ok lets all shit our pants to something new: post 2005 horror film thread

Pretty sure it hasn't been released outside australia yet , but has anyone seen wolf creek 2 yet ? thought the first one was one of the better australian films of the last decade and while i imagine the second will be something of a rehash am still interested in seeing it.

undead thread

Finally saw The Conjuring yesterday and really enjoyed it. The second half was less impressive but the first was probably the best haunted-house stuff I've seen from Hollywood in a while.

Also looking forward to Strange Color Of Your Body's Tears, even though they clearly got stuck five sixths of the way through constructing a new film title from old Edwige Fenech movies.

seriously. why not All the Bloody Keys of the Nude Dolls?

The Photogenic Nun and the Phantom Tigers?

Does anyone keep up with martial arts films? I'm just curious if anything good in the last 10 years has came out in the vein of Chinese Ghost Story, Boxer's Omen, Spooky Encounters, Zu Warriors From The Magic Mountain, Spooky Bunch and Mr Vampire. I think Chinese Ghost Story was remade recently but it didnt look very interesting and reviews didnt seem encouraging.

I read a book about this subgenre a few years ago (I think it was called Spooky Encounters too) and it seems these films died out apart from the occasional hopping vampire film.

Amer was so good and despite its clear influences pretty singular, the trailer for The Thingy Whatsit Of The Crying Corpse or something looks pretty great. I'll say 'further developing a distinctive visual cinematic language' rather than 'looks similar and the last one was good' 'cause I'm looking forward to it.

Juno Mak's RIGOR MORTIS (2013). it's an update of the Mr. Vampire films and even features some of the actors from that series. I haven't watched it yet - waiting for the forthcoming release of the director's cut on BD - but it looks very promising.

the other modern fantasy wuxia have tended to overrule in chintzy CGI to the point of distraction. Even Tsui Hark's films haven't been immune from this blight.

Over-indulge, not overrule. Stupid autocorrect.

I think what I see of hong kong films in general shows bloated shiny Hollywood epic disease. The humour of the older films seems to have vanished.
Apparently Hark complains about the Hollywoodization but some people blame him for it. I saw Green Snake recently and it bored me quite a bit despite some lovely visuals. After watching several wire-fu films with people who aren't great martial artists, you get the feeling you are often watching mostly people jumping very high towards/above the camera or being knocked away from the camera.

I don't know much about the political state of Hong Kong but I've heard they are suffering a bit from being with mainland China (it was only after I read that book that I realised many of the Hong Kong superstars tried to be make it big in America in the late 90s, with varying degrees of success). I wonder how much this affects the film industry there. I've seen clips of their modern tv dramas and they look like really lovely wuxia epics without any(?)martial arts.

Also heard there are still good screwed up films in Catergory III coming out(things like Untold Story, Red To Kill, Ebola Syndrome).

Dream Home!

I saw a trailer today for Rigor Mortis, something like a Chinese vampire movie (though tbh I couldn't quite follow everything in the trailer)...looks kinda promising?

yes, a true goeng-si movie. and the credentials are good. i'm very excited.

Dream home is fucking fantastic

I think Dream Home is one of the ones I heard about recently. I'll put it on the checklist.

The trailer and reviews for Rigor Mortis don't look promising to me. Looks like there might be too much cgi again. They say the film has a dedication to two of the dead stars of Mr Vampire and has several actors from it but if this really is supposed to be a tribute, why take out the slapstick (cant remember if the trailer had any martial arts either)?
To be honest, I don't think Mr Vampire is as good as a lot of those other supernatural martial arts films. It's really weird that the prank vampire at the start looks totally convincing but the real vampire at the end looks as if he is supposed to be fake, like some guy just wearing a mask. One of the laziest makeup jobs I've ever seen, I wonder I they were on so tight a dealine and had no eye makeup to make it look less like a mask.

Mr. Vampire is one of my favorite movies, so i think i might disagree with you there.

Could you wax lyrical about it for me? I'm interested.

I always thought Spooky Encounters was much better. The movements/choreography of the vampire/corpse are amazing. It has one of the best laugh out loud endings I've ever seen. I just wish it had more horror stuff and didn't go for the long magic battle. I think the start of both Spooky Encounters and Mr Vampire promise more horror than they end up delivering. The chandelier scene at the start of Spooky Encounters 2 is classic.

The Mr. Vampire, Spooky Encounters, and ACGS series are blessedly true to their own cultural roots, and it's strange to me that you expect these movies to deliver Western-style horror. There's no shortage of HK films that draw/crib from the Western horror-film canon. The best of them are able to infuse a distinctly Eastern sensibility (The Imp, Bewitched/The Boxer's Omen, Hex, Killer Snakes, Devil Fetus, Seeding of a Ghost- to name a few favorites) that keeps them from being merely derivative. So why not just enjoy the purity of these series?

Admittedly, the most entertaining IMO HK movies come from the random collision of Eastern mysticism and mimicry of Western blockbusters. Like the Terminator-styled precinct rampage in Evil Cat, and the HK-styled retelling of The Witches of Eastwick in An Erotic Ghost Story.

