson, d.p. Robbie Ryan) (Between personal stuff and being probated I got a little behind, so time to play catchup.) This actually wasn't bad. I was a little surprised at how... decent it was, really; it's nothing groundbreaking, but it's a pretty fun little movie. I livetweeted while I was watching it and was told in response to one of the tweets that it cribs from a lot of space movies; maybe I'm just less familiar with space movies than I should be, but really, the thing that stuck out the most to me is that this film is pretty much British Alien (1979, dir. Ridley Scott, d.p. Derek Vanlint). Not in the sense that Leviathan (1989) is Submarine Alien or Contamination (1980) is Italian Alien, but this movie actually kind of seems to understand what made Alien work so well; it tries really hard to build a similar dynamic with its characters, but falls slightly short due to having a slightly overloaded cast. It tries really hard to use cramped spaces for tension like the famous air vent scene in Scott's film, but again, fails to stick the landing; most of the time, the cramped spaces are used to build Liev Schreiber's characterization, which creates some interesting subtext, but when it actually does use the claustrophobia for horror, it's just a simple chase scene. The biggest thing that keeps TLDoM from really achieving greatness is, unsurprisingly, the monster itself. Or rather, the monsters themselves. There's something inherently horrific about being trapped inside, essentially, an engine of destruction hellbent on turning everyone else into more of itself, while still being aware and conscious and using the last shreds of will you have left to beg your former friends to kill you; the problem is, one, the monsters look pretty dopey, and two, it doesn't really do anything with the psychological aspect of it until the very end. It's fun watching astro-zombies shank dudes with power drills and scissors, but it's not scary, and it just feels like a lot of wasted potential, especially given that it heavily cribs from a movie that lands that perfectly. Still, though, I didn't feel like I wasted 90 minutes. It was well-shot, very well-acted, decently written, et cetera. Certainly, nothing about it offended my sensibilities; I just wish I had more to say than "holy poo poo this is literally British Alien but not as good." Final Grade: C+ Closing Thoughts: - Schreiber's space PTSD is one of the most interesting little bits of characterization in the movie. I really wish they'd gone into more depth with it, but at the same time, I feel like that would have cheapened it. - I was expecting this to be a lot more violent than it was, honestly. Alien ripoffs tend to go for the extreme gore over atmosphere, but this was weirdly tame; if it weren't for the cursing, I'd say this would be a good film to show young teens around Halloween, and even in spite of that I'm tempted to recommend it as such. October Challenge Table of Contents Oct. 1: The Den (2013) (B) / Oct. 2: The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976) (C) / Oct. 3: The Last Days on Mars (2013) (C+) SALT CURES HAM fucked around with this message at 09:08 on Oct 11, 2014 |
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Oct 8, 2014 06:00
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It's worth noting that the main kid in Clownhouse was raped by the director during filming.
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Oct 11, 2014 04:26
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Is that serious or are you just being Lurdiak? I'm not trying to imply that nobody should watch it, I was pointing it out more because of the really hosed up subtext it adds to the movie.
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Oct 11, 2014 05:35
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Lurdiak posted:I don't know what being Lurdiak means, but I'm serious. It would be really weird to watch the movie knowing that. You're sometimes kinda snarky towards people you disagree with, and between that and the fact that I've been having a really lovely night, I interpreted what you said as being sarcastically dismissive of my point. Sorry for not assuming good faith on your part, I should really ease up.
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Oct 11, 2014 09:01
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Oct. 10: Hell of the Living Dead/Night of the Zombies/Virus (1980, dir. Bruno Mattei, d.p. John Cabrera/various?) What the hell did I just watch? No, seriously, what?  I'm still loving reeling from this movie. It's Dawn of the Dead (1978, dir. George A. Romero, d.p. Michael Gornick) by way of Magic Lizard (????, dir. Sompote Sands, d.p. unknown).The very first thing we see in the movie is a lab where... some unknown thing is happening causing all the various blinkenlights to go crazy. A couple of goons in what appear to be ill-fitting full-body condoms go down to check it out (meanwhile bullshitting about how they want to have sex with one of their co-workers), only to find that a rat chewed something up and died. One of them picks it up to dispose of it, but the rat immediately comes alive and burrows into the goon's hazmat suit and starts chewing him up while his buddy just kind of stands there slack-jawed. Yes, you read that right, a single rat gets the first kill of the movie. Not even a particularly huge one, it's about the size of your average pet rat. Stuff happens (this is not a very coherent movie), it becomes clear that this facility for whatever reason was harboring toxic zombie gas, and the head of the research team records a tape saying something along the lines of "we hosed up bad, bye bye world!" and... cut away. The next event in this movie is an action set-piece with a hostage situation that's clearly meant to be evocative of DotD's apartment block raid, where we meet a large chunk of our cast of characters. The first odd thing is, the supposed villains took hostages to try and get the facility from the first scene shut down. Y'know, the facility that just got torn the gently caress up and overrun by zombies because they were working on bioweapons. These are supposedly the bad guys. Meanwhile, a SWAT team chills outside and talks about how badly they want to kill terrorists and how much they like killing and how they're gonna go gently caress some native New Guinea girls when they're done. The SWAT people end up being the protagonists. This is overall pretty representative of the movie's politics: they make no goddamned sense whatsoever. Honestly, the entire movie is pretty incoherent; an entire set piece