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Boring autobiographical excuses: Hi everyone I am late. I was super excited for this year since we have the best thread title yet, my Camp Crystal Lake shirt from the May challenge finally arrived, everything was looking good. Then I accidentally went to watch the Perseids with a girl who is terrified of everything and suddenly I have no free time and most of the stuff that kind of looks like free time is woefully horror-deficient. I'm still like 50 pages behind on actually reading this thread, much less the main horror thread. Challenge stuff: But just writing October off is unacceptable so I'm giving this a shot anyway - my goal is a lamentable 13 movies, with 6 done so far (long-delayed writeups to follow over the next few days). As a personal first I will consider rewatches acceptable, but only if the girl watches with me and actually likes the movie. So far we've gotten as far as her reading wikipedia plot summaries when I start a thing (because apparently this makes her less terrified when she glances at the screen and something scary is happening), and then half paying attention to one or two scenes she said she didn't understand from the wikipedia description. I've gotten one "that didn't really seem like a horror movie" which I guess is a step in the right direction, but this still feels like a major project. 1. Mandy (2018) - This was a weird one, mostly in that it actively avoided being weird in any of the ways the trailer made it look like it was going to be weird. A lot of it is directly adjacent to things that are very familiar or familiar things from a slightly different viewpoint. Like someone took a simple, bare-bones plot about random violence and the quest for revenge, then ran it through a filter that stretches everything out until the pacing exactly matches Refn's. But while that's my first impression I was also immediately left with the feeling that it's probably really more akin to some older style I'm just not as familiar with. I get that same sense from all the elements of the movie that feel like a kinship with Heavy Metal - a bunch of shots near the end of the movie look like the came straight off an album cover and there are some animated interludes that feel like they owe a lot to Heavy Metal (the show), but the movie's actual soundtrack is a purely synth affair that again echoes the sort of atmosphere you'd expect from Refn. So maybe it's actually looking back to some common ancestor and there were a bunch of weird not-really-magical realist pulp revenge novels sitting next to the pulp sci-fi and fantasy the landscapes came from? Whatever's responsible, painting an ordinary story with this aesthetic worked out really well and throwing in Nicholas Cage is obviously always a good decision. There's also some maybe-interesting stuff about the film providing both supernatural and mundane readings of everything that I still haven't really fully digested. I feel a little guilty about referring back to Refn all the time because he's not the only guy who conjures up this sort of atmosphere, but he does it so consistently and I haven't seen anything else from Cosmatos. And as much as I enjoyed this, I spent a non-trivial chunk of it thinking about how much I love The Neon Demon. I really need to watch that again.
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Oct 27, 2018 00:12
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Well I completely failed at posting, so here's the final list of stuff I watched and super brief thoughts on everything post-Mandy, which I covered in my previous/first post: 1. Mandy (2018) 2. Apostle (2018) - Mixed feelings again. I really enjoyed the first hour or so of our protagonist sneaking around the island and piecing together clues, and the story was pretty fun even if it felt a little too blunt about its themes on occasion, but it really could have used a little more trimming. There were at least two or three incidents of villainous expository monologue that felt really jarring, and baskethead seemed like he was only in the movie because someone liked the visual. Good, but disappointing because it should have been great. 3. A Field in England (2013) - Kind of cool just for how much atmosphere it manages to pack into a non-set and it would make a good double feature with A Dark Song, but the characters need to carry it and they all feel pretty flat. 4. Pyewacket (2017) - There's a single pretty cool shot in the middle of the movie and I could imagine the central mother-daughter relationship resonating with someone, but I am not that person. Mostly it just felt disappointingly predictable. 5. Incident in a Ghostland (2017) - Visually beautiful and competently executed, but I bounced off of it pretty hard because after the first fifteen-twenty minutes you find out you're just watching Sucker Punch, but with fewer ideas. You could maybe almost imagine it being a response about the banality of evil but then it would have needed villains who were more human and less video game-y. 6. Thoroughbreds (2017) - This was pretty fun. Solid performances and cute dialogue. The ending feels a little bit hollow, though; like someone made a beautiful and compelling argument in hopes of persuading you that the sky often looks sort of blue. 7. Fran Challenge #12: Devil Fetus (1983) - I'm a sucker for goofy Hong Kong horror so this was an easy sell. It's got most of what you'd hope for, including a pretty great wizard duel. The only thing I found disappointing is that when compared to The Boxer's Omen or The Seventh Curse the premise was on the mundane side. But that's kind of an impossible standard and the actual execution was great. 8. Fran Challenge #11: The Ghost Breakers (George Marshall, 1940) - This movie has a ton of fun ideas and mostly blends the together pretty well, but it suffers badly from dialogue that feels obligated to be clever at all times. The tedious kind of comedy first, horror and mystery distant seconds. 9. Fran Challenge #7: Wolf Guy (1975) - Incredibly disjointed and tries to cram at least three different plots into a single movie (sequentially), this was still a ton of fun. Starts as an interesting supernatural mystery and features the goofiest secret base I've ever seen. 10. Fran Challenge #5: C.H.U.D. (1984) - A classic I should have seen a long time ago. I wish I'd known less about it going in; if you ignore the opening scene the bulk of this movie would be a pretty compelling mystery. There are probably others I'm just not thinking of, but it's really striking having a monster movie where the monsters are so thoroughly backgrounded. The movie's attention and the narrative focus are all about the root cause of the situation, and the actual things eating people are a side issue at most. Will definitely need a rewatch someday. 11. Fran Challenge #3: Near Dark (1987) - Birth state rather than current residence because I didn't really want to watch Children of the Corn. I think I made the right call because this is one of the best vampire movies I've ever seen with an absolutely stellar cast and a bunch of standout scenes. It's also one of the worst vampire movies I've ever seen because the condition is so trivial to reverse that it doesn't even feel like a vampire movie by the end, but I guess they really wanted a story about hanging out with the wrong crowd and redemption. Badly betrayed by devotion to its themes, but so well executed that I love it anyway. 12. Fran Challenge #10: Summer of '84 (2018) - A story without any real surprises and the gang of friends felt sort of transparently movie-ish. Maybe just a consequence of having seen Stranger Things and It in the past year or two? Anyway, it was all so well executed that I didn't mind. The climax in particular is one of the best I've seen in ages, but they should have cut the bookending narration and final scene. 13. Fran Challenge #13 (I guess, according to that list on wikipedia? I didn't notice it in the movie at all): Poltergeist (1982) - Another classic I should have seen a long time ago, but have instead mostly seen piecemeal in its influence on other media. Plus the crawling steak scene once when I was flipping through hotel cable channels or something. I really wanted to like this more than I did, but it felt like less then the sum of its parts. Tons of good ideas are in here but the entire thing is hanging on the family, and the kids just don't really have any personality or anything much to do. Having a psychic show up to explain all the details of what was going on killed the entire middle of the movie for me. Still, a great climax and the husband/wife had good chemistry even if the kids felt vestigial. So I at least made my personal movies-watched goal, but I think it's formally a failure since it took me until now to post all of these. Mostly this year felt like a bummer just because I wasn't able to keep up with the thread - way less free time combined with what looks like record-breaking participation and some absolutely astonishing totals from several of you. So kudos to all of you and thanks for all the write-ups, I've got at least a dozen new names I'm excited to track down and watch based on casually skimming just a small portion of the thread so far. Irony.or.Death fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Nov 2, 2018 |
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Nov 2, 2018 00:30
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