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Let's go 01: Overlord (2018)  I usually grab a screenshot, but it's a really nice poster Eh, it was alright. Circa-1944 Mad Science is an underused aesthetic IMO, it's a really nice level of clunkiness. I would have preferred if it stayed pure horror all the way through, instead of turning into a fairly straightforward action movie towards the end.  /5Coming up next: The Empty Man (2020)
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May 4, 2021 13:21
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 05:33 |
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02: The Empty Man (2020) A man investigates a cult that is seemingly based on Slenderman. It was okay. Overlong, and it seemed aimless at times, but the ending did quite a good job of recontextualising the rest of the movie in a fun way. I guess it was all fundamentally about horror protagonists, and what people want and expect from them. /503: One Cut of the Dead (2017)  The actual behind-the-scenes footage of the real movie crew filming the fake movie crew that's filming the in-universe movie. A Japanese director is tasked with creating a found-footage zombie flick which is both a continuous single-shot, and aired live on TV. Just a delightful movie, funny and warm. An audience's attention works very differently when they watch something for the second time; instead of figuring out what's happening, they focus much more on details, intentions, character motivations. One Cut uses this difference very intelligently; the first time I saw the footage, I just accepted all the odd moments where the cast didn't know what was going to happen next; it's a movie, so OBVIOUSLY they're going somewhere with this. The last 1/3rd of the movie, the Behind-the-scenes part, does a great job of making the same footage from before new and interesting. /504: The Carrier (1988)  April's Movie of the Month A small town is swept up in religious mania following the outbreak of a terrible disease, spread by a local outcast. This was a really nice surprise, an obscure low-budget movie with some great set+costume design. It's got this distinctive tone to it, where things get absurd but never entirely farcical; it's funny when a warlord demands the enemy camp share their cats (for detecting disease), but the battle scene that follows is genuinely grim. I'm going to be honest, I really don't understand the mechanics of how the disease works, but ah well. Had a good time. /5Up next: Day of the Dead...
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May 15, 2021 08:45
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05 Day of the Dead (1985) (I know it's an obvious choice for a screenshot, but I just had to) Pretty good. I think I still like Dawn better, for its setting and atmosphere, but there's something interesting about how these people handle being in such an unbelievably terrible situation, in how the soldiers become not just hopeless, but hostile towards the doc for his hopefulness (and other, better reasons, but those come along later after their opinions are already set). They're trying to maintain a system and an order that's beyond dead; being accessories to it is all they have going for them. This felt like the first movie in the series where Romero was able to make the zombies as gnarly as he imagined. Also, I never realised that Gorillaz song also sampled the movie's music, I figured it was just the dialogue. /506 You're Next 2011  A pretty standard home invasion flick is derailed by one of the intended victims being uncommonly good at killing people. My first rewatch of the season. Honestly I love this movie. The petty spitefulness of the family, the practicality of the kills, the mean jokes, the sense of space and control/uncontrol, it all just comes together. I haven't really loved anything Adam Wingard has made since The Guest, but I keep watching every movie he makes, just in case. /507 Are We Not Cats 2016  A deeply weird romantic horror movie about these two kids who share a disgusting habit. It's like the Jaws of hair-eating. The movie is just so grimy and uncomfortable, it's great. Looking back, it's quite similar to that movie Good Time, except with no cops involved. I'm not really one for gore, but this movie did a good job of being gross without being gratuitous. /5Up next: Jeepers Creepers...
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May 17, 2021 13:09
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08 Jeepers Creepers (2001) Siblings on a road trip attract the attention of a demon that eats people. A light, enjoyable actiony-horror. This is the second or third time I've seen it, and I was struck by some similarities to The Terminator: the super-durable antagonist; the scenes of cars fighting each other without visible drivers; the sequence where the baddie pursues the protagonists through (and I mean through) a packed police station. Thematically it's totally different. There's nothing like T1's repeating image of people betrayed by their own tools; the Creeper's just a mean fucker who enjoys scaring and killing people. Anyway, it had some really memorable images and some really creepy scenes, like the whole thing with the pipe. /509 Mientras duermes (Sleep Tight) (2011) No screenshot, soz. A doorman, Cesar, spends every night sleeping next to a tenant, Clara, who is totally unaware she is being stalked. A really nasty, unsettling film. I was sold on it by a description a couple weeks ago as a horror movie where the Final Girl doesn't realise she's in a horror movie. Cesar is a piece of poo poo, but there's enough to him to make him interesting, and a lot of the tension comes from trying to suss out exactly how bad whatever he's planning is. It's funny; the movie wrings a lot of tension around the possibility of him getting caught, and it works, even though you really should be rooting against him. Like if Walter White were a creep instead of just a bastard. Also the first movie I've watched through Shudder, as they only came to Australia a couple of months back. /510 The Dark and the Wicked 2020  Two siblings, brought to their parent's farm by their father's impending death, find themselves beset by shadows and whispers from some thing. Cold and bleak. Some parts of it were well-realised; I thought the performances were great, and I got a great sense of their childhoods in spite of not really being told much about them. The gradual revelation of how far the adversary can reach was good, and unsettling. Overall though, the whole thing was a bit overlong, and just not all that gripping. and a half/5Up next: Dave Made a Maze... wikipedia describes it as a "fantasy adventure comedy horror film", so it counts, okay?
