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This has been the easiest round - just vote the first entry, you know that you're getting the best option each time.
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Apr 9, 2020 00:43
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I ultimately voted to keep ANoES around, but that was a tougher call to make than I'd originally expected. I mean, I think the original Candyman is quite possibly the best slasher movie ever created, but 2 and 3 were pretty dire. I don't think as much of Nightmares 1 or 3 as most people around here do, but I still think they're ultimately fine, plus 4 and Freddy vs. Jason are great. But even then, all of those stacked together against Candyman 1 and I was still hesitant. I dunno... if you'd asked me at the start of this, I'd have said Freddy walks with it easy, but the further we go, the less I actually believe that.
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Apr 23, 2020 16:23
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Did we ever establish which precise Universal Monsters movies are in contention here? It sounds like there's some confusion as to which ones we're talking about, and the whole series is a wide enough net to cover both incredible highs (Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein) and some pretty dull lows (a lot of the sequels to The Mummy are pretty blah, I'm not as keen on any Wolf Man movie, etc.). That said, I have too much personal investment in the Child's Play franchise - as it started as the only horror movie to really scare me as a child to the one consistent horror franchise that I love as an adult - for me to vote against it here. Even for Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff.
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Apr 29, 2020 17:06
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SO, I'm gonna play contrarian here for a moment on Universal Monster chat and say that, while there are one or two stand-out movies, on the whole the idea of it being a franchise is weighed down by all of the terrible, repetitive sequels. I know we're constraining this down to largely just the Frankenstein and Wolf Man movies, with a few tangential asides for Dracula (and I personally don't see how the two direct Dracula sequels have any bearing on House of Dracula), but even still, you have to square up some basic facts here. Namely: - House of Frankenstein is bad - House of Dracula is bad - Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man is bad - Dracula and The Wolf Man are not that great to begin with I get that we're trying to cast as wide as possible a net for the idea of snagging as many UM movies as possible, but we're looking at what we get with rosy colored glasses. Out of the, what, 9 or so films we decided should count, I peg more than half as being middling to poor. And you know that if we started counting things like the various Mummy or Creature from the Black Lagoon sequels that this would just further hamper their standing. I dunno... I like the concept of the Universal Monsters more than the process of watching them, a lot of the time. They have great aesthetics and design, and sometimes precious little else. I also think that, overall, the Child's Play saga is like 5 for 7 in terms of very good to middling quality - and I'll even stand up for the 2019 reboot as being not that bad, if we want to lump that in here too - which means we're back into the debate between "one great film vs. several good films" that we've played out a couple of times already.
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Apr 29, 2020 22:46
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Burkion posted:Let's have some words. Okay, let's. Burkion posted:House of Frankenstein has some brilliant cinematography and direction and it picks up from the last film competently. It is flawed, but not bad in any dire sense. The worst thing about it is that Dracula is completely separate from the rest of the action, taking up the first act only. Larry's torment and character arc is carried on perfectly well and Boris Karloff as the Mad Scientist is beautifully poetic as he hams it up with the absolute best of them. He is the king of the show, and it is fitting that the Monster that he created carries them both to their death. I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one. I just found it a complete mess. Burkion posted:House of Dracula is a trash fire... You can stop here. House of Dracula is a trash fire, that is one thing we can be in total agreement on. Burkion posted:Let's swing back to the bad bitch that got us to the ball. Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman is a great film, maybe not an all time classic, but a great one all the same. It functions simultaneously as a sequel to The Wolfman and to Ghost of Frankenstein, and generally does not miss a beat. The movie is harmed by the choice to shy away from Bella Lugosi speaking as the Monster, as he is canonically still Ygor at this point and also blind, but this is the movie that started THE walk for the Monster. God, no. Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man was boring, drawn out, nonsensical garbage. Even as someone who knows the continuation on from Ghost of Frankenstein, the way the Monster was handled was a terrible decision, badly explained, and unfairly defined the way the character was seen in pop culture forever after, in a negative way. (I still don't know why, really... was that just the most popular one from the whole Shock Theater band of films Universal put on television back in the day or something?) Burkion posted:The Wolf Man not being a great horror film on its own terms deserves some loving talk back. I already went on at length about what the Wolfman accomplished and what it did and what it means, so I want to hear from you on how it failed itself. Yes, the violence is muted because they couldn't do what they wanted- that is the lament of all but the rarest of horror films. But sheer pound for pound, Wolfman stands heads and shoulders above almost all other films for birthing an entire genre of work. No way. The Wolf Man was boring and dragged on and on. The set work in Talbot Manor was nice, but that was about as far as that went. Music was dull and recycled, a lot of the secondary performances were bad, and the script just kept repeating itself - I think I marked it as 3 complete repetitions of that poem in a 10 minute period last October. It's as if no one making it trusted the audience to be able to follow all of the rules and crap it was making up as it went. And it's not like the film can even keep to those rules as it goes on, either. Burkion posted:The Wolf Man defined what it was to be a cinematic werewolf. No? I don't know of any werewolf film today that gives a single poo poo about things like wolf's bane or pentagrams or silver beyond silver bullets, and most of them go for more wolf than man than this one did. (I saw that movie Howl for the April Challenge which went the other way and trust me, that does not work.) And it isn't even like the rules that they're making up in the film are adhered to fully - Talbot's first victim was some random gravedigger, not some one that he had felt compelled to seek out as the Wolf Man via the pentagram mark. It marks the whole thing out as sloppy and inconsistent right from the get-go, and if they want to insist so mightily on trying to set up all of these various rules and elements the least they could do is play within the sandbox they built. This is like arguing that Night of the Living Dead defined what being a cinematic zombie is when it didn't - it's the progenitor, yes, but Return of the Living Dead is what defined what we think of as a zombie. (Well, that and Tom Savini's make-up work in Day of the Dead.) The definition of a cinematic werewolf is a bit hazier, since it's such a mutable design and so open to wildly differing interpretation, but I'd peg the defining films as either An American Werewolf in London or The Howling before The Wolf Man. Burkion posted:And Dracula? There are two good performances in Dracula - Edward van Sloane as Van Helsing and Dwight Frye as Renfield. Bela Lugosi is certainly a massive presence in the film, but I do hesitate to call it a good performance in and of itself, especially for how little screen time and dialogue he actually has. That's just me, though - I'm the ride-or-die Frank Langella weirdo. Burkion posted:Then we have Frankenstein. There are two great films out of this - Frankenstein and Son of Frankenstein. I'm actually nowhere near as big on Bride as most of the people here are - I don't think the more broad, comedic aspects work in this, and there's a good 5 minute special effects sequence showing off Pretorius' little creations that stops the pacing of the thing dead. It's not bad, but it is wildly overrated for what is, ultimately, a competent but not transcendent sequel. Ghost of Frankenstein is only okay. Burkion posted:Do you really think House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula muddy the water that much? I do, because I think that you're adding more cruft into the Universal mix than is necessary. If we wanted to focus on only the Frankenstein Quadrilogy of continuous sequels and leave out the shared universe aspect, you might have a better, more persuasive argument for the UM films continuing. As it is, you're taking two great films and two good enough films and shackling 5 or 6 more mediocre to terrible films to them and asking me to vote for the weight of averaged mediocrity. Ultimately, I'm kind of looking at this like the debate over the Romero Living Dead series vs. the Return of the Living Dead series, where RotLD has one outstanding, fantastic, better than almost anything film and a whole bunch of nothing weighing against it, vs. a trilogy of films that are not quite as good, but two are almost as good in their own right. (Plus some other not as good to outright bad sequels there.) I voted for the trio of good films over the one great film with a bunch of garbage weighing down on it; ultimately, I think a vote for the Child's Play series has to be made, following the same logic here. Burkion posted:And you don't want to bring the Mummy or Creature into this because then I'll just get to go on longer I almost want you to, because there's only one good Mummy movie out of five (The Mummy's Ghost, btw) and one good Creature movie out of three. The more of the Universal Monster sequels you add into the mix, the more you dilute the power of the few outstanding ones, and the more you make a vote for Chucky easier and more enticing. That's kind of the point I've been trying to make. 
