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Ah, this is always fun! I always try to stick to movies I haven't seen, but I saw some fun things last year that I kind of want to rewatch. We'll see. Started with kind of a dud, though. 1. The Conjuring 2 - Disappointing. It muddles the story by having such a goofily complex haunting, and far, FAR too many scenes rely on scary things that one character can see but others cannot.  .5/5.
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Oct 1, 2016 17:11
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 00:14 |
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Justin Godscock posted:1. Hush (2016) Hey, me too! 2. Hush - I enjoyed it a lot, but would add that I wish that she used the limitations of her disabilities more often while fighting back. /53. The Howling - This movie is a slooooooow burn, and is pure triple-distilled 70s. I enjoyed the effects, and think I probably enjoyed it more thanks to the Scream Stream. .5/5
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Oct 2, 2016 14:13
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Hoo boy. Rough day. 4. Purge: Election Year - I love these dumb movies, but I wish they put any thought into the premise. I mean, this is supposedly set ~18 years after the first Purge, but the year is still basically "present day", and by this point you think there would be advanced purge techniques or something. Instead they treat 'purge tourism' as something new this year. Anyway this was pretty by the numbers and disappointing. /55. Holidays - I wanted to say that eight was too many divisions for an anthology movie, but that's not true. ABCs of Death managed to have several good segments. These were all pretty terrible, though I guess if I had to pick a favorite, maybe Mother's Day? /56. The Forest - Man, Aokigahara Forest is such a great spooky setting for a movie. This was terrible. Lots of unearned jump scares, a pretty nonsensical plot, and not enough character development for you to care what happens. Plus, a ton of the movie takes place during the day. Even a suicide forest is just a forest in the day. I'm sure it's possible to make that spooky, but they did not succeed here. 0.5/5
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Oct 3, 2016 15:34
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Not really. Part of the plot of the third is that the usual ban on attacking 'level 10 government officials' has been lifted. Which is funny because I don't remember that being mentioned in any of the previous movies, and it seems to go directly against the idea of a purge. There is a group who seem to be planning to systematically attack politicians but they don't. The "end the purge" party's main argument is that the purge primarily affects the poor, but we never find out why. I just want to see purge corporate sabotage, or purge Wall Street or something.
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Oct 3, 2016 17:12
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I fell way behind in reporting, but not watching. Time to catch up! 7. The Wailing - Pretty great, weirdly creepy movie. It's a slow build that starts as almost a slapstick comedy. This connects you to the main characters, and when the poo poo finally hits the fan, it hits pretty hard. /58. The Eye (2008) - I find it very hard to take any of these kinds of movies too seriously, after the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror with the evil replacement hair. Anyway, a blind woman gets new eyes, and the new eyes allow her to see spirits. Not bad, but it felt pretty rote. Also, easily one of the happiest endings of a horror movie I've ever seen. /59. Deathgasm - A couple of high school headbangers stumble upon a song that summons a demon, and then they have to deal with the consequences. Stylish, very bloody. I got tired of the one dimensional characters, though, which really dragged down what could have been a fun clever flick. /510. Shivers - Fun stuff. Early, classic body horror by Cronenberg. An isolated living complex runs into a, um, parasite issue. /511. Baskin - I really liked the way this movie started, with a good sense of comradery between the characters and a general sense of unease. It lost me after the actual horror begins, and it becomes kind of a boring slog. Kind of an insufferable twist ending that just made me roll my eyes. /512. Kairo - There's a ghost in the machine! And, everywhere else too! Very slow moving, and at times VERY unsettling. At other times, just a wee bit boring. The unsettling wins out, but I ended up disappointed overall. The ending is pretty great, though, for how far it takes everything. /5
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Oct 9, 2016 01:00