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May 18, 2021 13:29
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11 Dave Made a Maze (2017) This doofus builds a maze in his living room out of boxes, which unaccountably becomes an endless cardboard labyrinth populated by monsters and deadly traps; his girlfriend and some friends go in to rescue him, accompanied by an amateur documentary crew that happens to be present. Alright, this is really not a horror movie, but it has some elements of horror, and the word "horror" appears in the wikipedia description, and hell, it's not like this is the October challenge, so gently caress it. Anyway, it was pretty fun. The maze is the main star, and it's a very distinctive and varied setting. It's often drab, as you would expect from endless cardboard, but they try to mix it up as much as possible. They have a lot of fun with the documentary film director, and his attempts to take control of the situation. Anyway, it was some nice light fare, which was good because in retrospect the movies around it were pretty grim. /512 Die Hölle (Cold Hell) (2017) No screenshot. A cab driver is pursued by a serial killer after witnessing one of his crimes. Eh, it was alright. Again, more thriller than horror, but I heard about it in the horror thread, so it counts. It's not the most original movie; it borrows a lot from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Özge is a boxer; the villain is motivated by his misogyny; she falls in with this older guy who helps, but she still needs to finish things alone. Honestly, I think it benefits from the comparison. I found Berlin to be a more interesting setting than rural Sweden, and I prefer a character who's a regular fuckup that relies on others over an omni-competent loner like Lisbeth Salander. The pacing dragged sometimes; a lot of the movie is spent just sort of figuring out what to do with her niece, which was just less interesting than the conflict with the murderer. /513 Kill List (2011)  A pair of middle-class British hitmen accept a series of jobs from what turns out to be a cult. My third rewatch of the month. Movie rules, though I've got to admit I had to turn on the subtitles. The uncanniness of their lives - suburban melodrama that comes from having a job where you get large but irregular paychecks, for killing people - sort of tricks you into not noticing the deeper weirdness of the people they're dealing with, until it's too late. Like there are all these tells that in another movie would make you go "Oh, he's going to betray them, and she's in on it too", and they barely register because the normal people in the movie are so volatile themselves. It does a good job making you feel the stakes of smalltime violence; killing a single person feels like a huge deal, even though they do it for a living. Anyway, it's top shelf. /514 The Wretched (2019) No screenshot because of Netflix's copy protection This kid, working at his dad's marina for his summer vacation, comes under attack by some sort of shapeshifter-wendigo-witch that can edit people's memories. Also it wants to eat him or something, but the memory-editting is way more interesting. It was solid. The movie starts out alternating between a cozy summer working-holiday, and a horror movie-- and I really mean alternating, it just bounces between a normal scene (involving the kid) and a spooky scene (involving his neighbours). It would have benefitted from integrating these two together better; as it was, it reminded me of a TV show where one plotline is just way more engaging than the others. Anyway, they do eventually come together, and there's a neat twist that did a lot to redeem the first half of the movie for me. /5Up next: Gretel and Hansel...
