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

Low-budget (presumably they spent it all on Tim)

the rest on gennies to recharge lighting and camera batteries for all-day bush shoots

central, largely under-conceptualised free-floating metaphor

it's pretty well-integrated tbf - makes the point strongly in a few different ways without over-egging* the metaphor, and resolves more closely than the narrative has hewn throughout.


* six of 'over-egging', half a dozen of 'being even slightly close to the horrible reality'

ready or not: kind of poorly-made, kind of ugly, reminded me way too much of you're next at the outset, yet: too fun to resist

Disliked it for almost the whole running time but enjoyed the final tableau.

I've heard of and seen only two of these (One Cut and Climax). Anyone else? Most look pretty intriguing, imo.

https://bloody-disgusting.com/editorials/3596045/best-2019-10-best-foreign-horror-films-2019/

not yet but i'm gonna use that list for hunting, so thanks!

welp the reviews of the new Grudge are pretty much "meh" or worse across the board

pfft it’s a horror movie, you think i care about reviews

although it seems like it was a victim of studio-mandated reshoots lol so i’m no longer excited

anyway thanks for bumping this thread, i wanted to sing the praises of silent hill: revelation 3d

which is streaming on netflix rn and is full of very ugly cgi and exposition dumps and functions exactly like a video game and the jump scares are just the sort of camera-shaking cheap shots that ruins the new it adaptations for me and yet.... there is something captivating about it. it’s shot really well, the aimlessness/pointlessness of the plot makes the collapsing meta-realties very effective in a hello mary lou: prom night ii way, and jon snow’s american(???) accent is all over the fuckin place it’s hilarious

i went in expecting boring trash that would help me sleep and instead i got this hypnotic weird trash that kept me awake thinking about it

malcolm mcdowell is in it for five minutes and chews so much scenery it’s like he eats the movie whole. it’s awesome

I really liked Antrum, I thought it managed a lot with its budget and quite silly ideas. Several extremely pant-filling moments.

i had never seen the original silent hill so i put it on last night and imo it's one of the most beautiful-looking films ever made

It nicely recreated a lot of the settings but some of the cgi is terrible (a recurring problem with Gans, which is a shame because he has talent) and the ragged people looked a tad goofy. That's only the visual problems though. Am curious to see his segment of Necronomicon.

i kinda liked the ropey creature cgi, it added to the unreality of the film for me. also i gotta say this again: the cinematography is staggering. done by the same guy who did the last two john wick films and crimson peak/shape of water

finally caught In Fabric - mixed feelings about it. It looks (and sounds) fantastic but the writing is half-assed and perfunctory. There's no real story or characters per se, just a bunch of strung-together moments and ideas. It's more like a very detailed sketch of a film than a proper film itself.

Admission: The US remake of the original Grudge and the original Silent Hill film are both flicks I enjoy immensely despite feeling as though I shouldn't.

I haven't seen Silent Hill in a long time but I remember being really impressed by its darkness and weirdness at the time. Some real nightmare-fuel visuals in that movie.

iknow fans of the game weren't as enthusiastic but I think they nailed it, aesthetic-wise.

fucking loved in fabric

SPOILERS: didn’t even mind that it was two interconnected stories, in fact i really liked that bc the dress/shop are the main characters. the overwrought dialogue of the shop clerk! the hilarious bank clerks! the fugue of pleasure everyone goes into when that guy describes how to repair a washing machine!

I felt a bit frustrated by there only being two stories, like we should have seen at least another short's worth of the dress doing its thing to really tie the thing together cinch the narrative's waist

slender man: people really hated this movie! i liked it a lot

one of those movies that answers the question "is this movie really atmospheric and cool or is it just poorly lit" with a resounding "yes"

"Colour out of Space" was ... I dunno. It does a lot right. It looks cool, the mood is surreal and spooky. It also does a lot wrong, like letting Cage go full-Cage, which undercuts the mood, imo. Also has a bad habit of characters on screen saying stuff the film has already visually answered. Like, if you see two people fused by space lightning into a melted mess of a being, and they're moaning, you don't need to have someone ask "why are they making that sound!?" Or if you've seen all sorts of crazy things and mutated animals and other horrific shit and the horse is acting strange, you don't need someone asking "why is he acting that way?" For a movie partly about something making people behave in odds ways, it still made me constantly question choices people were making. Like, if there's a well, and there's been strange shit going on with the well, and your dog has gone missing (see: all the weird animal shit), and you think you hear the dog at the bottom of the well, and you stupidly decide to climb down the well (who does that?), and *then* halfway down you exclaim "ugh, it smells like something died down here!", like, don't go down the well!

