The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

An ongoing project to survey the best films of individual decades, genres, and filmmakers.
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colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#1451 Post by colinr0380 » Tue Nov 01, 2016 9:45 am

domino harvey wrote:The only other films from Wendkos I've seen are Gidget (Great) and the Burglar (Awful). Looking at his CV is like peeking into an alternate dimension in which a different version of me actually made worse viewing choices
The Paul Wendkos film that is currently getting regular airings on UK television is Attack On The Iron Coast, and what do you know, its serendipitously showing again next Saturday morning!

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Feego
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#1452 Post by Feego » Mon Nov 28, 2016 2:00 pm

Late arriving to the Wendkos discussion, but he also directed the famed 1975 TV movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden, starring Bewitched's Elizabeth Montgomery. It's a decent little film, with Borden being interrogated and subsequently tried for the murder of her father and stepmother while the crime itself is depicted in what may or may not be flashbacks (the film explicitly depicts her committing the murders, but some viewers interpret these sequences not as actual flashbacks but rather Borden's fantasies about how she would have done it). What warrants discussion of this film in a horror thread is the last 20 minutes or so of Borden's flashbacks/fantasies, which get surprisingly grisly for 1970s TV, basically becoming a mini-slasher (she's also nude in these sequences, lending a twisted sexual element). It's further implied that Borden may be psychologically disturbed after seeing her mortician daddy do tacky things with her dead mommy (this, I believe, has no basis in historical fact). Montgomery plays the role with a detached, slightly amused quality that certainly allows for interpretation as either a murderess or someone who wishes she'd done the job herself! And of course, the movie ends with the requisite creepy recital of the old "Lizzie Borden took an axe" nursery rhyme.

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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#1453 Post by terabin » Thu Dec 15, 2016 2:39 pm

Anyone have a top 10 for horror movies for 2016?

Here's Jordan Crucchiola's top 13 at Vulture.

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Siddon
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#1454 Post by Siddon » Sat Jan 14, 2017 9:55 pm

terabin wrote:Anyone have a top 10 for horror movies for 2016?

Here's Jordan Crucchiola's top 13 at Vulture.
1.) And Then there was None
2.) The Witch
3.) Neon Demon
4.) Don't Breathe
5.) Lights Out
6.) Darling
7.) Hush
8.) The Conjuring 2
9.) 10 Cloverfield Lane
10.) The Green Room

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Murdoch
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#1455 Post by Murdoch » Tue Jan 17, 2017 5:54 pm

I haven't seen many, but Blair Witch would likely top it for that second half alone. The first half cribs a lot from the original, and there are too many characters to keep anything straight, but by the time it distills itself into panic mode it becomes terrifying. The abrupt ending gave me chills, even if I couldn't tell you who any of the characters were. I encourage anyone interested to see it.

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domino harvey
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#1456 Post by domino harvey » Mon Jan 23, 2017 10:08 pm

For those who want a Cliffs Note version of many of the films discussed in this thread, Garagehouse has released a limited edition 7+ hour compilation of 250 80s Horror Film trailers on Blu-ray. Here's the review and rundown from Mondo-- sounds like fun!

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colinr0380
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#1457 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Jan 30, 2017 3:51 pm

Nurse Diary: Beast Afternoon (Naosuke Kurosawa, 1982)

A very strange film, Nurse Diary: Beast Afternoon is one of those Nikkatsu Roman Porno series of erotic films that the studio devoted itself entirely to between 1971 and 1988. But within that parameter the material in various films varies wildly (I'm not entirely sure of where to put this comment as the film is horror, but not quite; comic, but not quite; and sexy, but not quite! I think when there are a few more of the films released it might be worth going through them as a 'naughty' list project! Or maybe I should create a Nikkatsu Roman Porno collection thread in the Boutique Labels section to put comments on these films into. But for now I'll just tuck this write up here!). Nurse Diary : Beast Afternoon is a case in point, folding bizarre sci-fi and giallo aspects intercut with (and occasionally intruding into) its sex scenes! In some ways this feels as if it homages Argento’s Inferno (in its use of hyper close ups and its final conflagration!), and weirdly fits in with that run of ‘dream capture’ films from the early 80s such as Altered States, Brainstorm and Dreamscape (although it came out before Dreamscape and Brainstorm!). It fits in that company really well, though the antics are taken nowhere near as seriously as in those films!

I’ll just synopsise the plot of this one as that will show how bizarre it is in itself, so spoilers follow, though nothing beats actually seeing some of this stuff play out! The whole plot is so convoluted and crazy that it actually becomes quite impressive:

In the pre-credits sequence one dark and thunderstormy night a (mad?) doctor and his nurse assistant perfect a ‘dream ring’ device (kind of a metal coil, and inserted the same way!) but after a brief moment of triumph get hung from the rafters of their laboratory. The doctor drops to the ground and lets go of the dream ring from his grasp, but is still alive, whilst the dead nurse’s necklace with two bells on drops from her neck next to the ring.

Some time later a couple of young hikers are brought into the hospital after an unfortunate incident in which they got stuck together in an intimate fashion after unwisely deciding to have coitis in a freezing cold graveyard! The (goofy) chap gets discharged (but decides to spend much of his time after this hanging from a rope ladder outside his girlfriend’s bedroom window spying on the action with a magnifying glass!!!), but the girl is kept ‘under observation’ and has the dream ring inserted (shown through vagina pov shots!). Though during the night someone else creeps into the room with a speculum and inserts one of the little bells (like a bell from an animal collar, used to call a pussy(cat)) too, which seems to float around in some kind of zero-g state in there!

The bell is a kind of hypnosis device that when the second bell is rung implants thoughts in ‘wearers’ mind. In this first instance sexual fantasies involving the head doctor of the hospital who ravishes the girl while she protests! The dream ring records the girl’s dreams, which then get embarrassingly replayed on a giant screen to her and the watching impassive nurse. Then slightly later on we get another dream sequence in which the shifty chairwoman is in the fantasy instead!

Major spoilers follow:

It turns out that the head doctor and chairwoman in flashback were the people who hung the doctor who had created the dream ring and his nurse in order to steal his invention. The doctor who created the dream ring is still alive, but brain damaged into a subhuman state from his hanging and kept in a cage in the basement of the old clinic(!), where the head doctor persuades the nurse who is taking care of the girl to dress in black (including matching black nail polish) and hump the brain damaged doctor (as well urinate on him!) in order to somehow bring him back to sanity (!?!), so that he can tell the head doctor and the chairwoman about exactly how the dream ring works (they perhaps should have found this information out before they hung him the first time, but I digress!).

But the nurse is actually the sister of the original nurse who was hung in the prologue(!) and is on her own mission of vengeance against the head doctor and the chairwoman. This nurse is the one who inserted the bell and is implanting sexual fantasies and controlling our young heroine by hypnosis into doing her bidding, which involves getting the girl to jealously murder the head doctor and chairwoman whilst they are in bed together! (She jingles the other bell to lure the knife-wielding girl to the house!)