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May 25, 2021 13:10
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15 Gretel and Hansel (2020) Oh, you know the general plot already. Slow-paced, moody, deliberately anachronistic. I really liked parts of it. The look is great, lots of coloured lights against deep blacks. The witch (Alice Krige) was fantastic, and quite well-written; she's able to balance the predatory and motherly sides of the character without either one feeling false. The movie also does a good job of making her look subtly unearthly; they do the same trick as the Hannibal TV show, with the lights reflected in her eyes. I thought it was too slow, and some of the anachronisms (like the language, and the grab-bag of accents) fell flat for me. I disliked the clean, sharp-edged costumes at first, but ultimately they fit in with the overall look of the movie quite well. /516 The Vvitch (2015) No screenshot due to Netflix Another rewatch. I didn't plan it as a double-feature with G&H, just happened to watch it the following night. A girl and her family somewhere in colonial New England are exiled to a farm deep in the woods, where they're plagued by supernatural misfortune. Witch-paranoia in early America, in my mind, is a thing that happens in villages, between neighbours who don't trust each other and so on. By setting this in an isolated farm, with no characters except the family and the witches who are actually real, it encourages the viewer to focus on relationships between characters. Like it's not a madness-of-crowds thing, because there isn't a crowd; the fear and distrust is very personal. The mother, Kate, is the main force in persecuting her daughter Tomasin (the suspected witch). The main thing that stood out in the rewatch was the question of how sincere she was in this belief; while there are signs she is acting out of personal vindictiveness (the whole subplot with her missing cup), I think the movie ultimately frames her as genuine in her belief, and struggling against severe hardship and trauma. Which is its own condemnation, since it makes her so uncharitable towards someone else afflicted with the exact same things, but her religion is not a mere excuse; it's the core of her worldview. After bitching about anachronistic language in the last movie I have to admit I used subtitles for this one. I don't understand how people said things like "t'other". The word "the" doesn't have a T sound in it, it makes no sense as slang. /517 Antiviral (2012)  A salesman of celebrity viruses becomes snared in a conspiracy when one of his firm's top-sellers dies, and the price of her merchandise explodes. A deeply gross, nasty movie, in which celebrity culture is exaggerated to the point of people eating steaks of vat-grown meat taken from actors, or infecting themselves with samples of viruses harvested from the famous. There are some neat sci-fi touches; I especially liked the design console that outputs data as a distorted human face, relying on the human ability to interpret faces and expressions to rapidly convey information. Towards the end I found it hard to follow; the technology they're talking about is bizarre enough, and now the movie is introducing some scheme to make it more profitable? Anyway, I didn't think much of the plot, but the ideas in it, and the grubby, sweaty discomfort of people in it, left an impression. Possessor worked better as a movie, though. /5
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May 27, 2021 09:29
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18 Us (2019) No screenshot due to Netflix A woman and her family are stalked and attacked by vengeful clones of themselves. I liked parts of it. The parts with the family, working together and separately, were a lot of fun, and I enjoyed how blasé they (and the movie itself) were about what seems like the apocalypse. I think it suffered from a lack of clarity; the main conceit of the movie is these secret underground bunkers that contain clones of everyone in America as part of some abandoned societal mind-control experiment. It was just too huge of a thing to put into a movie that is mostly just about the family. Which is an odd complaint, because I can accept the same mix of personal and world-ending in other movies, but it felt weird to me here. The ending sort of fell flat for me; my interpretation of it is that moral behaviour is impossible in modern America, and the only people who get ahead are the ones who can ruthlessly crush their fellows, but the surface level of the story didn't feel satisfying on its own. /519 His House (2020) No screenshot, again due to Netflix A pair of refugees, newly released in Britain, are haunted by a vengeful spirit, and memories of their lost daughter. Quite good. I liked how the conflict between Rial and Bol spread along different lines, assimilating and how to deal with the ghosts. And how the movie sets you up to have certain expectations about what they're running from, and then the reality turns out to be far worse than whatever you were picturing. There's also an interesting dynamic where the usual fear in horror movies-- everyone thinks you're crazy-- gets rolled up into the pressure of integrating and fitting in. Weirdly similar to Us-- not just in that it's a black horror movie, but in how the protagonists had to do something terrible to survive, and the movie doesn't condemn them for it. /520 It Follows (2014)  A young woman sleeps with this guy, and then finds herself pursued by an unstoppable shapeshifting thing that was previously after him. Another rewatch for me. Excellent movie. I remember it being... colder; this time around, it stuck out to me how comfortable and affectionate the main characters are. Also more male-gazey than I remember. I saw the director's other movie, Under the Silver Lake, a while back, and it was really full-on there. In both cases it's clearly a deliberate part of the narrative; kind of wish he'd make a third movie to prove he's got another style. To this day I don't understand what the kids were planning at the end there. /521 The Owners (2020)  Some hooligans take a doctor and his wife hostage in a robbery; things get really bad from there. Another inverted home-invasion movie; reminded me of Don't Breathe. Sylvester McCoy, who I just learnt played Doctor Who a while back, does a fine job of being just a little bit creepy, but not enough to justify panicking until it's too late. I loved the scene where the boys are threatening to kill the doctor's wife and he still refuses to give them the code to the safe; I liked how the movie doesn't belabour the point of how weird this moment is, it just puts it out there and then overwhelms you with five other things to worry about. /5Up next: They're Watching...