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Apr 30, 2020 02:18
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I didn't want to just leave off on sniping at Burkion's responses point by point, and wanted to post a more passionate defense of the Child's Play/<Noun> of Chucky series as a whole. And it's not that I don't think it's warranted. I think there's plenty to discuss there, about how Chucky's position preys upon your sense of rationality to his advantage (I mean, a doll can't hurt you, that's absurd. It's just a toy. It certainly can't stand up on its own, let alone hurl invectives into your face, let alone bleed or scream in pain or show human anatomy, let alone refuse to be put down by fire or bullets or other forms of punishment. That's absurd. And yet, there it is, doing just that, and the idea of it, taken seriously and literally, does a lot to upend your sense of perspective and safety just by the virtue of being.) There's plenty to discuss about the rest of the series and its setpieces and design. I mean, I can't think of any other film that makes cheery Banana Yellow as unnerving or frightening a color as Child's Play 2 does, with all those unnerving Chucky faces hanging around in the periphery of your vision everywhere you turn. The carnival setpiece at the end of Child's Play 3 doesn't make much sense, even in context, but it is a great collection of set design and atmosphere carrying things forward. And I'll never say no to a hellish red horror ride past a mountain of foam skulls, in any scenario. You could discuss Don Mancini's singular focus and commitment to adaptability with this franchise, and his desire to not let it stagnate after getting pushed into the (probably ill-advised) third one so fast. You could discuss the queer themes and focus on gender identity in Seed, which are admirable things to try even if the overall film doesn't really work on its own merits. You could discuss the horror reinvention in Curse, or its desire to not lose sight of everything that came before as the series' 25th anniversary celebration, either. You could talk about the radical direction shifting of Cult and the promise of where the series looks like it's going, and how [spoiler]we look to be turning a series about a lone killer doll into a lesbian Bonnie and Clyde road trip movie, which boggles the mind that it turned out that was even possible[/b]. Hell, unlike with the Universal Monsters series, we don't even really know what the future will be for the Chuckster, since he has a television series slated to come out next year and Mancini is talking about doing two more follow-up films after that. Thing is, I don't know that I'm the right person to make any of those arguments. Because, honestly, while it looks like Burkion is arguing with his head on the UM series, I can't help but look at the CP franchise with my heart. When I look at Child's Play 1, I don't just see a good slasher movie with an inventive villain, I see the boogeyman that terrified me as a child. I see the thing that absolutely poisoned my relationship with my My Buddy doll, who was pretty much my substitute friend for most of that period of my life. I see terror at seeing that title appear in the Green Pages TV listings for afternoon viewing, knowing that I would have to speed past those channels. I see the VHS copy that the local grocery store had in its video rental inventory, knowing where on the shelf it usually sat in the third row, the horror row. (That's the same grocery store that introduced me to the "Aliens vs. Predator" arcade game, for whatever that's worth.) I see the illicit thrill of knowing there was our own forgotten VHS tape in the hall closet with the last 20 something minutes of the film on it, where the film had been taped off of HBO and then partially taped over with 1960s Batman episodes in an attempt to get rid of it... and of watching said 20 minute segment at home alone some otherwise barely remembered summer afternoon. I don't just see Child's Play 2 as just a good slasher sequel with a dynamite finale and some great set design. I see my ninth birthday party, where me and my friends ended up watching the whole thing on USA, hacked up but safe for afternoon viewing. I see the thrill of seeing that title in the Green Pages, knowing I could pause on USA on random weekend afternoons and soak in the safe-enough-in-the-daytime experience. I see the random video kiosk at... Spencer's Gifts? Sam Goody, maybe? I think it was Sam Goody... some store in the mall, and seeing the button for the CP2 commercial. And I see me playing it, getting scared... and then needing to show my mom, hiding behind her while it played a second time, asking her as we walked away if it wasn't the scariest thing she'd ever seen. I see the horror at seeing the banner in a theater when going to see The Land Before Time with class mates. I see the Marvel Comics adaptation hiding in my dad's comic book collection, only partially complete (we never got issue #3). I see the illicit, haunting image of Chucky daring you to call his 1-900 number, an experience I never was brave enough to attempt. I see my pre-college self using the VHS copy rented from the Video