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

Just watched Koko-Di Koko-Da, which I thought was very good. Is it folk horror? I'm going to say yes.

Kind of hate blumhouse but also interested to know whether any of these are worthwhile

not yr question but general attn: saw the Blumhouse "Freaky Friday The 13th" flick FREAKY at the drive-in last week, by the Happy Death day dude. totally recommended if the description sounds of interst, and if Vince Vaughan's irl MAGA-ness won't stop you enjoying him play a bodyswapped teenage girl with mild flouncing. Like last year's April W0lfe Black Christmas reversion, it's mainly aimed at teenage girls, but also at a family (that's open to horror/comedy)(and queer teen) audience.

xp to Koko-Di Koko-Da

the twee rabbit puppetry was a bit much and it sometimes spins off the rails but Koko-Di was genuinely unsettling and slowly opened up into something much more complex than it seemed. As far as surreal Swedish meditations on loss and shattered identity told through horror tropes go, it would be a good back-to-back with Persona.

I caught it at a late-night pre-release free screening in the city and the woman next to me clearly thought she had come to a standard horror movie and spent the third reel loudly opining out loud variations on "THIS SHIT CRAZY" and "What the fuck GOING ON in this movie?"

― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Saturday, February 22, 2020 4:55 PM

‘Freaky’ might even be halfway okay if Vince Vaughn were not so immensely fucking terrible in it. Female lead is great tho!

Vaughn’s continuous “OMIGAWD I AM A GIRRRRRRRRL” mincing is offensive and poorly executed, even if the genderflip romance stuff is pleasantly transgressive

the stereotypiness in Vaughan's performance is way more to the silly fun side than the egregious side imo. though yes, it would read worse if the rest of the film wasn't so casually queer.

also I took the disparity between his tone and Newton's as a way of heightening the fact that she was the lead, and/or an homage to Face / Off.

Watched Possessor last night. It's one of those movies about a Magical Technology that exists in the two hours between the invention of the technology and the moment the general public learns about its existence, at which point it can never be used again. The performances were all really good, though, especially Jennifer Jason Leigh as the creepy-predatory boss, and the main male actor. The scenes where he was walking around in a stroke-face mask (I don't want to say much more) were creepy as hell.

Freaky was OK, would have been 75% better if it had been 25% less dumb

That's about right.

i'm open to different takes on if/how offensive vaughn's performance is but it feels undeniable that he's just BAD; the parts where he's onscreen are straight up boring. and yes, the whole package needed to be considerably less stupid in general.

I think Vaughn is a good actor who was coaxed into doing too broad a performance

new on Shudder: Stephen Lang, William Sadler and Fred Williamson(!!) as elder asskickers in VFW and uhh Bertrans Bonello's Zombi Child. OK then!

*Bertrand

anyone seen the VFW guy's previous movie Bliss? looks wild

in fact I am midway through and pausing to say holy shit this movie

dora madison...incredible

wow VFW rules so far too....if he makes it a hat trick he's getting a thread

hobo with a green room

Possessor was great even if jon snow seemed to be struggling playing the Iago. Cronenbeg fils definitely trained at the school of his father.

Wasn't crazy about Possessor. Seemed like a few interesting ideas and good images strung together but lacked much coherence. I haven't liked Christopher Abbott in anything I've seen him in yet either

Chris Abbott is real good y'all tripping imo

keep thinking about Bliss and its accidentally Verhoevian sense of sleaze

Watched the uncut Possessor tonight. Not entirely convinced it held together and it felt very televisual in places (not a criticism; I'm not even entirely sure what I mean) but the impact was considerable. Cronenburg senior is everywhere, but it's as much a homage to Cronenburg's influences, I guess - Ballard, Philip K. Dick. I liked the commentary on the hellscape of corporate work (Sean Bean quoting Walter Benjamin under a mock-up Sistine Chapel roof), and the sound design was excellent - particularly the grunge and glunge of bodies. I want to watch it again already!

Cronenberg, ffs.

