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

Well - umm spoilers - there's the first movie, where the girl escapes and they try to figure out what happened to her. Then there's the other movie about the girl being haunted/attacked by her demonic alter ego. And then there's the third movie, where the other girl is being tortured as part of some vague theological experiment. None are satisfying beyond the most, yes, facile dorm room parsing. Seemed totally padded out to fill a feature-length run time, which is how I feel about most torture porn - pretentious, silly or both.

the only part that actually felt separate from the main arc of the story is the tacked on ending, which really did a disservice to the whole thing by trying to give some pretentious explanation. but the rest of your commentary just tells me that we have vastly different expectations of horror films, nothing really to argue about there.

loved the ending of martyrs, loved everything about it. pontypool's good too. feel like there was a good run of horror movies at the end of the decade, but things have petered out, especially if we're still arguing about martyrs and pontypool.

Well, I will say in both those cases there's at least a little bit to chew on, like them or not. Since then it's been pretty much all ghost stories and vampires.

anyone but me see The Woman?

so pontypool is about words acting as a virus because why? who knows? and then 90 minutes of movie happens and we learn nothing at all. its an empty movie wrapped up in an attempt to look smart while saying and signifying nothing at all.

― blurgh (jjjusten), Thursday, January 26, 2012 2:21 PM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well, it's obviously open to interpretation, but i think pontypool is about the relationship of language to violence. the disease it examines is not an absurd linguistic virus, but rather the human propensity for inciting warlike, tribal conflict. the film literalizes the ability of spoken words to create realities in which collective violence becomes possible. the protagonist's big rant at the end makes this point very clear: wars are conjured by what we tell each other and by what we choose to make of what we're told. it's no coincidence that the main characters are newscasters, keepers, creators and narrators of the collective social truth.

treating warlike thought as a communicable disease and locating its outbreak in a small, seemingly insignificant town highlights its sickening, pointless absurdity. pontypool transforms the "ordinary" cinematic spectacle of war into something not-normal, something ridiculous, horrible and profoundly alien. the words and ideas that enable violence become the monster, the invader, the thing from out there that threatens the in here. this interpretation helps make sense of the WWII=related words and phrases the zombies often repeat ("u-boat", etc).

the only scene in the movie that breaks the characters-on-a-stage framing is a long, dispassionate rundown of victims and assailants. it's a twilight zone inversion of something we're all familiar with: the solemn recitation of the names of the heroic fallen as presented on the nightly news. but where the sense-making agenda of a newscast makes such accountings seem somehow reasonable, pontypool insists on the tragic, pointless stupidity of loss. what is war, after all, but a cancer of the collective mind?

^ probably should have read that one over first

I like what you wrote right there. What scared me about Pontypool was the doubt the characters felt, unsure if they were insane or not. And if even trying to stop whatever 'it' is will also be going insane.

Insanity in horror terrifies me when it's done well, not the over-abused main character is actually insane and killed them. But when insanity is more like a contagious germ, that's what scared me about pontypool.

Y'all keep neglecting to mention that Pontypool is also frequently hilarious, on purpose.

But, yeah, the contagious insanity aspect works so well because the acting in this movie is awesome and convincing, even while dancing around such stylized, deliberate, Mamet-precise dialog.

i assumed the virus in pontypool was intended as a means of genocide against english-speaking, i mean, they even literally used the word genocide to describe what was happening, and not some random happenstance.

english-speaking canadians doh

oh! i watched frozen last week...it was a very good idea, but i think if you're going to build a movie's tension around the survival of three characters stuck on a ski-lift, you need to not spend the first 10 minutes making the audience hate them for being fratty douchebags.

so i finally got around to watching quarantine 2 and although it is not nearly as bad as i expected, that doesnt mean that it isnt total crap. pretty much confirms my idea that balaguero (bet i spelled that wrong) had one good script and one bad one, kept the good one for rec 2 and cashed in on the reject by selling it to the idiots who made Q2

watched Atrocious yesterday (not an auspicious name for a movie but eh spanish dudes so who knows) and it was ok? mainly because it was short, but pretty well acted - be warned, yep, its yet another of the 10 bagazillion shakeycam horrors out there, but the pacing was kinda well done and it didnt overstay its welcome at 70 minutes or so. you could def do much much worse on streaming netflix, but thats not exactly a ringing endorsement, so

My last street-team on this topic, I swear. Absentia is available through a shit-ton of cable providers as well as through iTunes and a couple of other places. I don't watch a shit-ton of horror movies, but I don't scare easily. For whatever reason, maybe because it was good, this one did it for me. Spent a few minutes just grabbing my wife's arm muttering "Fffffuuuuuuuuuck".

Absentia is good, yeah. Optimal use of an insanely meagre budget. Surprised there aren't way more horror flicks themed around missing persons.

huh i dont know that one at all, will try to track it down.

btw as a long time supporter of the hostel movies (2 esp) i just saw the trailer for direct to video hostel 3 and hoo boy i can not imagine how fucking pissed eli roth must be about that thing.

Absentia scared both T and I!