Gallery store where I worked to torment my sisters in the summer before I left, and the time we watched a pirated from Limewire copy on my Macbook on the car ride home at the end of my first year. I don't just see Child's Play 3 as a better-than-its-reputation-suggests (but still not great) mid-tier slasher sequel. I see the mini poster we got from some Comic Con convention thing, when I was just there to see Darkwing Duck, dammit (say that three times fast!). I see that horrible poster image jumping out from the racks of VHS stores everywhere around town. I see the copy of Young Frankenstein taped off of USA that a friend and I kept returning to, because we saw the first commercial for the film during one of those random commercial breaks. I see the same USA thrills in the paper, knowing that I was better fortified for the more modern film. I see the argument another friend and I had over watching CP3 on USA or a "Mystery Science Theater 3000" hour repeat on NBC some random summer night. I see me as an adult, with a mini-habit of pairing this film with bad Chinese food as some odd comfort food of the spirit, something to do in the waning days of August as we move firmly into the Halloween build-up season in September. I don't just see Bride of Chucky as a good reinvention of the character in the post-Scream era, as one of the few good films to ape that film's sense of humor and detached irony. I see my 16th birthday party, renting the VHS from the same Movie Gallery, years before I worked there. And watching it again a day or so later on my own, at home, at night, on Halloween, when my sisters and parents were out trick-or-treating. God, I felt some stupid and brave then. I could go on, but this has already been weird and stupid and rambling enough as it is. My point is, more than anything else in this tournament, the Child's Play series means something to me, personally, in a way that most everything else doesn't, beyond a sense of film school appreciation or something on that level. I can appreciate Burkion making a detailed analysis of all of the Universal Monsters movies and speaking from a point of intellectual passion. But, in order to go along with that, I would have to vote against my heart, against a series that has kept circling around and around in my life in weird and stupid ways at weird and stupid times. And, while I might make that concession for other series, I just can't do that here. Not for this series. I can't. I won't. You shouldn't either. Vote Chucky. Timeless Appeal posted:Well that's not true Yeah, okay, if you want to argue for something like White Zombie or something else inspired by the Haitian voodoo legends in the 1930s and 40s, sure, technically. But that's not the image of zombies that the modern world knows and understands today, which all begins with George Romero's 1960s sci-fi take on a barely remembered monster that no one cared about. Class3KillStorm fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Apr 30, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 05:16
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Shrecknet posted:I find it very telling no one has even bothered to talk about Night or Return of the Living Dead. It's possible I guess both franchises are just top-tier and it comes down to personal preference. I think the Night vs. Return series debate is ultimately a retread of the argument that has been made in the past, about having several very good films on the one side against one transcendent film with several other, lesser films weighing it down on the other. It's a hard call to make, since I think Return is one of the single greatest horror movies ever made, but 2 is pretty bad and 3 is only okay, and I know there's several more sequels that I have no honest interest in seeking out. It makes it harder to judge RotLD as a strong franchise in and of itself. Meanwhile, while I think that Return is better than any one single George Romero zombie movie, it's hard to say that Day of the Dead and Night of the Living Dead aren't very close to it, in terms of quality. I personally think Dawn of the Dead is a little too flabby and poorly paced in the middle to really be considered in the same stratosphere as the others, but it's still a good enough movie on its own merits. Those 3 together should offer enough firepower to overshadow RotLD 1 on its own - let alone RotLD 1 dragging several other films behind it - but I guess it's ultimately down to how much you think something like Diary of the Dead or Survival of the Dead should weigh against the trilogy. (FWIW, I'm indifferent to Land of the Dead, so I figure it's a wash when trying to rate that one as a pro or con.)
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Apr 30, 2020 16:57
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COOL CORN posted:I have a tarman/juicy zombie sticker on my car so I'm legally required to vote that way. I have what I assume is the same sticker on my work laptop, but even still, the combined firepower of Night, Dawn and Day is kinda too much for even Return of the Living Dead 1 (and kinda 3, I guess) to overcome. And I say that as someone who thinks RotLD is better than any 1 of those 3 films.