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May 29, 2021 10:18
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22 They're Watching (2016) A film crew for this Grand Designsesque show travel to rural Moldova and become embroiled in witch-paranoia. Trashy found-footage fun. The film crew are just charming enough to put up with their unpleasantness, and there's just enough stuff in the movie to convince me the cheap shots against the Moldovans are really just part of the characters, not part of the movie. It was pretty easy to guess how things would shake out early on. I'm baffled by the decision to put one of the main characters getting iced in a flash-forward in the first few seconds of the movie. The big special-effects extravaganza at the end was beyond the budget they had, but damnit they tried. /523 The Cremator (Spalovač mrtvol) (1969)  A distant, malleable funeral home cremator sinks into the Third Reich, gently, like an old man getting into a hot bath. Watched it for Movie of the Month, naturally. It was good as hell. Lots of very discreet scene transitions (or very non-discrete scenes, if you like) that make the whole thing flow together, dreamlike, with little ability to track the flow of time. The main guy, Rudolf Hrusínský, is fascinating to watch: a vessel for other people's intentions and opinions, whose own perspective is incredibly esoteric. He is, I suppose, the polar opposite of a materialist, so distant from material concerns that he'll gladly kill his children to satisfy some abstract notion of spiritual orderliness. /524 Army of the Dead (2021) No screenshot due to Netflix. Casino vault heist in an abandoned city bepopulate with zombies. It was pretty good. I liked the weird proto-society the Zeds were constructing, the extremely close fighting, the gore, the weird poo poo like robot zombies (if you look closely) and the time-loop conversation. It was also unfocused (story-wise); it gestures in all these interesting directions and then goes down the least interesting one. Supposedly they're planning a bunch of spin-off crap; I'd watch another movie, but nothing more than that. A lot's been said about the length and the lack of focus (in the literal sense, the use of lenses); honestly it never dragged for me, and I felt things were too blurry like twice. I feel like there's a lot of little details here to reward a rewatch some day. /325 Halloween (1978)  It's Halloween. What hasn't yet been said about it? I'd never noticed before how closely It Follows riffs on this movie, all the distant shots of dark suburban houses. And the scene where Sam's in class, and the pursuer is there out the window, it uses almost the same camera angles as the identical scene in Halloween. The aspect I found most interesting this time was the idea of whether or not Michael actually gives a poo poo about Laurie. I mean, obviously he tries to kill her, but he seems far more interested in her friends (who have SEX); he goes out of his way to kill them, and makes a big ritual out of it, while his pursuit of her seems improvised; she's nearby the main targets, so he might as well. I'm probably reading a narrative out of nothing; he acts decisively against the friends because those scenes end in their deaths, while he improvises against Laurie because she's the survivor and it makes the movie more interesting. And of course there are scenes earlier where he appears to stalk her specifically. Dr Loomis spends the movie telling us there's nothing in there, but there clearly is. Speaking of, Loomis is incredibly bad at his personal crusade; he spends like six hours standing on a street corner, waiting for Michael to show up, before realising that his own stolen car has been parked just across the street. Another thing that stuck out to me was Michael's age. I'd always conceived of him as a perpetual 40-year-old, but here he's in his early 20s, only a few years older than the high-schoolers he hunts. /526 Halloween II (1981)  Immediately after the events of the first movie, Laurie spends the rest of the night in hospital, asleep. Also, Michael keeps killing people. Honestly it kinda sucked. I appreciate that they tried to change up the setting, but murder in a hospital just isn't creepy like murder in suburbia is (admittedly I'm fortunate enough to have no strong memories of hospitals). The victims are broader and less likeable than those of the first movie; the whole subplot with Laurie being Michael's other sister was totally pointless, a cheap soap-opera twist that's surprising but not scary. Some of the early scenes, when Michael is on the [strike]run[/strike] stride from the law and making his way out of suburbia, those captured the feeling of the original, but they felt like trailer-fodder, disconnected from the body of the film, which is the hospital. I did quite like the part where you learn Loomis accidentally killed that boy Laurie likes, just for its shaggy-dog meanness. /5Up next: A Quiet Place Pt II...
