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

My wife is out of town til Thursday so I'm gonna binge on horror flix this wkend. Any netflix watch-instantly suggestions appreciated.

(LOL jjj posted the exact same thing upthread several weeks ago)

the only 2 things i can think of off the top of my head that i know are on netflix on demand are "Shrooms" and "The Signal"

OH SHIT and Deadgirl, if you haven't seen it.

Wow shrooms is good??? I didn't dare hope! Awesome.

Might do some of those shortish lovecraft thingies as well...

The Woods is up there as well, and is pretty great (guy who did MAY, but better imo)

and digs Miike

um, what

Already 2/3 through the Woods and will be finishing today. Right up my alley.

as is Severance, if you want a tiny bit of british humor in yer slasher flick. also "the new guy" if you want a tiny bit of stalker horror in your low-budget quirky office space style comedy.

you can pretty much skip 100% of the "masters of horror" series, every one of them ranges from slight letdown to fucking awful imo (if you fell compelled to try one, fair haired child is the best of them)

xposts.

oh no! Thx for the warning.

idk, i havent seen all of them so im probably a bit too harsh, but for the most part it seems to be a repository for half-assed ideas that the directors aren't all that committed to. i might be missing some gems tho i suppose.

Not totally qualified for this thread as it's a docu but damn I will see the f outta this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/movies/30cropsey.html?adxnnl=1&ref=movies&adxnnlx=1275145359-pAjU1jD6ODSppgC1jayJ6g

saw "house of the devil" the other night and it was totes shite. old-style horror movie which is ""authentically made"" at the sacrifice of having anything particularly ""scary or cool"" happen at any point - all the horror is packed into the last ten minutes and none of it is any cop so what's the point?

shame as the general premise was good. and then i watched "drag me to hell" and it was just aas much of a joy as the first time.

not so much horror, but check out machine girl if you havent already

that doc sounds AWESOME

I rate horror films by making my nephew and niece watch them and monitoring their reactions.
Paranormal activity, was particularly effective.

you can pretty much skip 100% of the "masters of horror" series, every one of them ranges from slight letdown to fucking awful imo (if you fell compelled to try one, fair haired child is the best of them)

i really enjoyed Pick Me Up (Fairuza Balk fending off a muttering Michael Moriarty!) and thought Cigarette Burns was fun, though none of the other cast-director-plot combos have inspired me to explore further.

though i just noticed The Screwfly Solution is on my queue, probably because it's joe dante directing elliott gould as a scientist trying to figure out why horny men have become homicidal killers. grand series title aside, i just want these to be decent Tales From The Crypt episodes.

miike's is worth seeing if you like miike i guess
zombie soldiers from dante was terrible but still kind of worth seeing

miike's imprint is awesome if you can get past billy drago's terrible overacting... it's an hour jampacked with jawdropping images, and there's something beautiful and sad about the last 20 minutes when the truth finally, uh, emerges

I've seen 3 or 4 other master of horror episodes and none of them comes close to imprint

Enjoyed "The Woods" so much that I watched the other Lucky Mckee movie on NF Watch Instantly, "Red". I guess this is the one Mckee got fired off of. Stone cold quality, would totally recommend. Not horror really, more a grim-ass honor & revenge tale, but based on a novel by horror author Jack Ketchum. Brian Cox is onscreen almost 100% of the movie, being awesome (he co-produced it-- maybe he loved the book?). Could totally imagine this as a late-period Clint vehicle.

Probs gonna go ahead and watch the other Jack Ketchum-derived flick, "The Girl Next Door". Any comments on that?

Also the narrative driver of the film is GODDAMN PUNK KIDS HURT MY DOG!!! which brings me on board 100% from the get-go.

I would not recommend The Girl Next Door, but I don't remember it well enough to really say anything about it other than it is bad.

been meaning to watch "the girl next door", reactions I've heard range from glorified TV movie to harrowing bleakfest.

got interested in seeing it after I read that ketchum's book was, in part, a response to mendal johnson's 70s cult novel let's go play at the adams. supposedly ketchum was so freaked out by the end of LGPATA he felt compelled to write his own version where justice is served.