Everything climaxes (literally) in the ‘Beast Afternoon’ of the title, in which (as the sun darkens blood red through the skylight) an orgy takes place in the basement of the old hospital between the nurse and the brain damaged doctor, and the head doctor and chairwoman in an attempt to boost the brain damaged doctor’s brainwaves and restore enough sense to him to get the dream ring instructions out of him! But then the nurse turns the tables, gets the chairwoman and head doctor perched on chairs with nooses around their necks and douses the basement in gasoline. But she hasn’t reckoned with our young heroine getting possessed by the spirit of nurse’s murdered sister that inhabits the bells, who is intent on murdering the nurse for betraying her promise never to become someone else’s plaything, on pain of death!

(I particularly love in this scene that the nurse doesn’t get the chance to gloat over hanging the head doctor and chairwoman, as she just accidentally knocks both of the chairs that they are standing on over as she is running around the room to escape the possessed knife-wielding girl!)

The basement scene is kind of amazing for having so much going on in it. The bell drops out of the girl and her boyfriend finally drops his magnifying glass and saves her whilst the nurse is attacked by the reunited two bells in their necklace form(!) that strangles her to death before dropping to the floor and spontaneously combusting (!!) that causes the place to go up in flames. While the girl and the boyfriend escape all the evidence is destroyed, including the brain damaged doctor shown finally writing all of the equations to his dream ring device on the cistern of the toilet in his cell!

Its such a strange film but its definitely worth a watch if you can cope with the film stopping regularly for a couple of minutes of softcore sex scenes every so often. Despite that its also surprisingly pretty pacy, packing in all the above lunatic plot twists into just 66 minutes. And it looks gorgeous throughout, with some incredibly stylish shots that really makes this film worthwhile! I'll add a couple of screenshots below:

Plus how can I hate a film which features lines of dialogue like "It is complete! With this, I can enter the dream world! Something that even Freud and Jung were unable to accomplish!" or "Dreams are a mirror that reflect the mind. In old psychotherapy, dreams could only be described in the patient's words. By converting them into images, we've achieved a 100% treatment success rate"
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Mr Sausage
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The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#1458 Post by Mr Sausage » Tue Jul 11, 2017 9:24 pm

A Cure For Wellness (Gore Verbinski, 2017): How can a movie be this familiar and yet this confusing? More to the point, how can a movie be this unnecessarily long (146 minutes) and yet still fail to explain the plot adequately? There’s nothing complicated here; any mildly aware viewer will see how the pieces are going to fit together; and yet everything seems to fall apart in your hands when you think back on it. I guess it’s got to do with eternal life, but what are the eels doing everywhere again? How’re they supposed to work? And where did that mind control come from at the end? And what are the thudding anti-rat race themes during the first half supposed to do with it all? I suppose the movie wouldn’t seem so endless and plodding too if it weren’t just going through the motions of things we’ve all seen before. The movie’s an inert collection of narrative and technical clichés. Its ‘scares’ are pitched at the level of mysterious girl-children humming creepy lullabys and shock images that turn out to be dreams or hallucinations…or are they? No, really, are they? The movie never clears that up. I’m not surprised this failed so miserably at the box office—what’s the appeal of a two-and-a-half-hour accumulation of familiar old things no one’s especially fond of told with a dreary, endless adequacy?

Life (Daniel Espinosa, 2017): Alien, if the xenomorph were a disgruntled cuttlefish and the Nostromo a space shuttle in Earth’s orbit. The scientists aboard are on a mission to retrieve a probe from Mars containing a small organism that will obviously end up growing at an impossible rate, displaying an impossible level of intelligence, escaping, and killing all the supporting actors. The movie does have one genuine surprise, but it’s not one that ends up affecting the events of the movie all that much. Still, small mercies are gratefully accepted among so much stuff I’ve seen done better elsewhere.

30 Days of Night (David Slade, 2007): Makes just enough of its setting to be interesting, and yet no more than that. There is a baseline level of filmic competence to ensure the movie is both entertaining and uninspired. Given that it’s set during a month of darkness in the arctic, the film has the perfect setting for a bleak, wintry horror tale of vampires stalking the denizens of a small Alaskan town. The film does a fine enough job of constructing that setting. And yet it never seems cold. Sure, people wear toques and parkas and such, but they have no problem going outside when they need to, and the cold never seems to affect anyone, let alone incapacitate. Compare to The Thing, whose arctic setting wasn’t just atmospheric window-dressing, but a genuine part of the plot, something that could severely disable its characters and therefore limited their options. The other problem is that the film’s set-up does not work for a two-hour movie. Tho’ the story spans 30 days, it feels like it happens over just 2 or 3, with only a couple of title cards announcing the days passed to tell you otherwise. I’m not surprised to discover this was adapted from a comic series, as it has that paradoxical feeling common to decent adaptations of long works of being both unrushed and underdeveloped. Nothing’s obviously missing from the movie or glossed over or inappropriately set up—as I said, there is a baseline level of competence here--and yet there is this constant niggling feeling that everything would’ve been more effective if allowed to unspool over a longer amount of time. This ought’ve been a miniseries. There would be more time to establish the layout of the town and develop the mood of things going wrong as an inexplicable dread builds; more time to show the initial vampire invasion and how the different townspeople react; and there would be more time to show how the characters have to adapt to the growing days and weeks as they struggle to survive. A miniseries would’ve made a decent movie into a potentially superior one. Anyway, I have to mention Danny Huston’s strong performance as the head vampire. He projects a believable otherness (the other vampires are content just to snarl and bare their teeth endlessly).

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014): A really beautiful movie. It’s an unusual fantasy of Persians living in some dusty western town with the allegorical name Bad City, where the dead are dumped into canals and a silent vampire prowls (or skateboards) among the homeless and drug addicted, her shroud a vampire cape. She lives in a room by herself, using the jewelry she takes from her victims to pay for things, including the records that she likes to dance to. The people here, vampire included, are lonely and sad, so when the vampire makes a quiet and unsentimental connection with a young man, it’s expected. What’s impressive is the patience of the movie. It takes its time building its lonely, quiet mood and observing its characters, especially their small non-verbal reactions, the way their silences communicate what they think and feel. I adored this film.

Thirst (Park Chan-Wook, 2009): A very strange vampire movie. The tone is unique, something between drama and farce. It’s often funny, but rarely in a way that makes you laugh (well, maybe a grim chuckle). The central romance can sometimes be touching, and other times grotesque. The movie often lingers over gross details, but can also be light and delicate. It does the best job I’ve ever seen of demonstrating the physical attributes of vampirism, especially their unnatural strength. I’m still not sure how the filmmakers accomplished some of those scenes of vampires lifting people about. It’s hard to say how successful the movie is because I don’t know what to measure it against. It’s pretty sui generis. But I was always interested, and that’s probably enough.

Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013): Vampires are closer to ghosts than other monsters for how they can used as a vehicle to explore other territory. Here, it’s a look at a loving long-term romantic partnership, with the vampire angle projecting enough narrative otherness to isolate this subject and allow us to see it from unexpected angles. The vampires are often presented as addicts, and yet the central relationship is not only functional but entirely healthy. The pair aren’t codependant, leeching, accusatory, or resentful. They can evidently spend large amounts of time living apart, and yet slot back into each other’s lives as if nothing’s changed. They are different people with varying interests, yet supportive of each other’s interests, and respectful of their respective differences, even when those differences are amusing to them. I was not expecting to be so moved by this film. Nor was I expecting it to be so musical.

Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro, 2015): I didn’t believe a moment of this gothic pastiche. It’s not just that it’s ridiculous, often cringe-worthy, and made from the parts of better films. It’s that there’s a flatness to it that drains it of conviction. It’s tough to articulate, but I feel the movie believes more in what it’s imitating than in itself. As such, there’s no reality to invest in, and without that, all you have is two hours of brightly-coloured renditions of things you’ve seen many times before. I should’ve rewatched Dragonwyck instead.

Stoker (Park Chan-Wook, 2013): I could’ve done without the coda, which seemed witless, but the rest of this morbid psychodrama was so energetic and vivid, so crazy and suggestive, that I’m willing to forgive the final misstep. The premise is a riff on Hitchcock: what if in Shadow of a Doubt young Charlie was not such a normal girl after all. What if she took after her uncle in surprising ways. The result does not try to ape Hitchcock, thankfully, but remains a stylish, mainly low-key thriller with a keen (and often astonishing) visual sense that builds into some rather brazen nuttiness. The acting is uniformly good, and while Kidman is the standout in terms of getting all the emotional scenes, it’s Wasikowska who has the difficult job of communicating the strange, conflicted otherness of her character without much expressive recourse (she plays a silent, shy, unemotive girl). She does it beautifully, and her character is fascinating and explored with subtlety and openness (at least until the unnecessary extra plot beat right before the credits end). A memorable film.

Cronos (Guillermo del Toro, 1993): An interesting permutation of the vampire story, one ostensibly concerned with the desire for immortality but which mostly takes that theme for granted. More interesting is the relationship of the grandfather afflicted with vampirism and his young granddaughter. Del Toro has a beautifully unsentimental understanding of children here, and the way she attempts to look after her grandfather even as he goes through the most grotesque changes is interesting and touching. Would that the movie had explored that aspect more. As it stands, the movie is concerned mainly with surfaces, but it builds a pleasing and unusual one. I didn’t love it, but I enjoyed and appreciated it.

Mimic (Guillermo del Toro, 1997): As far as giant bug movies go, this one’s not bad. It’s a Del Toro film, so it’s appropriately gooey and sickening, with some impressive (and underlit) set design. The script is weak, with nonsensical scenes, and characters and plot threads lost for long periods of time (F. Murray Abraham in particular gets dropped half way through the movie, only to reappear briefly at the end for no reason other than to pretend the movie hadn’t forgotten him). The bugs don’t seem to have a clear set of behaviours, either, acting mainly as the screenplay demands. So not a great movie. And yet I enjoyed it. Del Toro and I share a common childhood interest in insects and the grotesque, and that helped.

I’ve now seen all of Del Toro’s films, and I don’t think he’s made a great one. A few of them (Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, Hellboy 2) are pretty good, others ( Mimic, Hellboy, Blade II, Pan’s Labyrinth) watchable but disappointing and flawed to various degrees, and others (Pacific Rim, Crimson Peak) outright bad films. None are the work of a major director, tho’, and I’m pretty confused at his high reputation (and this for films and a style that ought to be right in my wheelhouse).

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knives
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#1459 Post by knives » Tue Jul 11, 2017 9:39 pm

I always assumed his reputation was based in no small part on him being such an endearing personality.

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domino harvey
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#1460 Post by domino harvey » Tue Jul 11, 2017 10:41 pm

I should’ve rewatched Dragonwyck instead.
This is almost always true no matter what the other film is

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colinr0380
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#1461 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Jul 12, 2017 1:09 pm

Rebecca excepted of course!

I wanted to agree with Mr Sausage on 30 Days Of Night. I really enjoyed the film (especially the brutally sudden and unsparing use of violence that contrasts against the drawn out tension of much of the rest of the film) and the performances but never really had that strong sense of desperation come across in the length of time that people were under siege in a frozen town, or the horrors of hypothermia. Getting told about the time jumps in title cards is a little different from feeling as if you're living through it with the characters. That also has a seemingly unintended side effect of making moments like the death of a couple of supporting characters deciding to leave the safehouse seem more like their own stupid fault for leaving cover, rather than having the audience feel the length of time that they were under siege causing their nerve to break. I'd add another yes vote to the 'should have been a miniseries' proposal!

(I usually like comparing the final, moving 'exposure to sunlight' scene between a couple here with a similar one at the end of Blade II! And both of them are a bit like the best iteration of this benediction-style scene that occurs at the end of Cronos!)

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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#1462 Post by thirtyframesasecond » Sat Jul 15, 2017 4:27 pm

Del Toro's Spanish language stuff's great, but even his popcorn stuff has enough distinctive about them - I even like Mimic quite a lot. Not seen Pacific Rim or Crimson Peak and not particularly arsed.

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Lost Highway
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#1463 Post by Lost Highway » Sun Jul 16, 2017 4:04 am

I love The Devil's Backbone and the first half of Mimic, but generally I don't know what people see in Del Toro. Conceptually his films are often promising and always disappointing. Even his much admired Pan's Labyrinth strikes me as a cruder rerun of The Devil's Backbone. Where he falls down for me with his Hollywood films is a fanboyish take on characterization which mistake quips for dialogue. His characters never strike me as three dimensional and I find them impossible to emotionally invest in. There isn't a single thing I believe in Crimson Peak, Pacific Rim or his Hellboy films apart from that he has an eye for art direction. Which largely places him in the same field as later Tim Burton films for me.

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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#1464 Post by zedz » Tue Aug 08, 2017 11:07 pm

Just popping in to "recommend" the late Andrew Getty's insane The Evil Within. It's an overbudgeted labour of love, or desperation, or something, and it really has to be seen to be believed.

This is a bad, bad film in almost every conceivable way, but it's certainly not boring. Just when you think the film has finally found its woeful groove, some fresh absurdity is lurking around the corner. Try to imagine a filmmaker with Tommy Wiseau-level skills (and understanding of human behaviour), cursed with an unlimited budget, trying to make the kind of horror movie that somebody who wasn't really paying attention might think that David Lynch would make.

Our protagonist is a 'retard' (they don't just go there: they barely go anywhere else) who has a thing going on with a cursed mirror that orders him to perform escalating atrocities. Animatronics may be involved. This movie doesn't have the best mirror acting you've ever seen, but I'm pretty sure it has the most! Badly drawn and performed characters bumble into and out of the story, most meeting a sorry end, some just hanging in the air like a stale fart as narrative non sequiturs. The plot lurches and judders around scenes that were never shot, or possibly the disjunctions are because we're experiencing different generations of script filmed at different times.

What makes the film remarkable, and worth seeing once, is that there's a genuinely original visual imagination evident at times - often at inappropriate times, as when a bland dialogue scene is shot with a trippy, continually tracking / wiping editing scheme that Raul Ruiz would have dismissed as too eccentric. The fact that the filmmaker was a Getty heir means that every fanciful / misguided CGI or effects whim could be catered to, which is kind of unique for this kind of shitty film. Almost by accident, you get flashes of eccentrics like Jodorowsky, Ottinger or Ruiz in the middle of a turgid Z-grade genre exercise.