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Apr 30, 2020 19:35
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Timeless Appeal posted:We need to cut through the Universal Horror is mostly dreck sentiment that is forming. You have one legit good movie listed there, and at least two that are overrated. The Wolf Man is boring and repetitive, and Ghost of Frankenstein isn't much better. (Son of Frankenstein I'll grant you; I think that's my legit favorite movie from the UM series.) I think the problem isn't that most of the UM series isn't "dreck," per se, but it is very dated, stilted and dull. They're mostly two-star mediocre films, at best. And even with the narrowed focus that we're using for this bracket discussion - we left off the entire Mummy branch, which is actually improving the overall standing of the whole thing - this is still one or two good-to-great films being weighed down by half a dozen or more bad-to-okay films. That's why it makes more sense to vote for the Child's Play series. Yes, none of the movies are individually better than the best Universal Monster films. But, pretty much none of them are as boring as most of the random UM sequels (say what you will about the quality of Seed of Chucky as a movie, it is certainly not boring), and all have more consistent quality overall. I'd much rather vote for several pretty good films than 1 or 2 very good films and a dozen mediocre ones. Franchescanado posted:Personally I would like the next bracket battle to be... Wouldn't that just be a race to see who loses to John Carpenter in the final round? Class3KillStorm fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Apr 30, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 21:57
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Whoops, double post
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Apr 30, 2020 21:58
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Timeless Appeal posted:Hot-take: The cool kid opinion that Bride of Frankenstein is the better film has broken off into this weird radical thought that Frankenstein is not actually great. I wasn't talking about Bride there. Timeless Appeal posted:edit: everyone's factoring gayness in their rankings right? When were we ever not?
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May 1, 2020 00:30
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Basebf555 posted:I don't mean to say Wishmaster sequels would've been big money but work is work. What has Divoff even done in the last 20 years? Everything on his wiki page post-Wishmaster is direct to video crap that I can't imagine was paying him as much as a starring role in a Wishmaster sequel would. I have to imagine that the full Djinn costume and makeup were an absolute bitch to work in, let alone get into or out of. The cost and effort were why they kept manufacturing reasons in the first two for him to look human, after all. So, if he wasn't making a seven-figure paycheck each time, I could imagine him just looking at the hassle of that whole process again when they wanted to make a third movie and deciding it wasn't worth it.
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May 1, 2020 16:53
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TrixRabbi posted:I think Universal Monsters is the one to beat it. Universal Monsters aren't even gonna beat my boy Chucky, what are you on about? 
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May 1, 2020 17:16
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Basebf555 posted:So I really can understand why someone would vote for Child's Play. It's an extremely solid series and if it made a big impact on you and the Universal Monsters really didn't, then sure I think it makes sense to vote Chucky. When the Universal Monsters were up against the likes of Cube it was a different discussion. With apologies to Shrecknet... 
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May 1, 2020 17:43
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Irony.or.Death posted:I haven't seen the 2019 yet just because a remake at that point in franchise continuity felt like such a sad and needless thing when it was so much healthier than any of the other classics, but people claim it's pretty good too and really I can forgive it since, like, it's a direction all the major franchises have gone so maybe it was sensible for Chucky to check it out once. I hope Fiona Dourif gets to go to a space station in the next movie or two, though. The 2019 reboot thing isn't a Don Mancini decision, it was a purely mercenary business move on the rights of MGM, the owners of the rights to the original Child's Play. It feels more like a script for a different idea that was snapped up and the CP label was slapped onto it. And yet, it still turned out all right. Not great, not awful, fairly entertaining as mid-budget horror films go. I don't know if it did well enough to warrant a sequel, but I'd watch one if they did get around to making it.
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May 1, 2020 20:59
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STAC Goat posted:Yeah, I haven't seen the remake so like... its easy for me to discount it but its a lot like how I discount Snyder's Dawn of the Dead when I consider the Night of the Living Dead series. There's 7 films by the same creative mind in the same continuity and then 1 film just doing its own thing. To me that's separate. TV series is due out on SyFy next year and Mancini is pretty heavily involved. He's also still talking like there's gonna be 2 more DTV movies that he's working on for after the show's first season is done, which will pick up from where Cult left off. (The series is supposed to be more of a side story thing while Cult is ongoing, or even maybe as a prequel to that one. They've been kind of cagey on where it's supposed to fit, continuity-wise, as I understand it.)
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May 1, 2020 21:11
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STAC Goat posted:Also Redman is canonically dead in the Chucky verse. Which is sad but also amuses me highly. I think the role was also originally written for Quentin Tarantino, who was going to do it when the film was scheduled to shoot in Los Angeles. When the budget got trimmed and they had to move production to Romania instead, Tarantino departed and Redman eventually got brought in to play that role. So, just think... in some alternate universe, we would have gotten to see Quentin Tarantino get disemboweled by a murderous doll as intended!
