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No list or anything for me, but I'm going to try to get through one a day through the end of the month that I have not seen before. I'm plugging a few major holes along the way, starting with... October 1st: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - One of my friends told me we watched this a long time ago but I had no memories of it. Which is funny given how much other films I've seen took from it, of course, so it ended up feeling familiar at many points anyway. Still, it did a few interesting things I haven't seen anywhere else. Did I think they were the most interesting parts because they were all that seemed novel, or is everyone just stealing the wrong stuff? Anyway, the major standout is the pacing of the violence at both macro- and micro-scales. I went back to check time stamps after my viewing because it had struck me so much, and the time from the first kill to the last kill (Franklin, I'm not counting the semi hit at the end) is about 17 minutes. The chainsaw chase that begins at that point is seven minutes. Individual bouts of violence were also mostly very brief - the first kill in particular worked very well, and I can't think of another movie that takes this approach. I loved the final shot as well, I would have expected a typical movie to follow the truck speeding away but what we got was much more effective. On the other hand, the first third of the movie felt like it wasted a lot of time despite a few effective scenes. I spent half an hour with these kids and learned almost nothing interesting about any of them. I swear one of them just completely vanished partway through the movie. She was around when they got to the childhood house, then I just never saw her again. The dinner scene was a strange combination of ideas I liked (I'm a sucker for closeups of eyes, I think) and stuff that started to feel like padding. I wanted to respect the way the camerawork handled scenes that were emotionally intense for a character, but I was too bored for it to really work. I can see why this movie was so influential, but I respect it more than I actually liked watching it. Halloween - This ended up being an interesting pairing since it's almost the exact opposite of TCM in terms of overall pacing. Things happen really fast for the first five-ten minutes, then there's some buildup I really enjoyed including one or two really cool long shots, but then it sort of settles into a holding pattern and I get a lot more babysitting action than I actually wanted. It picks back up near the end for a pretty strong finish. The score was great, of course. I'm struggling for anything else to say about it. I think I enjoyed it more than TCM overall, but I'm not eager to see it again. I think I am going to watch Halloween II tonight, though, since I've been told it's a second-half-of-the-movie sort of situation. I'm definitely taking a break from slashers after that.
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Oct 2, 2016 23:41
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3 - Halloween 2. As I was told, this really felt like the second half of the movie and obviously wouldn't have worked as well on its own. Consequently I feel a little unfair saying it's also a much better movie, but it's really a much better movie. The pacing is absolutely perfect, they managed to keep a hospital setting visually varied, the music is still great, and while I miss the long shots from the first one overall the time spent with Michael was more rewarding. It would have been really easy to portray him as a simple Terminator sort of character, but while he's got the inhuman patience thing going on he also obviously has preferences and tastes. We got a little tiny bit of this with him fixing his mask at the end of the first one, but there's so much more of it here and it's all great - manages to avoid getting into overbearing origin story nonsense. Jimmy finding the nurse who'd bled out was also the funniest scene I've watched in ages. Easily one of the best slashers I've ever seen.
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Oct 3, 2016 02:08
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1. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Halloween 3. Halloween 2 4. We Are Still Here - Fun but not exceptional. A couple move into an old house in a small town to get away from memories of their dead son, but the wife keeps insisting she feels his presence in the house. Another couple comes out to join them for a weekend and wave crystals around/not wave crystals around depending on which character you ask. Most of the characters are reasonably engaging and it goes about half a step farther with its premise than you'd probably expect after watching the first ten minutes, but never makes it all the way off the rails. There's also an unfortunate bit where the same character explains the dark secret of what's going on twice, in scenes that can't be separated by more than twenty minutes or so. I'm also not totally sold on the dark secret of what's going on - the darkness under the house is apparently supposed to be a real force in the world of the film, and in that last phone call Cat insists Dagmar isn't what they should be worried about, but everything we actually see sure makes it look like Dagmar and his family are what you should be worried about. Like, okay, Dave is a murderer and the house will gently caress up your weather patterns and maybe spread some disease, but Dagmar and co. will follow you out of the house to punch a hole through your chest if you try to run away and drag all of your friends through the floor while you burn and then erupt into a fountain of blood if you try to stick around. The other threats are fairly low-key, in comparison. Dave did provide some high quality head explosions on both the giving and receiving ends, though, so points to him for that. Part of me likes leaving the ancient powerful evil totally unseen like that, but it ended up feeling a little jumbled here. It did exactly what I needed it to in terms of a break from slashers, though, and was much more enjoyable than I expected going in. Ghost-y stories usually bore me to death in a way matched only by demonic possession stories.
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Oct 3, 2016 23:36
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1. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Halloween 3. Halloween 2 4. We Are Still Here 5. The Church - It's shocking how little Soavi I've seen given how much I love Cemetery Man, and this seem like a good time to fix it. A cathedral is built on top of a mass grave containing an indeterminate number of witches, capped with a mask I'd really like to have hanging on my wall someday. The place's new librarian shows up for work and starts poking around based on his hunch that a cathedral without any kings buried in it must be guarding some great secret like a forgotten science that will let him become a god. A little silly, maybe, but he is a librarian and obviously he finds something pretty cool or it wouldn't be 80s Italian horror. The movie felt a little more polished and grounded than most of what I've seen from Fulci/Argento/Soavi, which was almost disappointing, but you could really only call it grounded within the context of the Italian camp. Some great practical effects, one really excellent costume, all the dream logic and dubbing you know and love. I think Stagefright is up next, and I really need to dive into Bava at some point this month.