Jon, check out May if you get a chance (though it's not on instant watch).

y'all will laugh but I am DLing the extended cut of The Wolf Man right now. Did not see the theatrical but got the idea that any chance it had of being dece was squashed by rampant recutting.

yr wife is out of town and you are dling the extended cut of the wolf man. dude.

I know, she wld probably watch it actually, I should just stick it on the hard drive till she comes back and continue on to the next trauma feast.

so yeah, it's time to cue up scrapbook

but first, 'Shrooms'. Ha wow the score is by Dario Marianelli! He's a high b-list composer, they musta had some budget for this.

'We are on a plane to go shrooming in Ireland'-- excellent, get right to the point.

i really loved the woods, talked about it a bit way upthread. and may's great, too. the girl next door, otoh, sounds too grueling.

most recent horror flick i've seen was andre aja's mirrors. started off with some promise, but fell apart quickly, and the last 1/2 hour is just ludicrous.

Shrooms was awesome. Played into one of my pet themes (malevolent fungus) and had A++ semi-deformed cretinous backwoods folk. Thanks for the rec, jjj!

Yeah that movie greatly exceeded my expectations, glad you liked it!

ok so out of nowhere movie that i loved - "Shallow Ground" (2004). what seems to be a creepy incoherent mess actually totally pulls it together by the end, although i get the feeling that there were some cuts for time constraints going on with some stuff towards the end. weird pace that works, def works that dread center in your brain effectively, a jump scare or two but not reliant on them. i dont even know where i found out about this (if its from this thread - hey thanx whoever), its been living in my queue for a while, but i really dug it. on netflix streaming btw, complete with a cover image that will make you think it has to suck, but it doesnt, i swear!

watched a couple of horror flicks last night. first up, saw guy james wan's dead silence. didn't much care for the saw series, but this thing is fucking great! retro gothic ghost story about a haunted ventriloquist's dummy. spooky, evocative and (for most of its running time) scary as hell. wall-to-wall haunted house jump scares, which are silly and get kinda old after a while, but still work like a charm. definitely one to watch with the lights off. not a lot of gore, but enough to keep you off balance, and i've always been a sucker for the haunted doll/dummy thing. movie's basically dumb as a box of rocks and makes no attempt to seem realistic at any level, but it looks fantastic, and is packed with subtle (and not-so-subtle) nods to other flicks: phantasm, the evil dead, suspiria, todd browning's dracula, etc. a perfect halloween popcorn flick, and on that level, at least as good as trick 'r treat.

next: the hills run red. meta-movie combo of the texas chainsaw massacre, blair witch, scream, rob zombie and eli roth. buncha movie geek kids go off into the backwoods, looking for a supposedly dead director of a long-lost and legendary horror movie, fatalities ensue. dialogue and characters are painfully dull, but the concept is at least half-cool, and the movie gets points for keeping the sleaze/gore meters pegged. again, lots of referentiality and borrowing, but it feels more uninspired here. secondhand elements feel less like nods to bava, fulci, TCM & brazil (?) than simple theft from the classics. i dunno, maybe i'm just annoyed by the director's failure to credit the obvious sources for his "ideas" in the commentary... bitching aside, it's a good time if you like lowbrow 70s/80s horror. plenty of special makeup & prosthetic mayhem, gallons of red corn syrup, a quick pace and a nasty sense of humor.

that was mostly bad CGI in tHRR, not red corn syrup. big mistake on Parker's part, IMHO.

that's true and not true. there are a few obvious and disappointing moments of cgi grue (the demonia ripoff tree scene, frinstance), but it's mostly just real/fake blood. thinking of the finger and head choppings, various stabbings, etc...

True, true. The CGI were just so distractingly shoddy in those few scenes.

Rhe only part of Dead Silence that wasn't boring was a joke by Donnie Wahlberg about dummies I probably could have lived without. Pretty much the least creepy thriller about ventriloquism I've ever seen.