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May 1, 2020 22:39
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TrixRabbi posted:You don't need a flow chart, here's a list of Toho-produced kaiju films (i.e. official Godzilla continuity, including films that do not feature Godzilla): I mean, with only a few exceptions, it's not like the Godzilla movies have a lot of ongoing continuity. And most of the instances where it does happen either relate back to the original or to the immediate preceding movie. So, for the most part, it's just easiest to watch the original 1954 version and then just pick and choose based on whether the poster or the opponent design grabs you.
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May 3, 2020 15:33
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Burkion posted:Ah my friend, no. On the other hand, how much of that matters? It's one thing to say, "oh, because he fell into the ocean in KING KONG VS GODZILLA, that's why the typhoon washed him onshore in GODZILLA VS MOTHRA." But all that amounts to is "Godzilla appeared on a beach and he's here now." Like, that's the recurring thing you pointed out. And why would anyone care? He's Godzilla, he goes where he will. Inter-story continuity and human relationships are not the things you focus on first in a Godzilla film. So if you're talking to someone who's interested and never seen one, better not to scare them off with that kind of stuff and focus instead on the fun city smashing and monster fights. (Other than the first one, which is its own beast entirely.) So just pick the monster design you or they like best and jump around; worst case there's still some fun dumb monster wrestling action to fall back on. Class3KillStorm fucked around with this message at 04:49 on May 4, 2020 |
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May 4, 2020 04:38
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Debbie Does Dagon posted:So I've finished all of the Chucky films and the Larry Talbot saga, and I'm honestly not sure anymore. Curse and Cult really put that series over the top with a couple of very rewatchable instant classics, but Universal has a lot of very rewatchable nostalgic classics too. I think most of the low points are in the Universal films, but Chucky also seems to just coast at times. I guess it comes down to whether I prefer a Saturday afternoon spooky matinee, or a Saturday night beer and a takeout movie. Vote with your heart for Chucky.
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May 5, 2020 04:49
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Basebf555 posted:I'm not sure I really follow your logic because you're saying that just the Frankenstein films alone would've been enough to vote against Child's Play. So why not limit your consideration to just the Frankenstein films and vote accordingly? Why disqualify the entry all together? The argument against the group of Universal Monsters movies we have here is the same as the argument against The Return of the Living Dead series as a whole - that there's enough mediocre or even outright bad films weighing against the good ones to drag them down. We are voting for all of these films as a collective, after all, and limiting the view of the Universal series to "The Larry Talbot Saga" still ends up pulling what most people view as 3 different sub-franchises (Frankenstein, Dracula and The Wolf Man) under the aegis of providing prequels or scenery setting for the later crossover films, as if they were the main focus here. Limiting the view to something like just the direct Frankenstein films would have made for a stronger showing of the promise of the Universal Monsters series as a whole, and would have had less cruft to weigh against the strength of the best titles in that particular group. (To say nothing of the deliberate omission of the films that are widely viewed as subpar (like all of the Noun of the Mummy sequels) from the conversation - no other series has that defined from the start, though we are all taking personal liberties with things like remakes or crossovers.) I mourn the loss of the Child's Play franchise, and thank the people that joined me in making the morally correct choice here. But I take solace in the fact that UM is only going one more round before it gets blown the gently caress up by Jason.
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May 5, 2020 19:26
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Franchescanado posted:I love Tremors, and really like Tremors 2, but Manhunter and Silence of the Lambs is a 1-2 Punch that can't be dodged. Plus "Hannibal" the TV series is one of the best tv series of the 2010s. The "Tremors" tv series was not one of the best tv series of the 2000s.
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May 5, 2020 19:44
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STAC Goat posted:Only think missing is Hannibal Rising, which is the only movie I haven't seen. You aren't missing much if you end up skipping this, by the way. I ended up voting Scream over the Nightmare series, because while Scream 3 and 4 are both weak, they're not as bad as ANoES 5 or 6. I also don't think much, personally, of 2, 3 or New Nightmare, so while I like Freddy as a character, I don't think much of the films around him. Plus, Scream stands head and shoulders above pretty much any other ANoES movie, including the first, in terms of sheer quality. That's what ended up sealing the deal for me - I don't think that the bad parts of the Scream series weigh against the great first movie too much, while the Nightmare series has a much lower quality ceiling and a lot more dead weight pulling it down further. I haven't seen the TV series for either, though - would they drastically change the equations here? (Asking primarily about the MTV "Scream" show here, which always seemed pretty unconnected from the movies as a whole to me, from a first glance.)