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Oct 4, 2016 15:39
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I totally fell off the posting wagon, but managed to stay on track with viewing. Mostly. A couple of missed days, but I made up the quantity on weekends and everything was a first viewing so I'm going to call this a success overall. My challenge next year, obviously, will be to keep up with the posting. Here's a giant wall of all the stuff I watched since my last post, keeping it to brief thoughts on each. 1. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Halloween 3. Halloween 2 4. We Are Still Here 5. The Church Posting failure somewhere around here. 6. Stagefright - Still love everything I've seen from Soavi. Why aren't there more horror movies set in theatres? They got to do so much cool stuff with it, and still left a ton of unexplored territory. 7. Phantasm: Ravager - The second-most disappointing thing I watched. It had some good ideas, but the execution just failed all over the place. 8. Whistle and I'll Come to You - The most disappointing thing I watched. Some cool shots and a solid performance from the lead, but I am completely at a loss as to how it apparently scares so many people. 9. The Abandoned - The more distance I have from this, the more I appreciate it. It has a few little things I found incredibly irritating (Яussia faux-Russian bullshit all over the opening credits, some really unfortunate voiceover at a couple key points), but it was a constant pleasure to look at and consistently went in just a slightly different direction from what I was expecting. 10. I Saw the Devil - This didn't really feel like horror, but it was a perfectly entertaining entry in the South Korean "revenge ruins everything for everyone" genre. 11. Santa Sangre - Fifteen minutes in I was seriously skeptical about this thing being tagged as horror. An hour and a half later...well, it's Jodorowsky and horror is as good a genre tag for it as anything else. Loved it. 12. Messiah of Evil - I'd really like a better quality copy of this, that first night in the father's house is super cool visually. 13. The Broken - The most boring doppelganger mirror world movie I've ever seen. 14. Bad Biology - I feel like I was sold Nekromantik and got The Item. Easily the worst thing I watched. 15. Noroi - I didn't love it, but I liked it. Did not feel at all like a typical found footage movie, which I appreciated. 16. The Witch Who Came from the Sea - One of those movies I watched because it came up in the horror thread, but by the time I got around to it I had completely forgotten what we were talking about when it came up. Everything about this movie feels at least vaguely repulsive, but it's surprisingly smart given that. I have no idea who I'd recommend it to but I'm glad I watched it. 17. Stir of Echoes - It's a ghost movie, I guess. Everything about this was competent and there were some solid performances, but not really anything for me to care about. 18. The Visitor - I'm not sure a movie has ever had me rooting for Satin this hard before. That little girl's performance is great. Apparently there's a cut of this that's even stranger and more disjointed than what I watched, which is kind of hard to imagine. 19. Calvaire - There's a cool dance party and the last 15-20 minutes have some really killer shots and scenery, but there aren't really any interesting ideas present. 20. The Host - This was much darker than I expected. It was also really really good. Definitely one of the highlights. 21. The Hallow/The Woods - A pleasure to look at, and I feel sort of silly whining about the presence of a baby in a context where changelings are obviously going to come up, but babies are interest-repellent for me. They show up, I tune out. 22. Don't Breathe - I was with this for about the first hour, until the blind guy managed to stab the wrong body immediately after punching the right one in the face a bunch. Like, he was not sold to us as a guy with poor spatial memory and the guy he was beating up obviously did not pull a rapid and super quiet position swap. It felt super lazy and sucked me right out. 23. Deep Dark - This was a strange one - several layers of failed artists selling each others' work and a thing that lives in/is the wall of a run down apartment. Kind of fun. 24. Pet Sematary - I don't think I actually knew anything about this other than "ancient Indian burial ground", and I'd always just assumed zombie pets were going to be the focus. I was, obviously, extremely pleasantly surprised by what I actually got. 25. The Resurrected - It's not Re-Animator and it's not Dagon, but taken on its own merits I think this is one of Lovecraft's stronger stories and this was a better adaptation of it than I ever expected to see. 26. The Sentinel - The church turns a suicidal model into a nun tasked with keeping all the ugly people in hell. A murderer throws a birthday party for his cat. Traumatic father cake orgy. This is a strange movie and I'm still not sure I can say I actually liked it, but at least it wasn't boring. 27. The Lair of the White Worm - One of those movies for which I've seen the VHS cover a billion times growing up, but never actually rented it. Two decades later...this rules. Lady Sylvia is an incredibly fun character, and Hugh Grant's role was absolutely perfect for him. 28. Martin - This was a definite highlight. It's hard to imagine what the cut that runs more than two hours would be like, though. 29. German Angst - Two boring segments, but the last one has some mystery in it and does a decent job of subverting expectations within a relatively simple story. 30. Dark Waters - Good job at being wet; a little disjointed sometimes but I like it. Made me want to watch more movies with a focus on falling water, but it's been difficult coming up with other examples. 31. Horror Express - Execution was lacking in a lot of ways, but the ideas carried it - impossible not to enjoy. 32. Blood Rage - Low expectations after the first 20 minutes or so, ended up being fun. 33. Pulse/Kairo - Another great disappointment, especially frustrating because there's a bunch of stuff in it that almost worked well. This is a movie with a lot of ideas that doesn't really know how to articulate any of them. Constantly undermines itself with an incredibly goofy soundtrack. Could have been something really special with a (much) tighter script and maybe a few more scenes in public spaces early on. 34. Halloween III - I wish I'd gone into this knowing absolutely nothing about it, but it was still a lot of fun and a great way to wrap things up. Only two complaints: one, it could have used a stronger lead character and two, I now desperately want to watch the prequel about an Irish witch/toymaker and his army of robots stealing stonehenge. I bet that would be an even better movie. I think I might watch Pumpkinhead now to finish things off for real, but it's obviously going to run past midnight at this point so I'm not counting it in the list.
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Nov 1, 2016 03:58
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