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

2nd jjjusten on deadgirl, and yeah, the del toro list is excellent

deadgirl 3rded

the signal also streaming on netflix iirc

not only do I like the films del toro selected, but his rationale for liking said films is boss and otm, also like the pairing thing he did

so, last night i watched another movie that's been mentioned itt: canadian maurice devereaux's end of the line. funny thing is that i'd avoided it for quite some time, despite great box art, due to vague worries that it would be a christian horror film. lol. it's anything but, and it's great. up there with the children, shallow ground and trick r treat among the best indie horror flicks i've seen recently. basically, it's a zombie movie about people trapped in montreal's subway and maintenance tunnels, but the "zombies" here are delusional religious zealots trying to save humanity from an impending (imagined?) apocalypse. as it happens, their means of salvation consists of bloody murder with sharpened crucifixes. so yeah, it's about as anti-religious a horror movie as can be imagined. unlike most contemporary horror films, end of the line is inventive, atmospheric, visually striking and genuinely scary, at least from time to time. better yet, it's got some ideas and personality of its own. a bit too ham-handed in its religious critique, and some of the performances (unfortunately including the lead) are terrible, but definitely worth a look.

anyone seen devereaux's previous slashers? has some fans on imdb.

note: am only saying that deadgirl is the most extreme and disturbing movie in Stevie D's list, not that i liked it best. shallow ground is my favorite of the 4.

All the best bits in Paranormal Activity 2 were taken from the first one. All the worst bits (that is, the nonsensical barely-explained backstory) ultimately did it in. I did come out of it learning that demons either really, really hate pots and pans and pool cleaners or perhaps just have bad eyesight and commonly confuse them for small children.

PA seemed like one of those films where a sequel would just ruin the magic of it. Like, how do you repeat that again?

It's actually surprisingly effective when it sticks to the template! Our brains don't acclimate to the "gotcha" component of horror films - that's one reason horror films exist - but for all its mechanical jumps it's just not as creepy as the first one, thanks to the pointless backstory it brings in.

Just watched "Drag Me to Hell" again and, man, what an effective fun house. Also, time and again it subverts the usual horror tropes. We know exactly what's going on. There's no mystery what's after her. We even know what it (generally) looks like and exactly what it wants (it's in the title!). Furthermore, the protagonist is a good person with good intentions, the victim of an unfair vendetta, who has a trusting, supporting boyfriend. She's brave and resourceful, and steps up when she needs to step up. She even does the one thing no one ever does in a horror movie (even Paranormal Activity 2 ultimately chickens out on the pet front). And yet, start to finish it's nothing but fun, and even gets away with the aforementioned anvil suspended in a shed gag and trademark Raimi gallons of spewing fluids. And it's even PG-13! Shows what a master of the form can get away with.

Watched Deadgirl this morning, was ok, that is all.

man, i thought Paranormal Activity (the first one) was possibly the most boring piece of garbage i have ever seen. it didn't help that it took place in BARF san diego BARF.

Eh I think it was capable but def not groundbreaking or anything

Well, it's was nice to get a movie able to get an entire theater to lose its collective shit over a bunch of slowly opening doors. That's something, compared to "Saw VI" or whatever.

yeah i mean it was pretty much a one-time-use experience for me, but what an exp it was!

oooh! i want to talk about JT Petty's S&Man - but only with people who have already seen it. anyone?

out of that stevie d list i thought 'below' was probably the spookiest.

btw aftermath is really fucked-up, yeah. maybe more fucked-up: cutting moments.

i already mentioned both of them in the same post YEARS ago i see. i've run out of things to say.

I just watched "Frozen" and it's probably the most tense 90 minutes I've spent watching a movie. Unbearable at times but really well done.

watched Cold Prey last night and for the most part its a totally acceptable movie but after i was done with it i sat back and thought "ok, would this make any impression at all if it was an english language film" and sadly the answer was pretty much no. just another stabby weirdo in the abandoned winter cabin/lodge flick, kinda ho hum and a little light on meat behind the scares. its on netflix streaming but only in the dubbed version (which per usual is awful) so if yer still curious def get it on disc.

mentioned this on another thread, but also watched Black Water on streaming which is a suprisingly boring aussie killer croc movie, kinda like Open Water but with peeps up in a tree.

yep. felt the same away about the Austrian Dead in 3 Days. maybe we in the States and the U.K. are just jaded by the surfeit of homegrown "stabby weirdo" product. the foreign variants can be interesting - like the unrelentingly bleak and nasty Chilean Ángel Negro, or lurid Czech Scream clone, The Pool - but there wasn't much to either of these particular distro pickups.

i watched the criterion rerelease of bergmans Magician last night, which has some fun with horror tropes in art film style; recommended.

Ooh that sounds great!