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May 5, 2020 21:01
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Franchescanado posted:I guess it's not fair a point to weigh in on Franchises as established, but if you were to tell me there was a new Elm Street movie in the works (not just in talks, as of late), I'd be completely excited. There is a Scream sequel in the works, and I just don't care. I don't see the point of continuing Scream, and I especially don't like how each sequel kinda makes the over-arching plot of Sydney Prescott being the most unlucky poo poo-upon person in existence. I still think Jackie Earle Haley can have a good Freddy performance in him, if they would COMMIT to that take on him as being as super-sleazy as possible. One of the major problems with the Elm Street reboot was that they had plonked a late sequel Freddy conceit ("micro naps") into a Part 1 straight reboot, while also trying to tie in a "Freddy was innocent" take chained to that interpretation (but also lightening it up with a bunch of one-lines in the final act almost out of nowhere). Any one of them would have been effective, but you couldn't have all 4 working against each other in an 85 minute movie. Also, I still say Scream 4 dropped the ball by not having Sydney's evil cousin come out as Ghost Face and kill everyone in the movie, thus setting up a potential Scream 5 where a new new copy cat starts stalking the previous one. Make her have to walk a tightrope of trying to stay alive while also keeping her secret from spilling out, and keep the audience on its toes as to whether its loyalty could reside in this character or not. It'd be a gamble, sure, but the payoff could have been really interesting.
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May 11, 2020 22:33
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Franchescanado posted:I remember JEH talking poo poo about Freddy as a character, the Elm Street series, and I believe Englund's performance, in a holier-than-thou approach to salvaging his rep with the film bombing. Killed a lot of good will I had towards the guy. That, I was unaware of. And yeah, that's not cool to do, even if you do believe that you would need to make sure to get out from underneath a box office flop.
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May 11, 2020 22:44
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COOL CORN posted:The 2010 remake focusing on the pedo angle is particularly gross when we have 20+ years of ex-post-facto knowledge of how Freddy became a cartoon caricature of himself - kid's toys, talk show appearances, a prime time TV show, collaborations with rappers, etc. He's no longer just "a villain monster in a movie made for adults", he's part of the cultural zeitgeist, and loved by kids (even if they're not aware of some of the darker parts of his backstory), so choosing to focus on those gross dark parts of his backstory is an awful choice. I dunno, I think that's a good case for why they should have changed up the approach with Freddy in the remake. There's a take almost there, bubbling under the surface, of making Freddy a metaphor for repressed trauma, which is an interesting appoach - the Freddy of the original is striking at the teens to get back at their parents, while the Freddy of the original had directly traumatized these teens when they were children. It makes the stakes more personal in a way the first pass wasn't (and, in the case of the original, making Freddy a molester now as a dream demon/insinuating he probably was as a human kind of muddies the "sins of the father" angle they were taking). There's also something to be said of the way that they choose to shoot and position Freddy as a looming figure in that preschool environment, as opposed to the boiler room from the original series. Film critic Walter Chaw caught onto it when it first came out - "He's disgusting and unrepentant, a bit of a bully, and, posing as he will throughout the film as a teacher at a blackboard, representative of the kinds of real nightmares parents have for their children." There was the chance for the remake to make Freddy scary in two different ways to two different generations - for kids and teens watching the remake, he can be a scary monster man with some metaphorical overtones; for adults that grew up with the original and have kids of their own, he could also be emblematic of a much deeper, very adult fear of children alone in a hostile world. That the remake didn't manage to do so is a shame; that it didn't do so because its focus was split in so many competing, contradictory directions is a crime.
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May 12, 2020 16:57
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Timeless Appeal posted:The first choice is a no brainer and I say this as someone who adores Friday. I can understand this, but I feel like it also does short change the premise of this whole "franchise" discussion to just leave the weaker sequels out of discussion. And while I think that it's worthwhile to consider that Alien vs Night or Aliens vs Day are very close in terms of quality, I just think that, with Prometheus and Covenant, the Alien franchise has a deeper, better bench than the NotLD series does. (I think that Alien 3 is a better film than Dawn of the Dead, and I think Alien: Resurrection is about equal with Land. But Diary and Survival aren't very good at all.)