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knives
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#1465 Post by knives » Tue Aug 08, 2017 11:34 pm

Isn't this the meth addicted millionaire movie?

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domino harvey
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#1466 Post by domino harvey » Fri Nov 24, 2017 2:45 pm

domino harvey wrote:Disconnected (Gorman Bechard 1983) It may be unfair to praise this film for being so fascinatingly inept while decrying Boardinghouse, but this like Satan’s Blade or A Night to Dismember enters into that sweet spot of being intensely watchable and unexpectedly endearing in its cluelessness. Alternately artsy and hypnotically artless, this is one of the strangest slashers I’ve ever seen. There’s sort of a plot (one that ends with twenty-five minutes still left in the movie!), but the most accurate description is that the film presents an endless loop of plotless scenes in which a comely young actress ambles around her apartment while answering the phone, looking at the phone, and being in the general vicinity of the phone, occasionally interspersed with other actors, locales, and murders. The “improv” in the film is car crash-level role playing out of a job interview, but amazingly this only helps to build-in the intentional awkwardness of moments like a nerd trying to hit on a qt video store employee. There are also lots of phoned-in film references— 90% of the apartment scenes unfold in front of a Trouble With Harry poster, which is A+ meta placement, but I liked how this particular shot was contrasted with the Dial ‘M’ For Murder poster in the background

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—and the characters talk about “old” movies and stars like we do here… which is disconcerting for all involved! The Wikipedia entry for the actress playing the lead even insists she’s related to Claude Rains, which would be doubly impressive since she spells her last name with an E. Recommended for advanced students of my 80s Slasher breadcrumb syllabus.
Just announced as one of Vinegar Syndrome's Black Friday titles

EDIT: What a difference a non-VHS source makes!

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colinr0380
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#1467 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Dec 08, 2017 2:46 am

domino harvey wrote:Regarding the "Can a documentary be a horror film" question from early in the thread, I've stumbled upon quite a doozy that will definitely be placing on my list. Easily one of the most perversely fascinating and scary documentaries I've seen, Surviving Edged Weapons (Dennis Anderson 198X) is a Canadian-produced police training video from the eighties that instructs officers how to, yes, survive edged weapon attacks. So why is this feature length training video of any value to non-police officers? Because it is the very essence of a splatter film, boiled down to an unending series of vignettes portraying the dangers, both obvious and surprising, in edged weapon attacks. I didn't go into this documentary with a fear of such things, but I sure as hell ended it with one!

The film seems like it will be fairly innocuous at first-- we get a peek at man's first use of edged weaponry in our caveman days, then some actual officers give some talking heads about their real-life experiences. Okay, whatever. But then the film treats the presumed police viewer with a never-ending compendium of unforeseen dangers, reenacted and staged by Hollywood-level special effect crews in a no-nonsense and unglamorous way, which only makes it all the more horrifying. The first such segment is so blunt it's almost comical-- a detective knocks on a suspect's door. The assailant opens the door just a crack-- and shoves a fucking sword through the cop! And the hits just keep on coming: a man at a routine traffic stop ostensibly retrieves his ID and instead hands the officer a small pencil-like knife into his cheek-- this is followed by a fascinating montage of all the different kinds of edged weapons a driver could conceal from an officer. A biker unscrews his gas tank, revealing a hidden knife attached, which is quickly sunk into an officer's hand. Suspects are shown attaching fishing hooks to the cuffs of their jeans to cut officers trying to pat them down. Baseball caps conceal razor blades on the back, allowing the assailant to simply grab the hat's bill and slaughter their victim single-handed. In a fascinating segment, the space needed between a blade-armed suspect and an officer with a gun is explored, piece by piece, finally arriving on a safe distance far wider than I'd have guessed. Every way of holding a knife is named (gotta love that there's something called the "Hollywood" grip), cataloged, and then taught against. Advice on what to do after you've been stabbed (how to position your body, how to keep the assailant in custody while wounded, &c) is also helpfully included. And two dozen other scenarios and segments, too numerous to catalog here.

The film is constructed in a professional, intelligent manner that renders it as good and worthy a documentary as any others specifically for mass audiences would be-- it's maybe even a little better in that in appealing to a specific audience, it can treat its subject with a confident shorthand that gives it an air of automatic authority-- even if all the portrayed scenarios are complete fiction (which they very well may be). I'm stunned this never got a commercial home video release, as I am positive it would have been a hit with the gorehounds of the eighties. And it's educational! And fucking horrifying!

Someone's put the whole feature length film up on YouTube in nine parts. Be warned that for some reason the first seven parts are squished into the wrong aspect ratio-- I had to download them and use VLC to correct the AR in playback, so that's a viable option.
Years after domino's recommendation of Surviving Edged Weapons, the Red Letter Media guys have encountered the terrifying power of that video on their Best of the Worst show!

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Lost Highway
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#1468 Post by Lost Highway » Fri Dec 08, 2017 6:51 am

Maybe as a reflection of the times we live in, I think 2017 has been a fantastic year for horror films and TV. Let me list my favourites:

1. Twin Peaks Season 3 (if Sight & Sound can do it!)
Not just my favourite TV series or (18 hour) film but possibly my favourite thing about 2017. Scary, funny, hypnotic, thoroughly unpredictable and deeply satisfying, not just as a continuation of one of the most groundbreaking TV series but also as one of my favourite living film-maker’s crowning achievements.

2. Get Out
Justly acclaimed for all the right reasons. It‘s the rare film about US race relations that doesn’t preach to the choir. It‘s is all the better for making the medicine go down by being a tremendously fun genre flick. It does everything right that Kathryn Bigelow‘s Detroit does wrong, even its villains are more nuanced.

3. Raw
Was blown away by the filmmaking, a great feminist horror film only a woman could make, full of wit and bite that’s never didactic. Gorgeous cinematography, great acting from the two female leads and my favourite score of the year.

4. The Girl with All the Gifts
Finally someone got Mathesonˋs I Am Legend right, this is the best and smartest zombie film since Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. It does for zombies what Let the Right One In did for vampires. Just when I though a subgenre based on an overexposed monster had played itself out, along comes a film which reninvents the genre. I hope we’ll see a lot more of Sennia Nanua, a star is born here.

5. Personal Shopper
I think I like the film for all the reasons many didn’t. Its shifts between genres and tones is what kept it unpredictable. It’s also the most MR James of all recent cinematic ghost stories, nothing gave me shivers as this did in a final, almost thrown away reveal. This has been left off many genre best of list as it’s thought of a primarily art-house character study, but what’s surprising is how willingly it embraces the conventions of the ghost story.

6. mother!
I’d never thought I’d love an Aronfsky movie, but he finally truly let his freak flag fly. Apart from being genuinely unsettling and sincere to a fault, I also thought this was pretty funny. Where Black Swan was slightly undone by a muted ending, this one goes all the way.

