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Post by guttersnipe on Oct 19, 2023 13:34:45 GMT -8
Also, I see we have the exact same ratings for both Halloween Kills and Evil Dead Rise. (Fractionally, that is - I use Letterboxd to rate movies, and they have everything on a five-star basis; my three stars for Evil Dead Rise translate to 6/10, etc.) I was genuinely surprised at how listless Halloween Kills felt considering how admirably DGG had revitalised the franchise beforehand. He'd somehow managed to rebestow respect on the dread epithet 'horror sequel' with a film full of genuine crunch, scares, motion and purpose... and then followed it up with some strictly routine business with unimpressive setpieces and a draggy subplot about taking back the night, in a way so convincing you feel like yelling "run, you're all going to get killed" at the screen. Disappointing to say the least.
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Post by guttersnipe on Oct 19, 2023 14:02:39 GMT -8
I was just talking about the Death Note movie with a friend. It was... not very popular. I'm starting to wonder whether Death Note was actually good, or if we just all thought the premise was kind of cool, in a morbid way (not unlike, e.g., The Purge). To a certain extent, I was pleasantly surprised. The detail that really caught me off-guard was how it moves at a hell of a speed; I had to check the runtime when I discovered that Light had discovered the Death Note, been visited by a demon, murdered somebody and confided this to a girl inside twenty-five minutes. The camerawork is consistently smooth with judicious use of Dutch angles, harness shots and montage, the soundtrack boasts a decent slew of goth and darkwave artists to underpin a sombre tone (to an essentially silly topic), and Willem Dafoe and Lakeith Stanfield acquit themselves in quite thankless and ostensibly daft roles. Were it not for the overt blandness of the the core YA romance that eats up a substantial portion of the dramatic angle of the film, I'd argue we were looking at an unsung minor victory in cyberpunk and neo-noir.
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Post by Jeremy on Oct 19, 2023 15:33:54 GMT -8
I was genuinely surprised at how listless Halloween Kills felt considering how admirably DGG had revitalised the franchise beforehand. He'd somehow managed to rebestow respect on the dread epithet 'horror sequel' with a film full of genuine crunch, scares, motion and purpose... and then followed it up with some strictly routine business with unimpressive setpieces and a draggy subplot about taking back the night, in a way so convincing you feel like yelling "run, you're all going to get killed" at the screen. Disappointing to say the least. The problem with Halloween Kills is that it's trying to simultaneously be a standard no-brain slasher flick and a profound piece of psychological horror. I like the idea of a horror film exploring the issues of paranoia and mob mentality*, but the whole film is such a mess of dumb horror tropes and heavy-handed themes ( "Evil dies tonight!") that it just winds up feeling very silly. In any case, I am now genuinely curious to hear your thoughts on Halloween Ends. That film is... polarizing, to say the least. *I assume the political underpinnings are intentional - the movie was originally set to be released two weeks before the 2020 election, before Covid pushed it off a full year.
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Post by Jeremy on Oct 20, 2023 12:10:58 GMT -8
Oh, speaking of David Gordon Green, I watched Bones and All last night, and he has a small role as one of the cannibals. This took me by surprise, until I remembered that DGG is now earning a reputation as someone who cannibalizes old horror franchises, so naturally it is fitting to cast him in a new (abstractly) horror film! Or something.
Anyway, I was not really a fan of the movie. It has its strengths - Taylor Russell is really good, Timothée Chalamet is all right, and features some gorgeous shots of the American Midwest. But the story runs on far too long, particularly given that the writing expects us to invest in a central relationship with such gruesome underpinnings.
Which brings me to the main problem - I found the film to be extremely tone-deaf, to the point that it undercut its own message. As the late '80s setting suggests, this film is trying to draw a metaphorical line between its cannibal protagonists and the gay outcasts during the AIDS crisis. Except... the metaphor doesn't actually work? Yes, I understand that a lot of young people felt (and still feel) repressed and alone due to who they love and how society shuns them for it, but... dude, the main characters in this movie literally kill and eat people. I'm sorry, but this is not the same thing - they are an actual threat to society and people have a right to fear them for it.
I had a similar problem while watching Pixar's Elemental a few weeks ago, which I generally quite enjoyed but which features an element-based world that it tries to use as a metaphor for mistrust of immigrants. And yes, some of the characters in that movie are clearly just straight-up bigots. But... people who are made of fire are kind of justified to fear people who are made of water. A water guy can potentially kill a fire guy just by sneezing on him! Am I making sense here?
Also, Mark Rylance was badly miscast in B&A; I couldn't take his character seriously for a minute. Anyway, rant over.