A friend's wife asked about it and I cracked something like "yeah it's really scary if you're really scared of dummies" and unfortunately i spoke too drolly and she missed the sarcasm and rented it, later asking me how the hell I liked it.

I don't think I am at all interested, but philosophy of the knife is just out on instant watch netflix and i figured someone here would tell me just how atrocious it is.

Haha I just watched the first 30 minutes of that and decided to come over here and take a break! Timely.

Don't think Im up for it tonight tho, prob going to switch to candyman instead

Hardcore gorehounds I know speak of it hushed reverent tones tho, so I'm going to give it a shot soon and will report back.

ugh I'm reading a thread about philosophy of a knife on a horror movie board and why why why

Rhe only part of Dead Silence that wasn't boring was a joke by Donnie Wahlberg about dummies I probably could have lived without. Pretty much the least creepy thriller about ventriloquism I've ever seen.

― da croupier

watched two more tonight, both inspired by recent recs on this thread:

shrooms: seriously blue-rinsed psycho thriller about college kids tripping balls in ireland. decent cast and dialogue, nice tight suspense and action direction, but no real surprises. figured out what was going on shortly after the first kill, and that took some of the fun away. i was entertained throughout, but hardly blown away, and it's too serious-minded & realistic to ever be a personal favorite. i kinda want my horror to be more fantastical and eccentric.

shallow ground: man this was great! a thousand thanks to whoever recommended it. cover art's so bad i probably never would have picked it up otherwise. one of the most imaginative and ambitious horror flicks i've seen recently. it's delivered somewhat like a stephen king novel, with several storylines progressing side-by side at all times, each containing its own twists & mysteries. never went where i expected, and i can't think of anything to compare it to. for all that, it operates squarely within the genre, and has an intriguingly artless awkwardness that reminds me of romero, cohen and coscarelli. not terribly scary, but creepy enough, and with more good ideas than 10 ordinary horror flicks.

Glad you dug shallow ground!

"philosophy of a knife" is kind of amazing so far, but I can only handle it in bite sized pieces. It is kind of overpowering. Mostly archival footage so far, which means that things could go horribly wrong when i get to the reconstructed "experiments".

Ok Jesus Christ, not sure I will actually manage to make it through this.

my problem with philosophy of a knife is that it reeks of cliched goth/rave/industrial bullshit. (watched an hour or so of it after saying i wouldn't.) artsy-fartsy "embrace the darkness" bullshit without any actual aesthetic or moral intelligence. fucking cheezy-ass halloween rave flyer fonts, dated & uninspired "spooky techno" soundtrack, an artistic sensibility gleaned from watching old NIN videos. iskanov's previous films, which i checked out from the library a couple years back, make this even more clear. the fact that philosophy poses as a serious moral investigation makes it all the more insufferable.

Iskanov's Nails was fun - Lynch put through a cliched goth/rave/industrial grinder - but mostly because it's so short, colorful and frenetic. POAK, being none of these things, is a slog, and a catastrophic fail of non-editing. so is Visions of Suffering. apparently Iskanov's newest movie is even longer than POAK, even more indulgent. oh, joy. all this shit was tedious even before Karim Hussein's Subconscious Cruelty made it de rigueur.

Contenderizer, did you not find the (trying to avoid spoilers now) identity/M.O. of the killer in Shallow Ground a little bit unsatisfying? Overall I liked the movie quite a bit for its great ideas (when they ran the fingerprints through the database I think I actually shouted my appreciation out loud) but it seemingly didn't add up to much. I dunno I think I will actually watch it again soon, my bemusement demands it.

Shrooms, I dunno it just hit a sweet spot for me! I loved the scenery and loved loved the cretinous shack dudes so much. Agree the 'twist' was easily anticipated.

Try out The Chair. I think it ties with The Woods as my favorite of the dozen or so horror flix I've watched on Netflix streaming the last few weeks.

Watched Them (the French one) last night and am still getting my head around it...