7. Berlin Syndrome
Apart from #4, the most underseen and underrated film on my list. Beautifully directed and acted and very atmospheric, this negotiates some troubling territory with great care. A psychological thriller in which the motivations of hunter and prey feel all too plausible. Like Raw this greatly benefits from a female point of view. It also struck a chord because I recently moved to Berlin and apart from one major implausibility in regard to housing in this city, it uses its locations very well. I also liked its muted resolution which is all the more believable for not giving in to cathartic, violent excess usual for this type of story.

8. A Ghost Story
Technically a horror film, if not in execution, A Ghost Story may not be as profound as some have claimed, but I still thought it was tremendously charming and it featured the years best visual conceit and one that never got boring.

9. Hounds of Love
The second Australian film on my list about a young, female kidnap and sexual abuse victim, which could have ended up horrendously exploitative had it not been handled so well. Very stylish and well acted, this takes a Fred & Rosemary West scenario and digs into the psyche of its female antagonists.

10. A Cure for Wellness
After mother!, the second big budget studio horror folly on my list. Like mother! a film I thought I’d hate from everything I read and which I ended up loving. Three quarters Thomas Mann‘s The Magic Mountain with a dash of Kafka and one quarter The Abominable Dr. Phibes and what’s wrong with that ?

Bubbling under: The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Annabelle Creation, Life, Split, Gerald‘s Game, Better Watch Out, Colossal, It Stains the Sand Red, Mayhem, Cult of Chucky, Stranger Things S02, Black Mirror S03, The Handmaids Tale S01, Glitch S01

Horror films and TV series of 2017 I’m still keen to see: It, Tragedy Girls, The Untamed, Super Dark Times, Thelma, Creep 2, The Exorcist S02, Glitch S02, Black Mirror S04

Duds and disappointments: Alien Covenant, It Comes at Night, 1922, Prevenge, The Void, The Blackcoat‘s Daughter, The Devil‘s Candy, Channel Zero S01

edit: I‘ve since seen It which I liked, but I’m not sure I liked it enough to change my top ten. I also caught The Untamed, which didn’t quite work for me and A Dark Song, an addition to the sub-genre of folk horror, which I enjoyed a lot. It does surprising things with a familiar premise.

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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#1469 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Aug 02, 2018 7:19 pm

Here are my viewings from the Fantasia Film Festival

Aragne: Sign of Vermilion (Saku Sakamoto, 2018)
A waking nightmare, beautifully animated, with intense and strange images, that seems like it’s going to construct its own myth about insect psychopomps, but chooses not to follow through in a disappointing and expected manner. It gives a mostly rational explanation for its irrationalities, revealing a story that’s threadbare, existing mostly to hang strange and haunting imagery on. A movie to appreciate for its style and little more.

An Obituary (Jean Yoon, 2017)
A short film from Korea made to be seen with VR goggles. A man drives to his friend’s rural home deep in the woods for his funeral, but is surprised to find not just that no one else has come, but that no one at all seems to be around expect his friend’s mom. I’d used VR for games in the past, but this was my first experience watching a film in the format. It’s kind of fun, full of novel effects like watching someone drive away in a panic only for them to look to their right and scream, naturally causing you to look, too, just in time to see something at the passenger window; or to watch him hide in the woods from something and having to scan 360 degrees to find where what’s stalking him is, well, stalking him. But the experience isn’t immersive like 3D. Though you can choose where to look in 360 degrees, it mostly feels like looking at wallpaper pasted over the inside of a large sphere. The movie is primarily a technical exercise. An amusing 15 minutes if you feel like having a VR experience in narrative form.

The Dark (Justin P. Lange, 2018)
Bears a superficial resemblance to Let the Right One In. A section of the woods surrounding a dilapidated house is haunted by a monstrous undead young girl who litters the road in with traps to puncture tires and eats whomever gets out to look for help. A kidnapped blind boy is led into her territory and they develop some kind of friendship as she tries to help him evade the search parties out to rescue him. If the supporting players often have a starchy delivery and tendency to over-project common to inexperienced actors in low-budget movies, it’s more than compensated for by the excellent and assured performances of the two young leads. Beyond those two performances, the film’s strength is its patient, cold, and contemplative style, which it expertly uses to avoid the sentimental traps this kind of story invites. The film likes to linger on faces, teasing out small nuances of emotion. It builds to something touching and understated. There is one scene, tho’, half way in that’s so misconceived and in such poor taste that it nearly sinks the movie and leaves an unpleasant feeling that lingers. The movie did recover, at least for me, but I still wonder why something otherwise so low-key and sensitive wanted to push so far into unpleasantness.

Blood and Black Lace (Mario Bava, 1966)
Arrow presented their new restoration at the festival. It looked so beautiful I couldn’t believe it. The last time I saw it was on an old DVD with pretty washed out colour. This was a revelation, even more so than the recent Suspiria restoration. I took a friend to it, a big horror fan who’d never seen Bava, and getting to experience the film second-hand through her enthusiasm was as fun seeing it again myself.

The Witch in the Window (Andy Mitton, 2018)
I had such a good time here. The story is familiar: a divorced father takes his troubled son for a vacation as they fix up an old country house in Maine only to discover it’s haunted. But the writing here is so sharp and the direction and performances so assured that, well, who cares. A lot of horror movies try to make their characters likeable or identifiable by replacing actual conversation (or even character) with endless, overly scripted banter. This is the first time I’ve seen a movie take that idea and make the banter not just genuinely funny and amusing, but use it to first mask and then reveal genuine conversation, to build dialogue around difficult emotional subjects that most films, let alone horror films, rarely address. The interactions between the father and his son are so amusing, genuine, and heartfelt that you not only forgive that you’ve seen this same situation before, but almost wish it didn’t have to be a horror movie, that it could continue on that vein until the end. It captures a real sense of how the more distant parent of a divorced couple can be just a bit too direct and blunt in their speech, and engage in conversations just a bit too adult, with their kid as a way to bridge the distance between them, and not necessarily to any negative effect. When the horror does come, it does so expertly, not just in the film’s sure control of timing and space within the frame (always check the corners!), but the believable and authentic reactions of the actors to what’s going on. This is a movie where people don’t wander off alone, where they flee houses at appropriate moments, and not only acknowledge that they’re either afraid or uneasy about some minor creepy thing, but have conversations about what they’ve just seen. And there is one terrific moment that had the audience utter a collective “oh fuck”. As good a haunted house movie as I’ve seen, very far from the theatrics of The Conjuring. Its scares are sparing; the real heart of the movie is the script and acting. Probably the best film I saw at the festival.

