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

Xan Cassavetes' Kiss of the Damned is too competently directed to be a tribute to Franco, but the Rollin-isms are pronounced and likely intentional. better than Irinia, though not much less derivative. i did like KOTD quite a bit.

i finally saw insidious the other day. i was surprised how much i enjoyed it. between that & the conjuring, james wan is getting better & better at bringing on the oldhouse creeps

insidious 2 was a bit odd though. kinda collapsed in on itself with all the backstory, kinda sloppy

but i have such a big soft spot for whannell & wan together. i even dug the first Saw movie before it got beaten like a dead horse

Insidious seemed so promising at the start but with that scary lady in the darkness and the creepy music but it just taken all the worst things about Poltergeist and amplified them. Conjuring went even further to an infuriating degree.

Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears is like a homage to giallo based on an oral description of giallo surmised by a screening of a giallo parody. Expertly silly.

I've heard that Evil Dead 4 might be made as a tv series. Nightbreed tv series is also a possibility.

Just saw trailer to a Dracula origin story that doesn't look great but what made the strongest impression is a bad cover of Tears For Fears "Everbody Wants To Rule The World" that tries to make the song dark and edgy.

Lorde?

I've no clue. I don't know what they sound like.

Lorde

lol, i dialed that up on youtube to see what you're talking about and hooboy it's overwrought

I do feel they need to do something different next time, though. As beautiful as Amer and SCOYBT are, it's not something they can get away with repeating endlessly.

― Wristy Hurlington (ShariVari), Thursday, July 10, 2014 12:13 AM (3 weeks ago)

a tiny trace of amer's magic dissipated when i watched the filmmakers' earlier short films (included on the DVD release). crude little candy-colored retro fetish exercises about observation, leather gloves, female flesh, penetrative knives, etc. all of which is still present in amer but given a much broader and more interesting/challenging context. not sure how far they can go on "i am fascinated by the texture & trappings of this one particular pop genre," but it seems to be working so far...

Yeah, I loved all their stuff so far but the danger is looming. I thought the screwdriver scene in one of the short films felt a bit too much for their style though.

has anyone else seen argento's dracula 3d. it's really cheap looking. this happens in it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssE_6DmL_dk

Stage Fright is fairly entertaining. The first half an hour is substantially better than the rest and it suffers from the traditional horror-comedy complaint of not being tense or funny enough to fit into either genre well but it's likeable.

Also saw Mr Jones which wastes a moderately intriguing premise.

watched Oculus yesterday

it's interesting, but there is a lot of visual/atmospheric sleight of hand distracting you from the fact that the story is very halfassed

it gets kinda neat in the middle & goes crazy with timeline shifts, vaguely kinda sorta lynchian in places. better than expected.

awful lot of plate eating, mouths full of blood & teeth falling out. and choking. lots of choking.

side note: the dad is stonerdude Slater from Dazed & Confused :D

Hey just in case found footage shit doesn't make you want to bang your head against the wall yet, 2 new flicks streaming on NF. "Alien Abduction" (which has got to be in the running for worst marketing and branding department this year) is a pretty effectively creep out tension pounder, certainly dumb in spots but man when it works it really works, and they actually wring out a few new and effective tricks i havent seen before.

"The Conspiracy" on the other hand is way slower and tenser, milking a great burn up to the end, way better than expected - more thriller than horror maybe but the piling of anticipation and dread is very well done. Dark hand behind the curtain secret society creeper shit here, but it works.

Proxy is up today. Will probably watch that over the next few days.

The Conspiracy was definitely watchable.

wait where is proxy streaming? not turning up on instantwatcher

I'm watching it on US Netflix now.

http://us.whatsnewonnetflix.com

hmm maybe instantwatcher is going on the retirement list, lots of stuff has been sorta slipping through the cracks there as of late

The first half of Proxy is excellent - like the chilly Hitchcockian thrillers you used to get loads of coming out of France in the eighties and nineties. The second hour is pretty by-numbers.

