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While I liked most the horrors that I have watched, I have not actually a whole lot of experience with horror; I have in fact not watched a whole lot of staples of the genre. I intend to fix that over the course of this month. And maybe my lack of taste on the subject really shows, because I just watched Suspiria, which is apparently a gem of the genre and it left me rather unimpressed. One of my gripes is the main character, who spends most of the film passively being explained what is going on by other students and is generally a bland, uninspiring heroine who is hard to care bout. I realize that the maxim "show, don't tell" isn't quite as ironclad when it comes to horror, where the implied and the mysterious are paramount, but I really felt unsatisfied by the quantity of dead air in the film. But far worse is the way the film seems to flop around without a plot, without stakes; we see plenty of weird things happen in the film, but while some of them seem to have a logic behind them (the pianist challenges a member of the coven, and has his own dog assault him) others seem to have no purpose but to add some shock factor to the film (the maggots raining into the dormitory, and possibly the dog assaulting the kid, although I guess that could have been just the dog being aggressive; but if that was the case, why does the pianist insist that the dog is a peaceful animal? And why does the film seem to imply that something supernatural is at work?). There was a lot of dead air throughout the movie, and when something does happen, during the tense scenes, it's often accompanied by this sound like a metal rod hitting a empty metal crate, which I guess is supposed to be underlining how upsetting the situation is but that I found distracting and irritating. This is a shame because the tense scenes were rather nice and well-constructed. I also like the atmosphere of the setting, very opulent and with an undercurrent of teenage drama that wasn't really developped but helped keep the film grounded. The special effects were also perfectly serviceable (with the exception of the bat), considering that this movie was made in the '70s. The gore had an impact without being a splatterfest, and the corpse that the witch inhabits was very creepy... a shame for the way her outline suddenly appears for no reason, cheapening the resolution. I am almost sure that I am missing something about this movie, because everyone seems to agree that it's a masterpiece, but if I had to give it a vote with based on my impression as of right now, it would be 5/10.
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Oct 2, 2015 22:08
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 07:59 |
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Just watched the first Hellraiser. It was pretty good, I liked the combination of slasher and incomprehenisble-creature tropes. The edonistic demons were super creepy.
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Oct 3, 2015 22:19
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Can you believe I only just now watched Nightmare on Elm Street? I can see how a movie like this can leave as big as an impact on popular culture as it did, but I fear that the movie lost some of its oomph because of how many parodies of it I have been exposed to. A real shame, that.
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Oct 4, 2015 21:43
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I finally picked this up again and watched The Others. Holy poo poo was it good. Are haunted house stories normally this good? I absolutely did not predict the twist until the end.
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Oct 9, 2015 21:28
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