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Post by guttersnipe on Oct 20, 2023 15:14:58 GMT -8
25) Long Weekend (1978, Colin Eggleston) - 7/10
(Where did this idea come from that 1979's Mad Max put Aussie cinema on the map, when 1978 was an absolutely ripper year for it?)
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Post by guttersnipe on Oct 21, 2023 10:40:59 GMT -8
26) Slice (2018, Austin Vesely) - 4/10 27) Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (1959, William J. Hole Jr.) - 3/10
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Post by guttersnipe on Oct 23, 2023 1:39:58 GMT -8
28) The Bride and the Beast (1958, Adrian Weiss) - 4/10 29) Calling Dr. Death (1943, Reginald Le Borg) - 5/10
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Oct 23, 2023 15:18:44 GMT -8
26) Slice (2018, Austin Vesely) - 4/10 27) Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (1959, William J. Hole Jr.) - 3/10 Bill Hole Jr. is an incredible name for a director.
I've really been slacking on my spooky movie watching (or any movie watching!) - if I'm up late enough tomorrow I might catch TCM's broadcast of The Abominable Dr. Phibes. (What a plot description!)
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Post by guttersnipe on Oct 24, 2023 15:16:52 GMT -8
If my name was William Hole I'd probably think twice about inflicting that name upon anyone else, lest they become a dreadful film director or something.
30) Candyman (2021, Nia DaCosta) - 6/10 31) Multiple Maniacs (1970, John Waters) - 5/10
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Post by Jeremy on Oct 24, 2023 18:18:25 GMT -8
I think this might be the first year I complete the challenge. Been working at the rate of ~1 horror film a day, and it's been going well so far. (Last year I petered out after 18.)
I watched Rosemary's Baby last night; it's tense and well-acted, though I did find it quite draggy in the middle, and the ending felt kind of flat. I don't know if this makes sense, but films from the late 1960s seem to occupy a weird "uncanny valley" for me - they have many of the technical hallmarks of an "old" Hollywood picture, but a lot of them deal with taboos that would have been verboten in the early days. Needless to say, there was some of that on display in Rosemary's Baby (I skipped over that one scene, but got the basic gist of it).
I've seen some pretty good horror movies this month - Sleepy Hollow and [REC] are probably my favorites - but nothing's really blown me away yet. Hoping to come across at least one flick that truly hooks me.
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Post by guttersnipe on Oct 25, 2023 15:03:27 GMT -8
32) The Brain Eaters (1958, Bruno VeSota) - 5/10 33) House of the Black Death (1971, Jerry Warren, Reginald Le Borg and Harold Daniels) - 4/10
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Post by guttersnipe on Oct 25, 2023 15:09:43 GMT -8
I watched Rosemary's Baby last night; it's tense and well-acted, though I did find it quite draggy in the middle, and the ending felt kind of flat. I don't know if this makes sense, but films from the late 1960s seem to occupy a weird "uncanny valley" for me - they have many of the technical hallmarks of an "old" Hollywood picture, but a lot of them deal with taboos that would have been verboten in the early days. Needless to say, there was some of that on display in Rosemary's Baby (I skipped over that one scene, but got the basic gist of it). The last "critical" statement I remember reading on Rosemary's Baby was in a chapter of Quentin Tarantino's novelisation of his own Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (a superior work to the film itself), in which his author surrogate character extols on the virtues of some particularly choice camerawork in the film, citing it as a perfect example of how he deserved to be honoured as the greatest director of his time, which I found interesting as I'd never known QT to say much about Polanski beforehand. Having said that, when someone boasts an near-encyclopedic knowledge of cinema, it's understandable that they might not venture forth particular opinions on certain individuals given the sea of information surrounding them. Anyways, it's now over twenty years since I first watched it and it's still easily the best horror film I've ever seen.
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Post by Jeremy on Oct 25, 2023 16:28:16 GMT -8
Oh, I'd say definitely share your own thoughts on the film, regardless of perspective. Rosemary's Baby is an interesting case where I can see the film's influence on the subsequent decades of horror cinema (most notably in the past ten years, when elevated horror has grown mainstream) even as I don't really click with the film itself. I had a similar reaction to Vertigo a couple of years ago, where I didn't really love the film itself (certainly not as much as some other Hitchcock flicks), but I found it quite interesting to read up on others' perspectives of the film and why they love it.
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Post by guttersnipe on Oct 27, 2023 8:52:30 GMT -8
I'll see if I can drag the waters for the old conversion between unkinhead and I for a more 'eyes-afresh' perspective.
34) Day the World Ended (1955, Roger Corman) - 5/10 35) The Head (Die Nackte und der Satan) (1959, Victor Trivas) - 4/10
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Post by guttersnipe on Oct 28, 2023 0:28:39 GMT -8
36) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958, Gene Fowler Jr.) - 6/10
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