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

Would sort of be happy, tho, to not see any more horror movies set against the backdrop of mortgage crisis.

watched sleep tight (from the director of rec) over the weekend - really good! even tho the plot seems a bit played out

xpost Have their been a lot? I thought Vegas was perfect because not only is it nightlife-centric and full of transient workers, but it's also a housing crisis epicenter!

Cabin in the Woods still on multiple viewings

yeah agreed, in particular i liked the fast shift in tone from sleazy charmer to unstoppable force of destruction once he isnt invited into the house

watching it now. This aspect is good, but aside from Colin, the film seems directed by a robot (the teal and orange color grading and muttermutter-BOOM sound mixing doesn't help either). A better lead (not that "Mom, girlfriend, I'm sorry I'm a dick but you have to do what I say without asking me to give a sentence of explanation!" is an easy role to play) and a better director and this could have been classic.

ok the irony of a movie written by a former Buffy showrunner ending with a rote "charmless finally can relax and fuck his long-suffering girlfriend" was just compounded by the decision to put a country version of "99 Problems" over the credits (and when was the last time a decent movie ended with random shots from the movie over the credits?).

seriously, i can't think of a time where there were clips from the movie over the closing credits and I was grateful for the memories of 30 minute past

saw the new fright night a while ago. it's effective and smart, and colin farrell is great in it, but i thought it lacked personality. the original succeeds not because it's a "good movie", but because it's clever, affectionate, buried in period drag and deeply weird. i love the way it stretches and eroticizes certain moments (especially the dance seduction, which makes sense, but also ed's death, which is just bizarre), causing them to pop out from the rest of the movie like windows into a much stranger world. it really seems to care about its characters and about nerdy horror fandom, where the remake seems distinctly embarrassed by such enthusiasms.

and though i like david tennant, his character was all but useless here, and we never really understood why the protagonist would seek his help

we never understood why the protagonist did anything

That's what I meant about it being smarter and stupider than the original. Pros include the vamp played by Colin, not as a yuppie but as a work-by-night bro. Also, setting a vampire fight in a gallery full of anti-vampire tools. But the rest is pretty half-assed. Like, the Ed character, he knows Jerry is a vampire from minute one, but why would he even suspect? And then I like the fact that his mom and girlfriend both find out the truth midmovie in the most overt manner possible, Jerry's psycho freakout, but then what? What happens to the mom? Is she just lying in the hospital? Girlfriend should have stayed there, too. If you have to have faith to use a crucifix, does that mean a crucifix just plastered on the wall does no good? How did David Tennant know anything about this particular breed of vampire? Etc. And the last few beats of the movie are terrible. If ever a flick needed a fake-out second ending it was this one.

Anyway, like I said, feels like it was missing a few pages of script somewhere, like a reel got misplaced.

what are 2012's picks?

im interested in that too! i mean obv cabin in the woods but what else

sadly, i got nothing. its been a dry year so far, at least wrt anything i have seen

I'll let you know once I get my hands on some Fantasia screeners

yeah, i ain't got nothing neither. i've talked about most everything i've seen recently, and it's all been older stuff. hal jam mentioned quite a few newish films elsewhere, but i'm not sure how many were actually 2012 releases.

anyone seen lovely molly or the innkeepers?

lovely molly - no; innkeepers i wasnt feelin

I think ti west is crap, so I have not done the innkeepers. Yet.

I want to like Ti West 'cause he seems like an intelligent guy, and I respect that he's trying to do genuinely different things with the medium, but I didn't care for HOTD and strongly disliked Innkeepers.

sleep tight which i mentioned up above is apparently getting a US release later this year, so i'd put that on the list

has anybody heard of "shock labyrinth"? it's on instant watch and seemed possibly interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHomW7otjr0

'Ju-On' and 'The Grudge' series director Takashi Shimizu sets his latest horror outing in a Mount Fuji amusement park that bears a striking resemblance to Japan's real Fuji-Q High Land and "the world's longest horror house walk-through" located there.

the only reviews i can find seem to be "eh."

saw the new fright night a while ago.

Completely forgot that Tennant was in it. Should see it again if only for him. But apart from that I had a really great time watching it I thought Colin F was ACE in it.

Can anyone recommend similar style films? I really enjoy horror (hah, didn't even think it was scary at all) like this.