The Field Guide to Evil (Various, 2018)
An anthology film structured as a book of old folktales with the segments by various directors from different countries. It’s only intermittently satisfying. The good aren’t especially distinguished, the bad very bad indeed, and between those are the promising hampered by the format. The first segment is the most photographically beautiful of the film. Set in a dense valley in Austria, it follows some peasant women’s day-to-day rounds among the trees, rocks, and streams. It’s evocative and atmospheric, filmed with impeccable cinematography, and has a real physical authenticity to it. Yet it’s shorn of its ending. It stops abruptly and elliptically, without seeming to arrive at the point of its folklore. It needed an extra ten minutes at least; but at two hours, the film is already over-stuffed and can’t spare the time. Up ‘til then I was in love with the segment and wished it had been a full movie. The third segment has the same problem: it, too, is strikingly photographed, with some odd set design and a gruesome story, and yet it ends before what ought to be its second act can get going. One of the strongest of the segments is a b&w Lovecraftian story set in India, with a procurer of grotesques and curiosities for various circuses and sideshows venturing into the depths of India to find a crumbling ruin that houses the wretched and deformed whom he wants to buy and sell. Peter Strickland’s entry rounds out the collection and was the entry I was most anticipating. It’s a pseudo-silent film, not quite a pastiche or an imitation. It’s not b&w, but has a washed-out, unnatural-looking colour palate. Plot and dialogue are advanced using intertitles, but there are certain pointed uses of diagetic sound; the film is sped up slightly, but only slightly, so that it’s not keystone cops parody, but has an unnatural flicker. I was prepared to hate it at first, but the segment revealed an odd comic sensibility and I ended up appreciating its absurdities. Probably the best part of the movie. I left the theatre mostly interested in seeing what else Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, the directors of the first segment, have done, but checking IMDB I noticed I’d already seen their movie Goodnight Mommy, which was a superb and unsettling horror film for 2/3 and then bungled its final act so astonishingly that I wounded up hating it. There’s real talent there, but they just haven’t found the right story to tell. Anyway, the movie as a whole is skippable.

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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#1470 Post by domino harvey » Wed Oct 10, 2018 1:05 am

Image

Well, it's October, so

Absurd (Joe D’Amato 1981)
A science experiment disrupts a small town in what is obviously Italy but which the dub keeps trying to tell us is Small Town USA while its denizens eat spaghetti at a party and live in Mediterranean-style houses. The guinea pig run amok just looks like some Greek dude, albeit one who enjoys inflicting slow murder to whoever he is killing, and the murder machine thoughtfully makes sure lots of blood pops out of the pig carcasses— pardon me, human victims. This is awful, obviously, and that’s even before the movie introduces the Most Annoying Child In the World. Italian horror movies have a proud tradition of obnoxious kids, but this brat takes the torta. My favorite part was when the character we think is the heroine risks her life with a murderer in the house to save him and tells the kid to run to get help, and all he does is run around the perimeter of the house and reenter— although the solid five minutes of him pleading to be let into a locked room when there are literally dozens of other rooms to hide in comes a close second.

the Alligator People (Roy Del Ruth 1959)
A woman’s husband runs off the night they are married after receiving a mysterious telegram. The woman tracks down his family and learns the terrifying secret that her husband was part of an experiment that made him one of the titular beings. I've gathered the makeup and costuming work for the film's finale are somewhat notorious for their ineptness, and with good reason. I am already not the audience for movies like this, but the last five minutes or so of this just rubbed salt in the movie's own self-inflicted wounds.

the Cabinet of Caligari (Roger Kay 1962)

The title may be (almost) the same, but this American “remake” is an in name only affair. Rather, this confusing and bizarre film is what happens when API tries to remake Last Year at Marienbad (with a touch of La Jetee) and still be a Hollywood movie. Glynis Johns’ car breaks down and she finds herself at the manor of Dr Caligari, who has a strange hold over her and other guests. She soon finds she can’t leave and must conquer her oppressor by… stripping nude to trigger his impotency, among other failed gambits. For most of the movie nothing makes sense and yet it’s obvious we’re being shown some kind of symbolic metaphor for psychotherapy, so the “surprise” twist is anything but. However, the movie is so admirably bonkers and almost endearingly pretentious in its higher aims that it’s hard to be too mad at it, and the ending does pose an intriguing question:
SpoilerShow
How did this movie get away with saying Johns wanted to fuck her son?
It takes real cluelessness to try to appeal to an audience (American foreign-film viewers in the early 60s) who would want nothing to do with a remake of Caligari but probably could have been more easily tricked into seeing this were it called something else! I can’t really recommend this, but I suspect it would be perversely watchable to many here. [P]

the Fly (Kurt Neumann 1958)
Scientist messes with nature, natures messes right back. Though I’ve seen and enjoyed the Cronenberg remake, I’d always been led to believe this was a silly monster movie. As a kid I remember reading the plot description in one of those books that wrote up summaries of older movies in the days before easy access to the sources, and the ending to this film was even presented as comical. Good lord, how could anyone watch this movie and feel anything but dread and sadness? I thought the structure was clever and assumed an audience wouldn’t already know the score going in. The film metes out information in an admirably skillful fashion, and the movie brilliantly exploits and makes strange an everyday occurrence everyone in the audience has experienced: the frustration in trying to kill a fly (though the twist is they just want to capture it), here turned into a surprisingly tense sequence. Herbert Marshall looks more than a little embarrassed to be here, but his honor is left intact by this being a serious and successfully realized sci-fi film. Highly recommended.

Hell Night (Tom DeSimone 1981)
A small handful of sorority and fraternity pledges, led by Linda Blair, spend the night in a locked mansion estate where a horrifying mass murder was committed by a “gork”… who was never caught. Dunh dunh dunh. Blair cannot act, at all, but even if she could it wouldn’t help this early bite at the Halloween apple. At some point during this I realized the since everyone getting killed is trespassing on some mutant’s property, his actions as a concerned home owner are more sympathetic than those of the screamy teen victims. I did like that one of the characters dressed in costume not just as Robin Hood but as Errol Flynn as Robin Hood, but nothing else in this uninspired slasher retread has that level of specificity.

Hide and Go Shriek (Skip Schoolnik 1987)
Eight teenagers decide to celebrate graduating high school the same way all cool kids do: by hiding out in a dark furniture store after it closes. Rather unexpectedly, though, this movie started introducing some novel ideas and variations on the usual slasher standbys. There’s a lot of issues with how the killer is portrayed (and frankly, his “normal” look of donning a fedora is more horrifying now than then), but I appreciated the nice touch in how he wore the clothing of the victims he killed to trick the survivors into thinking he was their friends in the dark store. I was also surprised at how low the body count was, and how instead of filling the movie with endless murders, there’s only a few and then the last act turns into like thirty straight minutes of anguish on the part of the survivors. I’ve actually never seen a slasher focus so effectively on this aspect of the typical narrative, and the movie admirably stops being safe “fun” somewhere around the ten minute mark of these characters wailing and sobbing and trying in vain to escape the store while being confronted with the bodies of their friends and the futility of their predicament. As a result, there were times here that I actually felt tension and suspense (a true rarity in slasher movies) because the film disoriented me with its approach. Recommended, but only for those receptive to differentiation in these kind of movies.

the House of the Damned (Maury Dexter 1963)
An architect is tasked with assessing a Winchester Mystery House-esque mansion but strange things like, uh, missing keys, spook him and his wife in this unnecessarily ‘Scope “horror” movie that turns out to be a lame version of
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Freaks, but if the freaks were just real chill and laid back and left when you asked
I Drink Your Blood (David E Durston 1970)
Unexpectedly competent and nothing like the sub-HGL antics I expected from a film about a young tyke sneakily infecting the food of local evil hippies with rabies-infected blood! The movie has a novel definition of “rabies,” which is closer to zombie-ism, and there’s an unnecessarily downbeat ending, but this is one of those weird grindhouse flicks that actually works, at least within the mildly enjoyable perimeters of what it is.

the Majorettes (S William Hinzman 1987)
The oldest and homeliest-looking “teenagers” in memory are getting offed by a mystery assailant in the nth reiteration of the same slasher movie junk… until, halfway through the movie, the filmmakers come up with a legitimately novel idea: the mystery murderer is unmasked and then blackmailed to keep killing, but only those victims the blackmailers want. That’s a clever notion. The film not only does nothing with it, the movie soon undercuts it by turning into a hyperviolent, bullet and explosion-riddled gang war movie (????). An exceptionally bad entry in the genre, made all the worse for squandering a decent premise.