I think once Netflix hid its expiration dates, instantwatcher lost its sense of purpose.

Speaking of Netflix, anyone watch The Reef, the Australian shark movie? People seem to like it OK.

I found it very drawn out and uninteresting.

that is a perfect review of Proxy, too.

The realistic or semi-realistic shark horror film never really seems that promising to me, even though sharks are cool. All the Jaws films blend together in my memory, I'm not huge on them. I haven't seen Open Water, from the trailers it seemed very similar to Bruce Jones & Richard Corben's short comic "In Deep", which is amazing but I doubt that kind of story would be at feature length.

Open Water was great -- at least it was in the theater, where the blackness/sound made it feel pretty suffocating. I saw Open Water 2 (a totally unrelated film) on a plane and actually liked it, which says a lot, cuz it's pretty hard to like anything on a plane.

Black Water is very solid crocodile horror film. Recommended.

Open Water is the slow, based-on-a-true-story one with the abandoned scuba divers, right? That was great. But I keep getting it confused with things like Deep Blue Sea or Dark Water or Sharknado.

You are correct.

Open Water was great. The Reef, while well acted, was a slog.

"All Cheerleaders Die" isn't just the worst Lucky McKee, it might be the worst horror film I've seen this year. Fucking horrendous, I'll be mad about this for a while.

yeah, it's bad. watched it the other day and wanted to post something here, but i've been dragging my heels lately, no good reason:

Another in a string of disappointments from Lucky McKee, and arguably his first complete failure. Where his previous films have stuck with fairly serious horror, this one tries a different approach, blending snarky high school comedy with dark fantasy and supernatural horror. Heathers and Mean Girls are obvious touchstones, but All Cheerleaders Die lands closest to 2009's justly-maligned Jennfer's Body. McKee and his writing/directing partner Chris Sivertson show no flair for or insight into the adolescent milieux. They simply run stock character types through a series of absurd happenings, spiking the familiar teen melodrama with goofy magical claptrap and a few jolts of tepid mahem. In the manner of McKee's more successful past efforts, All Cheerleaders maintains a strong feminist perspective and attempts to build a compellingly conflicted complex central character. Those elements do add some interest to the proceedings, but they can't salvage the misbegotten whole. The comedy isn't funny, and the horror never bites. The film's tonal inconsistencies may be 100% intentional, but regardless of what the McKee and Sivertson intended, the end result is more irritating than involving.

though i liked the woods and the woman, i say "string of diappointments" because may still towers over everything he's done since. the trend has been southerly since.

I'm still most impressed by the woods and red, but I still hated this more than I can explain. So basically no matter which of his films you enjoy, you will hate this movie.

So thankful for this thread, because I had "All Cheerleaders Must Die" ready to go for a while, with the weird understanding that it was supposed to be good (despite a scan of some reviews which basically said, um, no it's not)). Obviously, as we've determined again and again, horror can be pretty divisive, and there are some really problematic movies that are worth seeing, and prestige movies worth skipping. But the animosity toward this one is pretty convincing.

What happened to the dude who made "Absentia?"

He made Oculus and has another one coming soon.

More specifically, apparently he's adapting Gerald's Game.

ugh. really?

I saw Jug Face over the weekend. Some good performances and generally strong direction, but really, I demand more when the entire film hinges on the worship of a malevolent hole in the ground. Bringing in a cheap looking ghost to deliver exposition and fill narrative gaps didn't help.

I liked Jug Face a lot for what it did do well, but am under no illusions about its overall cohesion.

INSIDE

Nasty as fuck to be sure and very suspenseful. Dalle made a striking villain. Good soundtrack.
BUT, just like Livid, the cgi really hurt it in a way that easily could have been avoided. The injuries the characters sustain makes their subsequent actions harder to believe.

Yes it was an extreme experience but I don't understand the praise placing it as a modern horror classic. I'd only recommend this to fans of miserable violent ordeals. I didn't get much out of it.