was just kind of added to the movie after it was done filming, and it doesn't even seem out of place, because the protagonists just keep going to new places, killing zombies in them, and then leaving and going to a different place to kill zombies in. There's no meaningful internal logic to what happens in the movie, it's just six people bumblefucking around New Guinea shooting things. The plotting is a god damned mess. That said, though, I guess I'm not entirely negative on this movie? It makes very little sense, the politics are like if a leftist got possessed by Frank Miller every few pages while writing a script and forgot to rewrite the relevant bits at the end, and it pretty much seems like an excuse to string together gore scenes, but I actually kinda had fun with it. The gore is very well-done, the dialogue is actually really (intentionally) hilarious a lot of the time, the actors play off each other nicely, and even though I didn't really catch any of their names, all the characters are fairly distinct and well-developed, and I kinda dig any movie where the apocalypse is caused by rich people trying to gently caress over poors for their own comfort. I guess there's just not really as much to say about those bits, though. Final Grade: B- Closing Thoughts: - Seriously, what the hell is this movie trying to say? It's seemingly leftist, but it portrays sociopathic miltarized cops as the good guys and it only seems to condemn the plot to make all the third-world people eat each other (I'm not kidding, that's why the lab was making zombie gas) because it failed and killed some whiteys. Did this movie have more than one script? - Fun fact: the screenwriter, Claudio Fragasso, is best known for directing and writing Troll 2. This has better dialogue, at least; there's a couple of really fun exchanges here and there. - I realize the grade I gave this seems completely at odds with what I had to say about it, but I really did enjoy this movie. It just makes my head hurt if I try to think about it for too long, and there's just really not that much to say about what I enjoyed comparatively. October Challenge Table of Contents Oct. 1: The Den (2013) (B) / Oct. 2: The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976) (C) / Oct. 3: The Last Days on Mars (2013) (C+)
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Oct 11, 2014 09:55
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It's really a shame what happened to Tibor Takacs. Dude made The Gate, one of the best kid-friendly horror movies, and then almost immediately had to resort to softcore porn, Z-grade TV work and lovely SyFy movies.
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Oct 13, 2014 03:21
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Franco Potente posted:I get what you're saying about Italian horror. I usually find it all gore and little atmosphere. With the exception of Suspiria (probably the scariest move I've ever watched), Argento's films do nothing for me. I've given Deep Red and Tenebre both shots, and they don't really excite any feelings of horror. They feel more like exploitation films to me. You liked Suspiria, but not Tenebre? Huh. Odd.
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Oct 13, 2014 06:34
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Most of those movies are pretty fun.  Zombie rear end is garbo but it's sorta unique in that weird little subgenre for being garbo.
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Oct 13, 2014 08:56
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Day of the Dead is the best of the trilogy by a wide margin actually
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Oct 14, 2014 04:49
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STAC Goat posted:I disagree completely but i can see why someone might say that. It seems like the most straight forward slash and gore zombie film of the Romero series so I imagine fans of that stuff would prefer it over the slower Night and Dawn that deal more with the human reaction. Day has that and the usual Romero judgment of society but also loads it with a tone of Savini gore and effects and Bub. I've never thought it was on par with Night and Dawn but I think its a totally serviceable and enjoyable zombie flick (as I also feel about Land). If it was just another zombie film without the comparison to Night and Dawn I think it would be seen as fine. Comparing it the two you're going to have people who love the first two judging it more harshly. But I can totally see why some fans would prefer Day if they really weren't that hight on Night and Dawn (or their favorite parts of Dawn were the hack and slash sequences). It's not a straightforward gore film, though? I'd actually go as far as to say it has less gore than Dawn; what's there is far more disgusting, but it's almost all packed into the end. The reason I like it best is because it feels like the culmination of Romero's growth as a writer and director; the themes are less heavy-handed and more nuanced, the characters are better developed than in Night or Dawn, the pacing is perfect (Night and Dawn both drag a little at times, whereas Day never does), and it's beautifully shot. I'm also a huge sucker for apocalyptic movies that are actually apocalyptic. Day of the Dead isn't about civilization plugging along in the face of catastrophe like so many others in the post-apocalyptic subgenre, it's about the last few living humans on Earth coming to terms with their inevitable extinction and choosing to go out with a bang, not a whimper. quote:And is it really a "trilogy"? Aren't there at least 5 movies? There were only three. 
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Oct 14, 2014 07:23
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Choco1980 posted:It was four. Land of the Dead is part and parcel with the other three. Diary of the Dead restarts things new, but you can't say the reset button was hit before that, sorry. Though honestly they all follow the same theme of addressing the major issues of their time, even the NotLD remake counts for that much. Yeah I'm just being mean to Land, I don't think it's as good as Dawn or Day but it's about on the same level as Night. (I don't actually like the original Night very much, granted, but it's a fine movie.)
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Oct 14, 2014 20:56
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V/H/S 2 is about a thousand times better than the first one.
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Oct 24, 2014 06:47
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