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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#1471 Post by Feego » Wed Oct 10, 2018 11:52 am

domino harvey wrote:
Wed Oct 10, 2018 1:05 am
the Fly (Kurt Neumann 1958)
Scientist messes with nature, natures messes right back. Though I’ve seen and enjoyed the Cronenberg remake, I’d always been led to believe this was a silly monster movie. As a kid I remember reading the plot description in one of those books that wrote up summaries of older movies in the days before easy access to the sources, and the ending to this film was even presented as comical. Good lord, how could anyone watch this movie and feel anything but dread and sadness? I thought the structure was clever and assumed an audience wouldn’t already know the score going in. The film metes out information in an admirably skillful fashion, and the movie brilliantly exploits and makes strange an everyday occurrence everyone in the audience has experienced: the frustration in trying to kill a fly (though the twist is they just want to capture it), here turned into a surprisingly tense sequence. Herbert Marshall looks more than a little embarrassed to be here, but his honor is left intact by this being a serious and successfully realized sci-fi film. Highly recommended.
This is indeed a great film and one of my favorite 50s sci-fis. One thing that really separates it from most of that era is that it's told primarily from the perspective of the scientist's wife, offering a rare woman's point of view. I don't know if the filmmakers were intentionally trying to attract or appeal to a female audience, but the movie even looks more like a lush melodrama throughout than a typical sci-fi. It kind of prefigures the 90s movie Mary Reilly (which I haven't seen), which tells the Jekyll and Hyde story through the eyes of a maid played by Julia Roberts. There is a kind of Jekyll/Hyde aspect to the scientist's experiment as well. David Hedison's physical performance after his transformation is also compelling and underrated among movie monsters. Without the use of his face or voice, he conveys his character's despair quite believably just through his body movement. And yes, the ending is terrific and still makes me squirm every time I see it.

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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#1472 Post by domino harvey » Wed Oct 10, 2018 12:04 pm

That's a good point on the female perspective. She's an unusually strong female character for this kind of film.

I also liked the moment where the scientist evaporates the cat and all you hear is an ethereal meowing coming from all directions as the cat's particles disperse forever. I know it makes no sense, even within the logic of the film, but that's a pretty messed up scene.

Are any of the sequels worth watching?

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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#1473 Post by knives » Wed Oct 10, 2018 12:32 pm

The first one is much more generic, though still better than 90% of what you've seen, but to its benefit it does have one terrifying image that has stuck with me since I saw the film on television twenty years ago.

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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#1474 Post by domino harvey » Sun Oct 14, 2018 3:22 am

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Doctors Jekyll and Misters Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian 1932 / Victor Fleming 1941)

A Victorian doctor seeks to prove his theory on the duality of man by isolating the evil tendencies into their own entity in this pair of Hollywood adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel. I’ve not read the book, and frankly doubt I ever will based on these two movies, so I’m not sure how much of this is in the source material, but while it’s unsurprising that the post-Code version completely discards the sexual frustration motivations that obviously drive Jekyll in the first film, the second movie replaces it with nothing, a void noticeable even more when watching them back to back. The entire point of the doctor’s encounter with the prostitute (or bar wench in the later film) and the prolonged engagement is to show that this character is unable to properly deal with his repressed urges and must give himself an “out.” In many ways this would be better accomplished without makeup at all, as the symbolic meaning would bear out and indeed support there being no real physical transformation at all, but an internal freeing of the id free of sexual mores. It’s also more than a little disturbing that once freed of the oppression of society, man reverts to abject deviancy and hatred towards women, with Mr Hyde terrorizing and savagely whipping the sexual object in both films. That said, I found these ideas more interesting in theory than in practice in either film. Mamoulian dabbles quite a bit in some experimental camera choices that were more at home in silent cinema (though the initial transformation scenes are astonishing), but Fleming’s film plays it far safer and more blandly (though credit where it’s due, the second movie inexplicably has the most offensively vulgar image of either film: Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner nude and in the straps of a carriage getting horsewhipped by Spencer Tracy— how the hell did that make it in??). Bergman at first seems miscast as the whore in the second film, but once we see this movie ramps up her victimhood, it makes more sense. Neither of these adaptations worked for me, but at least the first one had some ideas and failed nobly. The second is just a typical studio product drained of whatever nascent interest was in the story to begin with.

the Freeway Maniac (Paul Winters 1989)

After a young boy Halloweens his mom and her lover, he is institutionalized, grows up, escapes, and goes on a couple different violent rampages in this peculiar slasher variation. The lunatic’s first escape attempt is thwarted by a model stranded at a gas station. When she parlays the infamy from this into a starring role in a sci-fi film, the crazie escapes again and slowly works his way towards the set, killing a remarkable number of people along the way. I liked the little touches here, like when the first victim tries to argue with the killer that he shouldn’t be murdered because it’s only his first day on the job, or how the killer escapes being stuck in a hightower by throwing someone all the way down to the ground and then landing on their body to cushion the impact! This movie has a modicum of ambition and there is a bit of a Looney Tunes spirit to the endless supply of victims that wander across this guy’s path in the desert, but the film’s amateur hour acting and script are constantly at war with its aims. A hot mess, but one that would nevertheless be worth catching up with whenever some boutique label invariably runs out of movies and puts this out, as it’s anything but boring— when at one point, after countless human victims, the killer starts stalking a snake, you know you’re watching something special.

Fright Night Part 2 (Tommy Lee Wallace 1988)

William Ragsdale and Roddy McDowall return from the first film to battle Chris Sarandon’s sister, who kind of looks like Sean Young if someone smudged her, in this unimaginative sequel containing precious little of the confidence and craft that went into making the first film a modest success. Unlike in that film, everything here is typical horror flick free-associative logic (yes, what TV network wouldn’t replace a popular and established program host with an interpretive dancer?), and causality takes a backseat to tired complications and so-called suspense. A few well-done gore effects late in the picture at least offer some scant distraction, but overall this is several rungs below the original— so, standard-issue 80s horror sequel, then. [P]

Killer Party (William Fruet 1986)

Sorority sisters and frat brothers decide to throw their April Fools Day shindig in an abandoned house where a former pledge died twenty years earlier, and, well, you may have already guessed how that will work out for them in this slasher that nevertheless prides itself on faking-out the audience regardless. To start with, the film opens with two head-fakes (which is two too many). And then it seems like the film has arrived on a comparatively novel idea
SpoilerShow
in that it appears that the nice girl who is being set up as our Final Girl is actually the killer,
which is a fun riff on the conventions of these movies; but then, while that turns out to be technically accurate, the film decides to complicate it by
SpoilerShow
making her demon-possessed, with the film then turning into one of those bad post-Exorcist horror movies.
The weirdness and uneasy jigsaw construction of several different ideas is no doubt down to this being one of the slashers with a big studio backing it, MGM. It’s not hard to see a dozen different executives contributing notes that actually got used, to the film’s detriment. I will say that it takes a certain kind of perversity and/or cluelessness to go almost the entire film barely killing anyone and then offing everyone one right after another in a five minute span with no suspense even attempted. This is a royal mess, but a memorable one, for whatever that’s worth.