"miserable violent ordeal" is a viable niche these days, so..

...and speaking of, I just watched You're Next, a home invasion thriller from director Adam Wingard. Though I'm not typically a big fan of the subgenre, I enjoyed this quite a bit. It's slick, fast moving, and nasty enough to sting without ever sinking into the pitiless sadism that so often comes with the territory. The plot is as simple as could be. A wealthy family gathered in a labyrinthine mansion get booglerized by a pack of masked marauders. Throw in a bit of upper crust sibling rivalry for color, and we're off to the blood-spattered races. Developments I won't spoil here do complicate that scenario a bit, but the basic dramatic engine remains unchanged: hooligans hool, and our plucky heroine chops back, hard.

The Straw Dogs-style home invasion thriller has become a tired cliche in recent years, and some may fault You're Next for playing things so resolutely straight. Wingard and writer Simon Barrett do nothing to expand or reinvent the genre. They even ditch the class conflict that stories of this sort so often rely on for a bit of thematic depth. Instead, they amp up the us-vs-us dynamics of the family unit in peril, focusing as much on characters and relationships as they do on machetes and crossbow bolts. Which isn't to say that they slight the latter.

This is by no means a serious film. It's a crowd-pleaser, as they say, simple and ingratiating. It reminded me more of films like Scream and Deathtrap than the soul-scarring likes of Eden Lake and Funny Games. Unlike Lucky McKee, Wingard does a fine job balancing black comedy with full-blooded thrills, and manages to keep the tension at a nice, rolling boil pretty much all the way through. Not perfect by any means, and some of the fumbles are worse than others, but I had a genuinely good time with this one.

Wingard and writer Simon Barrett do nothing to expand or reinvent the genre

Well, I wouldn't exactly say they do nothing, as what little they do is no small part what makes this movie worthwhile and fun. I wish they had spent a few minutes on an ending, because the movie ... has no ending.

Strange Colour...is now up on UK Netflix.

Contenderizer says '"miserable violent ordeal" is a viable niche these days"

This makes it difficult for me selecting films. I had ignored Gaspar Noe for years because that's all I thought the films would be, but I found Enter The Void unexpectedly touching, so I'm hoping the earlier films will have some of that magic. I love harrowing films to be more profoundly emotional, like Watership Down and Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

When I see the previews for new horror films, another problem for me is that too many are about ordinary people.

Sometimes I wish the horror genre had a different name and it would be easier to avoid stuff I didn't like so much. "Weird" is gaining some ground, "Dark Fantasy" is quite problematic and already has associations with other genres.

imo it's the same with metal/heavy music
it'd be nice to have a better distinction but w/e

in both cases they keep trying to make "extreme" happen but then i just feel like an extra in a surge commercial which no thanks

Noe never bettered I Stand Alone imo.

I mean I'm up for pretty much any genre but there are only a handful of realistic horror films I really like. It can be a tad frustrating reading horror anthologies looking for supernatural weirdness but mostly getting murder/serial killer stories.

I wouldn't have thought heavy music and metal getting lumped together presented much of a problem. People map the genres so precisely that there is less chance of walking into the wrong room.

But there's always going to be stuff that is difficult to describe. I'm not sure I could call Martyrs a realistic horror film, and doing so might be a spoiler because in places it plays with your ideas of what is happening.

Sometimes I wish the horror genre had a different name and it would be easier to avoid stuff I didn't like so much. "Weird" is gaining some ground, "Dark Fantasy" is quite problematic and already has associations with other genres.

horror is an awfully big umbrella, especially nowadays. i prefer the weird and surreal to brutal extremities, and "dark fantasy" is fine by me, so long as it's closer to the company of wolves than twilight. because i'm particular, i find i have to do quite a bit of reading and listening to get a sense of what might be worth pursuing. which isn't to say i avoid stuff like the human centipede and martyrs, but at least i know in advance what i'm getting into.