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An American Werewolf in London - Good, simple werewolf movie. Transformation scenes are overwrought, but with good effects. Overall, interesting take on the "curse". 4/5 #Horror - This movie tries so hard to be relevant and deliver a message but it is just so awful at it. A group of 12-year-old girls bully each other, and then get killed. There are no lessons to be learned here. The credits and 'social app' animations are the movie's scariest parts, because they are so garish and ill-considered. 0/5 Excision - Very gory, but mostly just a weird, off-kilter horror comedy. Pauline is weird, wants to be a surgeon after high school and fantasizes about bloody scenes of sexy surgery. I didn't find it too scary but I thought it was entertaining. 3/5 JeruZalem - The three questions of a found footage movie: 1. How? The main girl has Google Glass, which is hilariously outdated already. 2. What? A portal to hell 3. Where? Jerusalem, Israel This wasn't great, but it was more novel than I expected going in to it. Way way waaaay too many "let's run this way, now let's run over here" scenes. 1.5/5
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Oct 12, 2016 01:43
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timeandtide posted:7. Haunter:
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Oct 12, 2016 02:53
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Haunter I enjoyed it a lot, but I wish the main character didn't spend most of her time completely scared out of her gourd. It led to a lot of scenes where interesting things happen but she couldn't be relied upon to follow-up because she was too busy peeing her pants. Felt like an artificial way to extend the story. Minor complaint, though. Fun haunted house story. 4/5 Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer Pretty disappointing. Lots of gooey effects, goofy plot. Fun scenery-chewing by Robert Englund. 2/5 Witchfinder General Kind of an unpleasant film to watch, what with the torture and all, but Vincent Price is a treasure. Maybe man is the true horror after all. 3.5/5 The Manitou The racism detracts, but otherwise it's a really entertaining movie that goes to completely unexpected places. Like, seriously. If anyone actually predicted a final fight in space between a nude woman throwing electricity and Satan with photon torpedos and metors I would be drat impressed. 4.5/5 The Haunting (1963) Holy hell this movie is gorgeous. Like, just beautiful to look at and beautifully shot. Solid spooky story that relies a lot on the weirdness of the house itself. Classic for a reason. 5/5 rewatch Pontypool I enjoyed this a lot more the second time around, freed to pay more attention to the details. Fun movie about a small-town radio presenter during the middle of an outbreak. 4/5 22. Fright Night (1985) Annoying characters, but pretty great makeup/transformation scenes. It got better as it went along. 3/5
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Oct 18, 2016 14:49
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Fright Night A vampire moves in next door. I have a newfound respect for the original, after watching them back to back. Same basic idea, not as well done. 2/5 Waxwork A waxwork museum contains living scenes that kill visitors. I wasn't a big fan. Each of the individual vignettes is very generic, except the unexpected Marquis de Sade one. Kind of a corny movie. 2/5 Night of the Creeps Pretty entertaining movie about space slugs, but I enjoyed Slither more. 2.5/5 From Beyond A couple of scientists open a portal to another dimension, and unleash all the fun located therein. Weird and strange and fun. 5/5 The Beyond A girl inherits and renovates a hotel unfortunately located on one of the seven gates into hell. I found this to be disappointing. More of a series of vignettes about a gateway to hell being open than an actual connected movie. The effects are gooey and gross and lingering. Probably improves with multiple watches. 2/5 The Stuff Woo, 80s! Living marshmallow fluff conquers the tastebuds of a nation. I like what a goofy badass the protagonist is. Fun movie. 3.5/5 Antichrist A husband and wife deal with the grief of losing their young child. Really an abject lesson about not being a home psychologist for your obviously still depressed wife. This movie goes places, but I didn't enjoy the places it went. I mean, I wasn't supposed to, but, still. I think it would have been a better movie with the original twist (Satan created the earth, not God) than the revised one. 1/5 Ju-On: The Grudge A family of ghosts destroy everyone they encounter. I enjoyed this more than I expected to, but on reflection it probably wasn't that good of a movie. The story is told through a bunch of nonlinear short stories, each focusing on the inevitable doom of one of the characters. The fact that everyone is doomed from the outset means there isn't a lot of tension. BUT, that's not knowledge they give you until the latter half of the movie. 3/5 Don't Look Now Really gorgeous film, about a reluctantly psychic Don Sutherland and his wife as they deal with grief after losing their duaghter. I didn't really feel like it earned its twist, though I will have to rewatch it. 3/5 Stir of Echoes Kevin Bacon gets his mind opened, and begins to have psychic powers. And also see ghosts. It was a goofy, fun, very 90s movie. Entertainingly dumb. 2.5/5 That's 32! Sheesh.