Watched The Caller last night. It's a creepy premise, and maintains a spooky aura, but there's a lot "no, really, you're not <doing x>" moments and wastes Luis Guzman. (I would say it wastes Bill from True Blood but he doesn't really have charisma or presence anyway.)

made it about 10 minutes into shock labyrinth and gave up - huge fan of that director but it looked like it was going to be a horrendous misstep. also from what i can tell its mostly a film meant to show off 3D tech, and it really really shows.

okay, will pass.
i just got a membership to IFC Center, can anyone rep for this?
http://www.ifccenter.com/films/the-pact/

I really liked The Innkeepers. Dug the vibe and characters. There's something about Ti West that's refreshing without trying to knock us out about how refreshing he's being. On the other hand, though, there's a little oomph missing from his movies. I keep feeling like he's close to making something really significant but it might still be several films into the future.

the missing oomph thing gets at my reservations, though i haven't seen the innkeepers. so far, he seems to generate good instincts and ideas, but rather dull movies.

watched don't be afraid of the dark the other night. was okay, very well-mounted, but sort of flat. one of the only times i've thought that a horror film really, really should have been shooting for PG-13, that it was harmed by its unwillingness to be a "family movie". a bit more cartoonish zip and a bit less grue, and it could have been a halloween classic.

i guess i mean that it could have taken a few cues from gremlins. loved the production design and the kid lead was pretty great. story wasn't much, though.

I missed this last week @ Japan Society, figured y'all shd know about it.

http://www.pajiba.com/trade_news/trailer-zombie-ass-the-toilet-of-the-dead-yes-that-is-the-actual-title-not-a-metaphor-for-an-adam-sandler-film.php

this is playing locally as a midnight film; anybody wanna rep for it?
http://www.ritesofspringmovie.com/

Search says nobody here has been discussing Berberian Sound Studio but I figure the title might not give away that it's a new horror film. Looks good to me.

Ok so I just watched "The Oregonian" last night (netflix streaming fyi) and its def low budget and makes some mistakes but overall i thought it was really really impressive and effective, including some actual physical goosebump/chill moments. riyl: non-narrative, creepy, lynch filtered through dirtbag vibe. its def as much an art film thing as a horror really, some tschevverasky (sp?) in there as well. totally worth it. unless you hate it in which case whoops.

yeah it was definitely effective. I didn't completely LIKE the effect it made on me, but it def made it.

Man, "Rubber" was terrible, and terribly smug.

Absentia's quite good. Simple and effective.

i really liked 'absentia'.

anybody interested in apparition?

so the hobbit version of maniac is out, uh, somewhere. maybe in limited release or overseas. or so i hear. anyone seen it?

so, Kill List? quite effective imo - & [SPOILER] I loved the unexpected third act to homage to 70s Brit pastoral horror.

kill list was one of the few memorable ones i have seen in recent times . V/H/S would be another. it is a short story wrapping a bunch of other short stories, implying they all happen within the same "universe". it would be cool if they made a tv series out of it.

Watched McKee's The Woman. There's something really 1990s about the insertion of the emotional singer-songwriter music over key scenes that either makes me think that 1) McKee is playing with us in an interesting way, or 2) is just tuck in the 90s, which I think is an actual possibility. He's certainly done this before.

Also the guy who played the dad was great. Pretty good ending, too.

emil.y, i think it was Simon H on another thread who also called Berberian Sound Studio a horror film - can I ask what makes you think that it is? Based on Peter Strickland's previous movie, and on a feature in the current Sight and Sound, I don't think it's a genre film as such (ie i get the impression it's about psychological collapse rather than supernatural threat) , although not having seen it, I could be wrong.

I wish all these horror movies were just released immediately to Netflix streaming, because that's where they need to be.

ie i get the impression it's about psychological collapse rather than supernatural threat

So, err, you don't think Repulsion is a horror film?

I mean, okay, the reasons I think it is a horror film: it premieres at FrightFest, a horror film festival; it has been reviewed as a horror film by every publication; the themes are of psychological horror set in a giallo production (and you are missing a lot if you don't think psychological horror is 'really horror'); the director thinks it's a horror film; the sole imdb genre tag is 'horror'.

I'll actually see it on Saturday so I can tell you if I suddenly have a revelation that it isn't one, but I'm fairly sure I won't.

Watched McKee's The Woman. There's something really 1990s about the insertion of the emotional singer-songwriter music over key scenes that either makes me think that 1) McKee is playing with us in an interesting way, or 2) is just tuck in the 90s, which I think is an actual possibility. He's certainly done this before.

Also the guy who played the dad was great. Pretty good ending, too.

― The Thnig, Wednesday, August 29, 2012 7:30 AM (2 hours ago)

liked the movie, but thought that the soundtrack was badly misjudged. almost certainly the result of being a bit too attached to 90s/early 00s indie film sensibilities. that said, the power-pop goofiness did soften the blow in a way that i appreciated. if the soundtrack had been all glowery and "intense", i probably would have found the film a good deal more repulsive.

Watched and enjoyed Ti West's The Innkeepers last night. Not great, but it rewards the patience it demands. It's similar to The House of the Devil in that it spends way too much time on the slow-paced development of uninteresting characters, but by time spooky stuff started going down, around the halfway point, I was hooked. It's vanishingly slight, and the ending is a bit anticlimactic, but I was genuinely unnerved for most of the last half hour. Also appreciated West's willingness to leave his audience with more questions than answers. Otoh, it's all but done in by the casting. The lead actress is clearly supposed to be cute as a button, and she is, but she's also terribly one-dimensional and unconvincing.