Oh whoa just after Hal jam mentioned it, s&man just showed up on instant watch netflix. Will report back once I see it - kinda stoked

bergman's magician? never seen it. as good as hour of the wolf?

two i've recently watched:

the signal (2007) - highly recommended by several on this thread, and i can see why. cheap, inventive, lightning paced horror thriller about a mysterious broadcast signal that turns most everybody on earth into homicidal maniacs. much like a contemporary zombie-plauge movie, but with the twist that the monsters are still thinking, feeling human beings who just happen to have lost their marbles. in an interesting twist, it's kind of an anthology film: three directors tell one story in three chapters, each focusing on one of its three major characters. this allows for quite a bit of variety in style and tone. the first chapter is straight up action-horror, the second satirical black comedy, while the third is dramatic and a bit surreal. i didn't strongly dislike this movie, but i didn't love it either. the second act's cruelty distanced me from the film and what came after never won me back. i have a problem with films that lavish attention on powerful, angry male characters who dominate and brutalize those around them (especially when those being brutalized are women). this dynamic often kills movies for me, whatever else they might happen to have going for them.

no man's land: rise of the reeker (2008) - watched this cuz i've seen and liked a number of ghost house titles (sam raimi's production company). nothing special. basic concept is good: people trapped in a strange netherworld, trying to figure out its mysterious rules and what they might imply. unfortunately, the excecution is dull and unimaginative. starts well and chugs along appealingly for about half an hour, but only goes downhill from there.

twist/twist - i really need to read stuff over before i post it...

have you seen the original (har har) Reeker? the sequel is more of a rethink/remake. i didn't care much for either, but the first had a certain hokey charm.

no, never saw reeker. sequel doesn't incline me to seek it out. watching ole bornedal's the substitute tonight, a danish film distributed by ghost house. looks kinda crummy, but i did like the original night watch, all those years ago. here's hoping...

i really didnt like the signal v much but the further i get from having seen it the less i remember why

i think i said up-thread that The Substitute = The Faculty for the Twilight set. it's not bad, but i'm not sure what Raimi & Co. saw in it.

I like The Substitute a lot! it's better to think about it as an 80s-style "family film" (IE Goonies) than something aiming at wannabe goths or whatever.

Huh

S&man

Not sure yet.

I want to talk about it a bit but w/o spoilering thats gonna be tough

i know!

Ok going to bide my time until there's more than 2 of us by watching "live object"

Btw if I had known that rip torn and udo kier were in this I would have gotten to it faster!

Magician is really horror only in a carnival of souls way
but boy is it good
and don't miss the video essay supplement, very illuminating

the substitute was excellent, way better than i expected. ending was a bit aprupt/unsatisfying, and the heavy-handed business about love being what makes humans unique caused me to gag occasionally, but no complaints otherwise. strong characters, wonderful performances, nicely moody cinematography and at least a little faith in its audience's intelligence. bornedal's got another film forthcoming for raimi and ghost house, called dybbuk box, due next year. looking forward to it.

dibbuk box? something like that...

it's spelled dybbuk. it's a jewish demon.

yeah, i initially spelled it dybbuk, cuz that's the spelling i'm familiar with. but the imdb entry and apparent movie title = "dibbuk box" for reasons unknown, so i corrected for that.

Magician is really horror only in a carnival of souls way
but boy is it good

carnival of souls is one of the greatest horror movies ever made

then you will find some joy in magician. just making it clear that it's only horror accents in an art film, not the other way round

I can see why ppl don't fully dig the signal - it's not a "perfect" movie - but I loved it, one of my favorite recommends from this thread.

don't get yr "angry male character" issue, contenderizer, it's not like the movie's on that guy's side, he's the villain! and he's an interesting one because he's not evil, just sick. the film does have it's share of sadism/gore, but that's why it's on this thread and not the nonexistant scifi one. it sounds like maybe a personal aversion?

paranormal activity

in the middle of watching this with my gf and she's gone to the toilet, the bitch

she's gonna come back and stare at you for like three hours

!!! SPOILERRY TALK BELOW \/\/\/

I just watched The Signal yesterday and I thought it was really good. I appreciated that they cut the tension in the middle with the black comedy stuff. I have to admit that I enjoyed Lewis's character because from our introduction to him it was obvious he was a jealous passive-aggressive guy with some inferiority issues but obviously if he hadn't watched so much of that damn signal he wouldn't have gone so damn crazy... its interesting to see a normal persons character flaws turn into OTT pathologies. There was a lot of brutalization in the film in general, its hard to claim that there was more put on women than men. Perhaps it just seems so much more brutal when the violence turns on women though? It was certainly more unsettling to me to see the lady's friend get her head bashed in repeatedly than say, when the same happened to Lewis (and more gore was shown even).

But, it addressed fears that play heavily into some favorite horror films like The Crazies (the original one) about how one could possibly know if anyone is sane when everyone has to act crazy in order to defend themselves and their loved ones. Sanity being something that is decided by society and not actually real is really scary, cause society seems more fragile than ever in our post-industrial techno world.

The second act brutality played more as slapstick to me though. That is probably due to my own desensitization, and I can see why someone would see it as just gratuitous exploitation.

As someone who refuses to pay time or money to things I see as gratuitous exploitation, I can certainly see contenderizer's larger point about violent asshole men being lavished with attention as a serious problem in modern horror films, since they are edging further away from being strictly the villains and more-and-more straddle that anti-hero line. For instance I thought the guy in Paranormal Activity was an obnoxious and abusive husband and I really hated the movie cause he was in it. Oh well, we all have our own hang-ups.

those dudes are always dicks in these movies, not antiheroes. Dude in paranormal activity is a total jerk.

ok so, watched love object and was kinda eh about it, finally saw human centipede and thought it was pretty well done EXCEPT for the fact that the 2 female leads are kinda terrible, but the big winner by far was Stuck, which I thought was completely fucking fantastic.

Tenebre and The End Of the Line showing up today from netflix so it should be a good week.

oh also watched The Chair and found it kinda lacking tbh - one great spooky shot, but that was about it.

ok, sorry dudes, but after watching tenebre and being kinda blah about suspiria and a few others, i am (outside of Goblin which is awes and that super long crane shot around the house) i am just straight up not really an argento fan.

yeah, I like suspiria but I'm definitely argento-impaired