The well was part of the problem with the way the story was told, too. As I understand it in the Lovecraft it's something in the water, but this movie has a meteorite crash to earth and implies it's the source of it all. (Including, inevitably, characters saying again and again "it's that thing that came from space, it's the source of it all!") But the movie still implies the water is the root of the problem, and ... I dunno. Maybe they should have had the meteorite crash and vanish in a prologue? Regardless, the story has been referenced or borrowed from so many times, from "The Blob" to "Annihilation" to "The Thing" (which this movie explicitly echoes) but mostly in a bunch of Stephen King stuff, like "The Mist" and "The Tommyknockers" and "Weeds"/"The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill," so I guess in the end it's so surprise it comes off as just another average King movie (with some better than average visuals).

^^(Some spoilers, obviously)

Nicolas Cage is a very bad actor and I don't trust the taste or opinions of people who claim that he's good.

Richard Stanley is a placeholder of a director and people who claim he's some major creative voice who's been stifled by The System are full of shit. I've seen Hardware, I've seen Dust Devil, and I've seen The Island of Dr. Moreau; the latter movie isn't good, but all the offstage drama ensured that there was basically no chance it ever could be; given the choice between Richard Stanley and John Frankenheimer, no sane person is gonna choose door #1.

letting Cage go full-Cage

he goes 1/5 Cage at best

Unperson OTM (about Cage, haven’t seen this yet).

His line readings hover around 3/5 on the Cage scale. There were lines that seemed built to be "bees!" like memes.

https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/tommy-chong-interview-color-out-of-space-weed-and-joker

one of the bummers about CooS (which I did like on balance) is that it seemed too aware of Cage-as-meme whereas in Mandy the extremity seemed intrinsic to the world and the character

Exactly. That's why I blame the direction as much as Cage. They leaned into his Caginess too much in a movie that really didn't need it. It has plenty going for it otherwise.

Tommy Chong is good but a few of the other supporting actors are.....really not great.

Yeah. This was very much a stoner cult film.

I kept thinking of (for lots of reasons) Stuart Gordon's From Beyond.

I'll probably check it out when it makes it to the theater here (if it does) but my one question:
Does the Colin Stetson soundtrack slap or nah?

(re: COOS)

The soundtrack is pretty good! Lots of stuff about the movie is classy and well done, just the tone is a mess and the acting is all over the place.

sounds like my kind of movie

the best thing about it is the artfully blended CGI+practical effects, especially in the last 20 minutes.

I liked From Beyond a lot when I saw it in the theater, but I was 14.

i saw from beyond for the first time a few months ago, it fuckin rocks

TBH as a big Stetson fan i was deeply unimpressed with the soundtrack for Color Out of Space and the sound design was just unpleasant and boring! I was surprised!

But I didn't think the score was bad. It didn't take me out of the movie, so there's that. I assumed a lot of the high pitched sound cues were him blowing through a mouthpiece of sorts.

xpost Yeah, From Beyond is pretty bonkers but it's got a better hook than this one, I think (because I think this one was muddled). In From Beyond there's an aphrodisiac addiction/attraction to the power/being/other dimension, which explains why they keep hanging around/going back for more. In this one (mild spoilers?) they don't get anything good out of it (except, fleetingly, quality produce?), and it's vague whether it's a meteor that brings it on, polluted water, whether the water preceded the meteor and what was in it (aliens? cosmic power?) was activated by the meteor, and so on. Which is fine, but also people keep talking about being unable to leave ... except for the people that are able to leave? And then there's stuff about cancer, and witchcraft, and ... politics? Social satire? I definitely wavered back on forth on whether it was being darkly funny on purpose. I dunno, just kind of muddled all around. Def. worth seeing, though, imo. Just disappointing.

I was hoping "Crawl" would be better than it looked. Like "The Shallows," which was also better than it looked (but still not that great). Well, this one was about as lame as it looked. So much dumbness. From a filmmaking standpoint, if most of your movie is set in a flooding basement during a hurricane, then it kind of ruins the effect when the basement is somehow lit brighter than the flashlight beams you're thinking around. And from a fucking zoological standpoint, while it's definitely not unique to this movie it does get pretty silly when you have a bunch of alligators so ravenous it's like they haven't eaten in a year. And from a stupid human standpoint, if your choice - after getting bitten, and stalked, and terrorized by a team of alligators while trapped in a flooding basement and then finally escaping - is to swim a couple of hundred feet across water absolutely teeming with more alligators (that you can see, because the water is swimming pool clear) hoping to make it to a boat rather than climb up to the fucking *roof*, then you deserve to get eaten.

Contriving to pad the body count in what is essentially a bottle episode narrative was particularly desperate in this one, since you knew that anyone that showed up was going to be quickly killed. Especially when the protagonists (and dog, natch) are apparently indestructible. Compound fractures, getting their legs chomped down on, arms chomped down on ... they just take a licking and keep on ticking, however cool it might be to see someone empty a gun's clip into an alligator *from inside the alligator* as it chews on their forearm.

(Pour one out for the idiot sticking around to further loot the flooded convenience store not for money, like his pals, but for snacks, cheap sunglasses and a hot dog. Playing Supermarket Sweep in a 7-11 must be some swamp dude's idea of heaven.)

I liked Crawl a lot!

I tried!

i sympathize!