I'm not complaining about eastern or western styles of horror. Mr Vampire and Spooky Encounters both get less and less dark at the showdown even if they are still supernatural, regardless of regional styles. They lose the macabre edge of the end. The openings of both films seem to suggest more macabre spookery than is delivered for the remaining time.

Boxers Omen and Devil Fetus both have macabre showdowns.

I haven't seen Devil Fetus yet(I seen youtube clips) and few of those others. Never heard of Hex.

I read a lot about Hong Kong films stealing music from western films and parodying parts of other famous films.

I am giving In Fear a shot tonight, a low budget British horror movie that has garnered rave reviews. It looks very promising from the reviews and has a 100% rotten tomato rating for what that is worth.

Finally watched Monsters on Netflix and can't believe anyone enjoyed that POS melodrama.

Ty damo suzuki's parrot - saw trailers for In Fear just before Xmas but since forgot what it was called and have been fruitlessly googling 'British horror 2013' or variations thereof for the past couple of weeks. Report back pls!

It isn't very good I'm afraid, they run out of ideas after the first 40 minutes and as much as they pile on the creepy atmospherics it isn't very scary or convincing, even if it was a film student effort I would consider it below par. That Scottish kid from Agents Of Shield is in it.

the problem with "monsters" is a surprising lack of uh monsters

^^^ this

Well there's that, but there's

- Starting your movie with three screens of text that have to do all the setup. Some movies can do this, some can't, this one should've found a way to cover the infodump in dialogue. It seems too much like setting up an improv class scene: "Here's your scenario - there's a crashed space probe that brought aliens from space to the US/Mexico border region, and GO."

- Having one of those screens of text have a grammatical error. ("US and Mexican military" instead of "militaries.")

- Lead actor was a charisma vacuum on a level with the guy in Birdemic.

- Lead actress has giant rock on finger, doesn't want to get on phone with fiance, WILL SHE STILL BE ENGAGED AT END OF MOVIE WHO KNOWS AM I RIGHT?

- Charisma vacuum hits incessantly on his employer's daughter, who he knows is engaged, can't get invited into her hotel room, goes out drinking all night. Cut to charisma vacuum waking up in bed next to a woman whose face we can't see -- IS IT LEAD ACTRESS? IT ISN'T! BET YOU DIDN'T SEE THAT SHYAMALAN TWIST COMING!!!

- "A photo of a child killed by an alien gets me $50,000. [ed.- shyeah, RIGHT.] A photo of a happy child gets me nothing." WILL HE BE FORCED TO CONFRONT HIS WARPED VALUE SYSTEM? WHO KNOWS, STAY TUNED!!!

Just ham-handed nonsense in nearly every scene. The only thing I liked was the official at the ferry dock who was all "Sucks to be you, that'll be $5,000 please."

huh I guess I liked its melodrama over most movies', let alone horror movies' (which Monsters, ironically, is not) total lack o' drama.

the monsters were the best thing about the movie hence my annoyance that they were barely in it

they could have at least eaten skip la doo or whatever that actor's name is to make up for all that wandering around

Has that movie gotten the Rifftrax treatment yet? It nearly outdoes Manos for aimless wandering. (THRILL TO THE OUTBOARD MOTOR REPAIR SCENE!)

i dont really get how you can feel like a genre based on people avoiding getting killed is generally drama free.

I dunno, I love horror, but "who will survive?" isn't enough to hold my attention in more than the most rote way. Start throwing "how" and "why" in there and yeah, things get more interesting. But how and why is not always horror's strongest suit (or point).

Man, there's a bit in the new Liam Neeson movie where the bad guy, after the massively implausible/impossible scheme is revealed, declares "it was easy!" My wife and I had a blast with that line, like the filmmakers just did not give a fuck about the "how" part.

lol phil otm, definitely had manos-levels of aimlessness

Oh, come on now.

sorry dude but that shit was BOOOOOOOOORING

and pointless

I ain't afraid of no boring.

it felt really mumblecore iirc

yeah

Dream home is fucking fantastic

― Corpsepaint Counterpaint (jjjusten), Thursday, February 27, 2014 7:51 PM (5 days ago)

just finally got around to watching the american remake of shutter and wow, i think it takes the title for worst remake i have ever ever seen

Maybe if The Fog didn't exist.

Just watched In Fear, not bad at all!

How do you defend the last hour of that movie Chap? It is terrible.

What after matey turns up in the back seat? The tension definitely drops after that point, but it remains unsettling. I thought his performance was great. I like how it's not really explained fully what's going on.

Come off it, the back seat guy is a dreadfully conceived villian and as for the finale .. oh words cannot express how shit that is.

Agree to disagree. Wasn't mad keen on the denouement, everything up to that point was fine.

Children of Sorrow. Slow-burn found-footage autopsy of a desert death cult that coceals a character study of pure evil. Didn't love it, and was frustrated by how often the simple story loses focus, but i think it's still well worth seeing for Bill Oberst, Jr.'s ferocious star turn as the cult leader. Should be interesting to compare this one, the work of new director Jourdan McCloure, with Ti West's forthcoming FF Jonestown riff, The Sacrament.

I have heard almost nothing good about The Sacrament.