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May 30, 2021 07:17
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27 A Quiet Place Pt 2 (2021) I wasn't hugely interested in this, but it was on at the movies, and I figure a movie challenge should involve the cinema if possible. My thoughts, from the main horror thread: Kazzah posted:Anyway, I saw A Quiet Place Pt 2 the other night. It was alright. Essentially More Quiet Place-- it picks up like a minute after the first movie ends-- and I thought the first one was fine but not great. I liked that it kept the stakes small; the family is mostly just dealing with normal (post-apoc) problems: injuries, safety, a journey of a few miles. There's no new tougher super-monster, no mother-ship that's about to drop ten times as many monsters on the earth, no monster-queen that they can kill and live in safety forever. It does that thing a lot of sequels do where it splits the cast up and we get to see how each one does on their own, and the end of the movie does a pretty good job of weaving them all together, keeping the emotional beats synced up. Cillian Murphy's character may as well have been named Joel, honestly, his entire plotline with Regan is the most Last of Us thing ever. 28 Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)  Alright, we got all the meat off of Michael Myers, now here's an unrelated story about a doctor investigating a conspiracy involving a toy company and an evil TV broadcast. I was surprised at how much I liked it-- much better that H2, definitely. It had this weird tone where it felt like a low-rent Bond movie, except the evil plot relies on magic. It's got the secret base, the emotionless suited goons, the significantly younger love interest; most of the runtime is our somewhat doughy protagonist investigating the front organisation while playing nice for the sinister boss. Quite a good ending, too. 29 3 From Hell (2019) Two ex-cons (and a cousin), finally out of jail, set out to restart their lives with a change of scenery. I watched the first two Fireflies movies for the last challenge; hated #1, thought #2 was much more entertaining. I'd say this was not as good as the second movie. It lacked the strong adversary that movie had; Danny Trejo's son, Aquarius, is just kind of honourable and boring, while Sheriff Wydell was fascinatingly lovely, a man rejoicing in getting the chance to kill someone righteously. You need something to balance out how hideous the Fireflies are. The movie was kind of aimless; once they're all out of jail, they decide to go to Mexico and lay low. The subplot with the gangsters pursuing them didn't feel urgent to me; everyone who comes into contact with these people dies, so there wasn't much tension to it. Anyway, it wasn't terrible, but it was unfocused and seemed to have no point. 30 Starry Eyes (2014)  A struggling young actress passes a deeply weird audition, which leads to a bunch of cult stuff. Eh, I didn't think much of it. It would have benefitted from me being invested in the other young people Sarah lives with, and I really didn't care about them. A lot of the narrative depends on her relations with them, namely being unable to get support from them, and ultimately blaming them for all the poo poo that's being done to her. And none of that connected for me. It had good parts; the casting agents were good and creepy; I liked the scene where the diner manager explains how the lame potato theming is his sincere artistic vision. But the rest of it didn't come together. Up next... Skull: the Mask
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May 31, 2021 14:36
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 05:33 |
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31 Skull: the Mask (Skull: A Máscara de Anhangá) (2020, allegedly) An ancient Incan mask finds a host and carves a path across São Paulo, harvesting hearts and blood to sate its master. I went in with sky-high expectations, and... it was okay. It was very gooey, and I loved the little glimpses we got of Anhanga's realm. Surprisingly plot-heavy; while it was interesting enough, a lot of it was clumsily delivered. For instance, early on we get a newscaster introduce the main-ish character, hardass cop Beatriz, and then immediately after we get the same info in some newspaper headlines. I also thought the sound kinda sucked. All the impacts and gunshots felt weak, the world felt dead, the music wasn't good enough to justify drowning out the rest of it. Anyway, all that could have been better, but the main attraction here is clearly Mr Mask, which was solid stuff. The transformation from heavyset guy in forensic whites into unstoppable brick-shithouse was well done; often with this sort of movie you take one look at the before- characters and immediately know which one's getting taken over. I just wish he was a little more interesting. Most of his scenes are systematically harvesting random people he comes across; it's repetitive. The peak of the movie comes in the church fight scene, where the movie finally gets a bit more weird with it. I wish they'd kept the momentum of that scene going. /5And that's that.
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Jun 1, 2021 04:01
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