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Oct 22, 2016 15:08
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Final Girl A girl gets trained to fight back against some unsuspecting killers. Man, this movie. Ugh. She is frustratingly not very well trained. The killers she is facing don't seem like that big of a threat. None of it makes sense. No girl would get into a car with their essentially blind date and his three creepy creepy friends. No trained fighter would abandon weapons the way she does. She takes every advantage, except, y'know, the utterly obvious ones like "keeping this axe". Commentary on similar actions in horror movies, or just poorly plotted nonsense? You decide. 0/5 Southbound An anthology of lightly connected stories, Southbound is fairly interesting but doesn't really pull it off. Some good stories in the middle, though I think I rolled my eyes at the wrap-around. 2/5 Halloween 2 Takes place immediately after the end of the first movie, and ups the ante in every way: more gruesome kills, more kills, and a more invincible villain. None of these make the film better, in any way, and I prefer a villain who seems human. This is where Michael Myers begins to enter into Jason territory and become the unkillable ubermonster. Still, not an awful sequel. 3/5 Halloween 3 rewatch This movie is so dumb and I love it for it. Halloween 3 attempts to abandon Michael Myers and tell and entirely new and unique story. Boy does it. When a Halloween costume owner gets killed, a doctor (?) and the guy's daughter investigate and discover a strange and complicated conspiracy. It's paced poorly, but the revelations are just so ridiculous and the ending is wonderfully dark. 4/5 Frankenstein Classic for a reason. Beautiful film, and Karloff is a great Frankenstein. Doctor Frankenstein is fully the villain here, and if you don't end up feeling sorry for the monster maybe the real monster is you. 4/5 Jekyll & Hyde ... Together Again A movie in the style of Airplane and Naked Gun, filled with constant stupid puns and jokes. Not all of them land, but the ones that do are really funny. Shockingly accurate to the original story, only here the drug that transforms Jekyll is cocaine. 4.5/5 The Sentinel What a fantastically weird film. A model moves into a new apartment with strange neighbors, including a blind priest upstairs constantly looking out his window. It didn't entirely work for me; I didn't feel like the reactions were accurate to some of the reveals. Like, things that should freak her out do not. 3/5 Angel Heart rewatch Worth it just for De Niro chewing scenery as the devil. The plot meanders a bit, and the central mystery is a bit ridiculous, but it's an entertaining watch. 3/5 Halloween 4 Halloween III was...not successful at escaping the orbit of Michael Myers, and so 4 returns to familiar territory. Now, Myers is full-on invincible and unstoppable, and just killing entire locations full of people for fun. Meh. The little girl at the center of it all was ok. 1.5/5 Halloween 5 Oh, we're doing this again? OK. Once again Michael survives a barrage and continues his hunt. The little girl from the last film, now psychically connected to him for some reason, is still the intended prey, but I wouldn't say Michael has a lot of focus here. A series lowpoint, I hope. 1/5 Rope Great film. Two men strangle an 'inferior classmate', and then hold a dinner party over his dead body to revel in their success. Their hubris becomes their undoing. Hitchcock plays with the form here, hiding cuts to make it appear like one long interrupted take. Regular conversations continue along in the background, making the whole thing feel like an actual dinner party, and the whole thing was very tense. Jimmy Stewart is great. 5/5 The Legend of Hell House A group of scientist and mystics head into a haunted house to attempt to clear the haunting. Some pretty enjoyable scenes of ghosts in action, separated by boring exposition. 2.5/5 The Relic A scientist of some sort sends his jungle findings back to a museum, where a creature begins to kill people. I am lucky I remembered that much. An immensely forgettable film, deadly boring with a mystery that you have no reason to care about, and characters who you also have no reason to care about. Also, one of the darkest movies I've ever seen, presumably to hide cheap and terrible sets? 0/5 44. The Mangler Entertaining but not good. Has a laundromat's sheet press been inadvertently possessed? Or has it always been evil? The movie doesn't really pick a side here, which makes the plot confusing and convoluted, probably solely to fill time. Based on a ten page short story they had to expand it somehow, and most of what was added is pretty awful. Still, an insane movie that goes to some interesting and enjoyable places. 3/5
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Oct 30, 2016 18:13
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Thirsty Girl posted:The Relic, like Deep Rising, is top-tier cgi trashfun. The end of The Relic did get pretty fun, but it took such an awfully long time getting there, and even then the monster and humans were constantly doing stupid things.
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Oct 30, 2016 19:21
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 00:14 |
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Halloween H2O H20 retroactively erases the contributions that movies 4 and 5 and 6 made to the series, and that's great. The original stalkee returns, and Myers stalks her and others around a private school in California. Pretty good return to form, though, also, pretty 90s. 3/5 Halloween Resurrection Well, then. A continuation of h20, with an opening vignette that shows how he survived the last film and is *ridiculous*. Of course the rest of the film is also pretty ridiculous. Enjoyably dumb. If you're looking for Busta Rhymes attempting to martial arts Michael Myers, well, you've come to the right place. 3/5 Train to Busan A zombie outbreak occurs on a train, and a dad has to learn how to protect his daughter. My only criticism is that it moved a little too slow, but it does a great job creating menacing zombies and naturally, bad humans. 4.5/5 Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon I thought it was interesting but it didn't really grab me. In a world where Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees, and Freddy Kreuger actually happened, a documentary crew follows a killer as he plans his (first?) massacre. I thought it worked pretty well until the massacre begins, and then it all sorta fell apart. 2/5 Chopping Mall Ah, the 80s, good for enjoyable schlock. A mall invests in killer robots and impenetrable doors, for..safety reasons I guess. A gang of kids stay in the mall overnight partying, and a lightning storm unleashes the robots upon them. Hearkens back to a time when you could buy a gun at a mall. Simpler times. 3.5/5 And then #50, on November 1st because somehow I skipped this dumb thing: Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers So imminently skippable that I completely missed it while watching the entire series. There's a cult now, and that's why Myers is an immune killing machine? I dunno this was really dumb. 1/5 It was a fun month and I saw some pretty neat movies. Thanks to the Scream Stream for expanding my options in a lot of interesting directions.
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Nov 5, 2016 22:25
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