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

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

Boooo. (That said, I can't think of many other directors I love who more regularly inspire choruses of "meh" from those around me.)

not kidding about that crane shot though, its pretty magnificent - apparently the american distributors wanted to cut it and he put his foot down and refused.

You still haven't seen his best picture, then. Write him off after you've checked out 'Deep Red.'

ok, yeah, im def not 100% opposed, so i was going to ask for recs - the other one peeps keep mentioning is something about a bird or plumage or eh never mind ill just go to imdb and stop being stupid. anything you get behind eric?

Yeah, Deep Red is the one that seems to treat the Argento non-fans best.

(I'm not particularly enthused by it, myself. I'm much more in favor of the flamboyant ones: Suspiria, Phenomena, Opera.)

I'll rep for 'The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.' it's a tidy, downright nifty thriller. But it's Srgento still so in the long shadow of his mentor, Mario Bava, that you might want to watch Bava's delightful Hitchcock riff 'The Girl Who Knew Too Much', first. Argento doesn't come of his own until 'Deep Red,' which is still traditional enough in terms of it's mystery and mechanics not to be alienating. 'Tenebre' almost doesn't make sense until you're immersed in Argento's world, being a metafictional autobiographical reinvention of 'Bird' and 'Deep Red' and a near parody of the giallo form in a slightly futuristic setting. It's his ' Alphaville,' if you will.

deep red is hitchcock + giallo kinda.

That equation doesn't compute, because there wouldn't be any "giallo" without Hitchcock (and Edgar Wallace).

i suppose that's true

LOVE ARGENTO OR GTFO

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?

― death panel of the mods (Edward III), Friday, November 12, 2010 11:49 AM (6 days ago) Bookmark

it is a totally personal aversion. and it's weird, cuz when viceroy says, "I appreciated that they cut the tension in the middle with the black comedy stuff," i feel completely the opposite. jacob gentry wrote and directed jealousy monster (the name of that segment), and i loved the black comedy stuff up until the point where lewis was fully in control and raged out. the scene where he suddenly, brutally murders laura's (?) friend, and later, where he blinds and tortures laura with poison, were both played for laughs, and i didn't think either was particularly funny. they made me depressed and even a bit angry. perhaps i empathize too strongly with the victims in such situations to ever truly enjoy them. anyway, this aspect of gentry's chapter took me out of the movie and made it hard to get back in. fwiw, i did think it was an interesting, effective and well-made film overall.

that said, a lot of the best ott black humor/horror induces a kind of psychedelic bewilderment in the viewer, where you don't know how far things are going to go or how you're supposed to take it. more sadistic films will push through to the worst thing imaginable, while horror comedies and mainstream films will typically undercut the awfulness, or swerve away at the last minute. it's a legitimate and effective horror tool, and one that i don't have a problem with, for the most part. maybe i was just in the wrong mood for those kinds of stunts that night, i dunno...

i wanna ask though: did anyone watch the short film that's included as a bonus feature? like jealousy monster, it was written and directed by jacob gentry, in this case as a "24-hour film festival" contribution. it's a quick and dirty TCM ripoff wherein a goofy redneck psycho (played by the guy who plays clark in the signal) abuses and butchers several trapped women. given the obvious budget and time constraints, it's surprisingly successful, wringing a measure of suspense out of one deaf victim's attempt to escape and free a fellow captive. but i couldn't get around the fact that it's basically just helpless women getting snuffed one after the other, with a side of sickly lols. disliked it, and watching it after the signal didn't improve my opinion of the latter.

But it's Argento still so in the long shadow of his mentor, Mario Bava, that you might want to watch Bava's delightful Hitchcock riff 'The Girl Who Knew Too Much', first.

― silent ouzo eclipse (Mr. Hal Jam), Thursday, November 18, 2010 10:24 AM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark

hell yeah, or blood and black lace

can't really fathom anyone not digging tenebre, though.

the slasher genre shd probably give up right now tbh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GydyA_cVJNA

Bad horror run for me - end of the line had some great initial jump scares but was teeteringly unfocused and oh man, some of the worst acting I have seen in some time. Really wanted to like it, but I just didn't.

Also lj I hate u.