I tried to watch "Tokyo Gore Police," which isn't really horror, I guess, but does feature some horrific low-budget effects. I admire its moxie, but was mostly bored, even as giant mutant phalli were firing bullets and a woman's torso turned into alligator jaws, after she had bitten off a dude's manhood.

ugh, I hate that guy's stuff.

Nishimura, that is.

Yeah, I hate that stuff too

you know why I generally hate horror films? bcz ppl judge them by how SCARY they are. What the fuck is entertaining about being scared? Same thing with motherfucking rollercoasters. Worst shit in the world. I don't want to be scared once the rest of my motherfucking life, I'll sign up for that ahead of having one good orgasm.

THIS IS SINCERE

understand why people don't like nishimura, but i did enjoy tokyo gore police. cheap, inventive, fun, funny. wasn't bored for a minute, but mileage clearly varies.

slipping on horror flix myself. last week, i watched some wretched thing i got from the library called stake land it was wretched.

Huh. I had heard good things about Stake Land.

no mention of sion sono's cold fish in here, anyone seen it?

i watched tokyo gore police on halloween while eating pizza, it was pretty stomach-turning. not really my kind of horror.

Jesus christ watch A Serbian Movie last night, and I want my innocence back.

no sympathy

you know why I generally hate horror films? bcz ppl judge them by how SCARY they are.

you realize this flat out admits that what other people think of what's on the screen is more important to you than what's on the screen.

I watch horror for many reasons one of them is I like being frightened, also I like being challenged by what I'm watching.

I just checked an indiana jones thread to see if morbz hated temple of doom (which has horror AND rollercoasters) and he just said all the films can't hold a torch to Thief Of Bagdhad so fair enough.

Oh, Serbian Film is so ridiculously vile that I can't feel bad for having seen it. Coulda been worse.

How could it have been worse?? Serious question.

It would have been a worse experience if it had been better made. For me, it was just so ham-fisted, obviously and cheaply symbolic and crappily produced that it didn't have much effect on me other than to be a little grossed-out by filmmakers' apparent hierarchy of deviance as evidenced by the chronology (120 days of sodom style) -- which is truly fucked is baby rape is in the MIDDLE.

nobody puts baby rape in the middle

irl lol

Ha! I thought it was kind of beautifully shot and the pacing was perfect, but there's a limit to what I'll call a good.

I agree with Three Word Username. It was just so OTT yet so on the nose at the same time, it was more a morality exercise than a real affront to my sensibilities. Like, is rape bad? Yes. Does the movie say otherwise? No. Is it really rape? No. Is it as hard to watch as "Irreversible?" No. Is it as well made as that movie? Hell, no. Etc.

I watch horror for many reasons one of them is I like being frightened, also I like being challenged by what I'm watching when heads explode.

anyone who watches ASF deserves what they get

Like it's some unique Rubicon? "ASF" is so surreal and intentionally provocative, but what distinguishes it from a host of horribles, on the offensive front, isn't that significant. What is significant is that it has a moral compass to it, which is more than you can say for any number of aimless torture porn flicks.

Also, and I thought this was interesting, I just read "The Lazarus Project" by the esteemed Bosnian-American novelist Aleksandar Hemon, which hinges in part on a return to the former killing fields (as such) of the Balkans, and darned if there weren't some depraved heart of darkness similarities to "ASF." Makes me wonder if the filmmakers were onto something that many of us may never fully understand.

i didn't mean it all that seriously. just given what i've heard, i've decided that it's a baby too far, and wanted to flex my opprobrium.

i haven't seen the film, but i thought it was generally acknowledged that bosnia's recent history is, if not "the point", exactly, then what ASF is responding to/arises from. or at least that that's the excuse.

Oh, that's totally accurate, and made explicitly obvious in the movie. Just saying that as repellent as aspects of the movie may be, I found it intriguing to read something of a more classy, accepted nature - that is, an award winning novel by a top-notch author - that in some ways explores many similarly horrific aspects of the former Yugoslavia's recent history.

The baby thing, by the way, is virtually a blip in a parade of semi-stylized atrocities, many of which take place in passing, or through a delirious filter. And the brief scene is practically narrated by the film's voice, its amorla pole, the same figure who makes the movie's themes explicit. Which isn't totally exculpating, but it does make pains to contextualize what you're seeing (or, really, not seeing in this case). But what I was getting at is that as horrific as it is in theory, it's really splitting hairs to say it's any "worse" than "Insides," or "Martyrs," or "Hostel" or whatever. There's some Korean film called I want to say "The Butcher" that looks so repellent I'd never see it; even though I doubt it goes as "far" as "ASF," it's approach seems wholly more disgusting and exploitative.

Amoral, not amorla, though amorla should be a word, I think.

no mention of sion sono's cold fish in here, anyone seen it?

yeah - easily the worst of the Sono I've seen. one-note, plodding, super long and very hateful.

though amorla should be a word, I think.

lol, i thought "amorla pole" was a literary figure i should be familiar with. a femme fatale, clearly...

bond villainess obv