Night Visions: A View Through the Window (Bill Pullman 2001)

Night Visions was a short-lived anthology horror series that briefly aired on Fox and was (pooooooooooorly) hosted by, of all people, Henry Rollins. The show attracted a decent pedigree of guest spots, including Bill Pullman back when he still had box office draw. His directing work here isn’t so hot, but the material is all set-up with no satisfying pay-off: a mysterious cube appears in the middle of the desert, revealing within it a life-size view into a pioneer family going about their day to day lives. No sound can be heard from within, but everyday at random times, the force-field surrounding the cube allows objects to permeate. Pullman is an army physicist who becomes obsessed with the family, especially the woman whom he believes to be a widow, and he constantly opines about how lovely their way of life is and how he understands her pain. Eventually Pullman breaks protocol and enters the cube, and, well, I doubt anyone will ever watch this, but nevertheless:
SpoilerShow
Pullman approaches the woman, who looks at him first with understanding, and then hunger as she takes a giant bite out of his throat. The whole pioneer family then joins in, ripping Pullman to shreds as they feast on his body. The grandfather reads some words out of his book and the magic cube disappears from the view of the military.
Now that I’ve typed that out and read it, I realize this actually sounds awesome. But in reality it makes no sense and sucks. Trust me. Or don’t, whatever, it’s only like 20 minutes long, go for it, I don’t care.

Night Visions: If a Tree Falls… (Po-Chih Leong 2001)

A trio of teenagers crash their car into a lake and somehow survive even though they saw their own bodies drown. They reason that through a fluke, because no one saw them die, they didn’t (ala the titular saying). Unfortunately, one of the members is deeply Christian and struggles with whether or not it was God’s will for him to die. There are way, way too many ideas presented in this segment to give them justice. But it’s too bad, because I could see this being a full-length movie with lots of fun set pieces. Take for instance the revelation that the kids’ theory is correct, but it’s fluid. So if someone believes they died, they find themselves back in the bodies of their corpses in the lake; but if they stop believing, they re-materialize. And the introspection of the Christian member and his struggle and ultimate ironic actions could easily be exploited more for drama and suspense. I will say that I don’t think I’ve ever watched an anthology horror episode and thought “This should be four times longer,” but here we are. I guess that’s a recommendation?

Night Visions: the Occupant (Joe Dante 2001)

In one of her last roles, Bridget Fonda is a recent divorcee who becomes convinced someone else is living in her house. There is absolutely nothing talents like Fonda and Dante can do in the face of a set up that must resolve itself by either Fonda’s character being a ghost or being crazy, both lousy options. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say flip a coin.

Night Visions: Quiet Please (Joe Dante 2001)

Cary Elwes tries to escape the noisiness of day-to-day city life by going camping for the weekend. Unfortunately Brian Dennehy’s grizzled and obnoxiously loud fellow camper won’t stop pestering Elwes day and night. If that wasn't bad enough, Dennehy eventually starts creepily bringing up inside information about an active serial killer... It’s not hard to see where this one is going, but unlike Dante’s other entry in this series, he has fun with the premise and makes the inevitability of the ending feel organic and the means to a satisfying payoff. The most successful of the four segments I saw from this show at being a compact, coherent, and enjoyable anthology horror entry. Recommended.

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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#1475 Post by Feego » Sun Oct 14, 2018 1:54 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Sun Oct 14, 2018 3:22 am

Doctors Jekyll and Misters Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian 1932 / Victor Fleming 1941)

A Victorian doctor seeks to prove his theory on the duality of man by isolating the evil tendencies into their own entity in this pair of Hollywood adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel. I’ve not read the book, and frankly doubt I ever will based on these two movies, so I’m not sure how much of this is in the source material, but while it’s unsurprising that the post-Code version completely discards the sexual frustration motivations that obviously drive Jekyll in the first film, the second movie replaces it with nothing, a void noticeable even more when watching them back to back. The entire point of the doctor’s encounter with the prostitute (or bar wench in the later film) and the prolonged engagement is to show that this character is unable to properly deal with his repressed urges and must give himself an “out.” In many ways this would be better accomplished without makeup at all, as the symbolic meaning would bear out and indeed support there being no real physical transformation at all, but an internal freeing of the id free of sexual mores. It’s also more than a little disturbing that once freed of the oppression of society, man reverts to abject deviancy and hatred towards women, with Mr Hyde terrorizing and savagely whipping the sexual object in both films. That said, I found these ideas more interesting in theory than in practice in either film. Mamoulian dabbles quite a bit in some experimental camera choices that were more at home in silent cinema (though the initial transformation scenes are astonishing), but Fleming’s film plays it far safer and more blandly (though credit where it’s due, the second movie inexplicably has the most offensively vulgar image of either film: Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner nude and in the straps of a carriage getting horsewhipped by Spencer Tracy— how the hell did that make it in??). Bergman at first seems miscast as the whore in the second film, but once we see this movie ramps up her victimhood, it makes more sense. Neither of these adaptations worked for me, but at least the first one had some ideas and failed nobly. The second is just a typical studio product drained of whatever nascent interest was in the story to begin with.
I have read the book, and most of what is included in these two versions (and indeed most film and stage adaptations) does not come from Robert Louis Stevenson's novella. His original story is actually told from the perspective of Dr. Jekyll's friend, who is trying to figure out why Jekyll disappears for long periods of time and figure out the identity of this bizarre stranger known only as Hyde. The fact that they are the same person is a twist only revealed toward the end. I don't know if there has ever been a film that took this approach rather than showing the audience that Jekyll and Hyde are one and the same from the get-go. There are no major female characters in the book, so the dichotomy of the virgin and whore are new (but not original, as I believe they were featured in early stage adaptations and definitely in the 1920 John Barrymore film). One interesting aspect is that Hyde in the book does not initially appear physically grotesque but seems to just have an evil aura about him. Witnesses say he looks deformed, but they can't figure out just why, only that he looks evil. Over time, he does become physically more and more ape-like, even shrinking in size so that his clothes comically hang from him. The Fleming movie sort of attempts this by not making Tracy look remarkably different at first, unlike the Mamoulian film where March immediately transforms into a simian creature.

I'll admit that the original novella does't do much for me, but my favorite film version is the Hammer production The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll, which utilizes a bit of Dorian Gray by having Hyde be the more handsome one while Jekyll becomes more and more haggard as Hyde's vile acts rack up.

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