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May 12, 2020 20:50
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STAC Goat posted:I can not however get behind Alien 3 being better than Dawn. Resurrection/Land? Yeah, ok. I mean, to each their own - Alien 3's theatrical cut is obviously kind of a mess, but I think there's a lot more going on than Dawn's surface level observations. I also thought Dawn was pretty flabby and badly paced in the middle section on my last rewatch, so I think it ends up being a bigger anchor for its series than Alien 3 does for its side. But I also get why people think the opposite, and comparing something like Alien vs Night is going to be a contest of splitting hairs more than anything.
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May 12, 2020 21:16
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Timeless Appeal posted:I mean I disagree on some of this. For a "What I would watch right now?" test, Land beats Resurrection and 3. It's messy, but has ambition that makes it at least admirable. I don't see how you can argue for Day of the Dead being the ending as a positive but also bring up Land of the Dead. Even if I agree that they (the studios, the creators, whoever) should have left well enough alone after Day (or Alien 3, if we're being honest), they didn't, and we're here to debate on what that fact ended up reaping. And, for what it's worth, I just feel like parts 4 - 6 of the Alien series ended up better, overall, than the counterparts in Romero's series. (I don't really count crossover movies as being a thing here, but if it did they would absolutely both be points against the Alien series, I'll grant you.) The Friday the 13th vs. Universal Monsters debate is the same one as the Child's Play vs UM debate, and several others that we've seen in the earlier rounds. And, I agree, there's no Friday movie that's up to the quality of Frankenstein or Son of Frankenstein individually. (It's actually kind of a weird mark for the Friday series that it's best film is the crossover film Freddy vs. Jason, which I already said I'm not weighing in the discussion.) But I also agree that, generally speaking, I find cohesiveness and consistency matters more in a franchise setting than any individual stand-out entries. And, in that manner, I would say the Friday series is one of the most consistent ones in this whole tournament, mainly because a lot of them end up covering the same ground over and over again. On an individual film-by-film basis, that would be detrimental, but weighing them as a cumulative experience, I think that ends up being a massive benefit here.
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May 12, 2020 22:39
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STAC Goat posted:
poo poo, I think you may have just staked the Friday the 13th series through the heart right there. It's got the Nightmare on Elm Street problem of "a super iconic character carrying a bunch of mediocre movies" - but even worse, since there has never been a stand-out classic "good" Jason movie the way Nightmare 1 is generally considered. (To say nothing of the debate around stuff like Dream Warriors or New Nightmare.) I knew this was gonna be a problem the Jason films would carry all the way to the end. I just didn't think the argument against them would be able to be so succinctly summed up by a pithy Muppets bit. STAC Goat posted:Oh yeah, jesus, watch Dawn and Day. You gotta see them to get any sense of the franchise. And I think they're both on Youtube in decent quality. I think Day is actually available for free with ads on Tubi and Pluto right now, or for free without ads on Kanopy. Dawn doesn't seem to be legally available anywhere, though. Class3KillStorm fucked around with this message at 23:14 on May 12, 2020 |
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May 12, 2020 23:09
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: I agree that Friday the 13th is consistent. 
: Consistently bad!
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Whoops, double post.
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May 12, 2020 23:12
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 21:51 |
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Timeless Appeal posted:Terminator 2 is amazing because the first film is this causality loop where everything is destined to happened and you can't change the future because the future already happened. Every Terminator movie should exist to invalidate the previous one, from a thematic point of view. T1 is all about destiny born via a closed causal loop, T2 says that isn't true and you decide your fate in the moment, T3 says you can only delay the inevitable. The nature of the premise means that the series should be in a constant dialogue with itself, both on basic mechanics and the philosophy inherent to that. The problem with the later sequels is that they have no real underlying philosophical bent - beyond "would this look cool?" and "would looking cool make me money?" - that they end up being super forgettable. Back on topic, I'm not sure that a constant revisionism for the Halloween series is necessarily a bad thing. I don't know how you could continue the story through the whole "Cult of Thorn" nonsense from Part 6, so stepping back and ignoring that whole branch only benefits them. Especially since H20 is meant to be about the revisiting of past traumas, and how they can dominate your present. (Halloween '18 starts from a similar premise, so also benefits by the dismissal of extraneous storylines to get to the thematic meat of the story. Really, here that just means eliding H20 and Resurrection, and I don't think anyone is too broken up about losing the latter.)
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May 22, 2020 16:42
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