I've woken up thinking about Possessor and specifically why I wasn't 100% convinced (and why I want to watch it again to check) I think it comes down to Abbot's central performance and what Cronenberg's tasking him to portray: essentially to exteriorise an interior drama - that of the battle for control for a consciousness. It's basically trying to reify a metaphor and it resulted in lots of close-ups and mid-shots of Abbot looking bewildered/in mental torment. I loved it when it switched to more concrete portrayals of this drama, for instance, the whole sequence with Abbot in a Riseborough mask will stay with me forever (was it a deliberate nod to the Myers mask from Halloween?) and the beautiful latex orgy of the transformation scenes. Anyway, I'm sounding really negative and I had a blast with it.

I think that's a fair complaint

that said he's better than a few of the leads in early D. Cronenberg movies lol

Agreed on all points. A better actor could have made this a great movie, but it works nonetheless.

pull quote for the resume

Posted this to detritus, but probably best here.

The Zoom movie was absolutely unwatchable to me

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Saturday, 12 December 2020 00:27 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Watched this ('Host') today and thought it was fantastic. I've rarely rooted against an entire cast so much, which I'm sure was intentional. Seriously technically impressive, tense, and a necessary externalisation of all the universal fears that have surfaced during a time of intense claustrophobia. That feeling of indoor spaces stagnating with dread. But way more fun than that sounds. Also an hour long.

Host freaked me out more than any film has in a long time but I watched it on my tablet with the phones in in a very old hotel room in the dark, which I guess is a fair sized caveat

I've skimmed enough spoiler free stuff about "Hunter Hunter" to make me pretty intrigued.

host is good as hell!!! not quite unfriended: dark web quality but so good for what it is

"Hunter Hunter" had an ambivalent review today in the L.A. Times. Sounds like an interesting premise. Reviewer's mention of disturbing / gory elements probably are positives for folk here.

finally watched We Are the Flesh - as grotesque as promised but almost funny as well. I hope the performers were well compensated.

It's definitely super weird and surreal and funny and gross.

this looks fun and dumb!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thcQFXC5sKY

co-written by max landis lol

Somebody upthread mentioned Dorothy Mills (2008) as kind of ho-hum, but the gf & I just watched it and really liked it - were talking about it the next day. It's Irish, has some classic tropes - an outsider upsets the balance of a quiet, reticent island community that would "rather just let the past stay in the past!" kinda thing, but it has some unexpected twists and is pretty bleak overall.
Very gothic atmosphere, and the Irish horror I've seen (not that much, to be honest) has been consistent in quality...it's almost a relief when you get an unknown film and see that it's funded by the Irish Film Board; it's probably going to at least be watchable.

xp, whoops didn't catch that.

ha well I wasn't trying to chirp you out, it's just sad that he keeps getting paid

i agree wholeheartedly! that film will only be interesting if it's not in the vein of "look at us being sexist but really we're NOT being sexist it's old times DO U SEE?!?!?!" which it could well be.

The Thai flick "The Pool" has such a great high concept b-movie hook - man trapped at the bottom of a deep drained pool with a big crocodile - that I had high expectations, but it is so larded down with grade-z melodrama (including one of the most horrible and horrifying on-screen pet deaths I've ever seen) and an obnoxious pro-life (as in, explicitly anti-abortion) message that by the end I could barely give a shit.

Hunter Hunter was like an ominous version of Leave No Trace but with a wolf and then holy fuck the ending

I watched Makeup last night, a British debut from Caroline Oakley. It's set at an out-of-season holiday park in Cornwall and is broadly about sexual awakening and I won't say too much else. It's only horror-inflected really, but it's got a great atmosphere and uses the potential of the landscape and the inherent bleak horror of an abandoned caravan park to good effect. It's definitely growing in my imagination. Good central performance, too.

Impetigore: Kind of a coup for Shudder that they now have Indonesia's Academy submission on there. Wild movie! Some cheap scares and a way overcomplicated backstory, but I really loved the way this movie toys with just how intense/violent or cruel it's willing to get, right up until, well, anyway. You'll see. Very likeable lead and above-average acting and writing in general. Could definitely have been tightened up a bit. It's cool that Indonesia submitted a legit, balls-out horror movie to the Academy. (It will receive no votes, I imagine, but still)

I thought the title was really misleading and almost unfortunate. There's some horrific stuff in this movie, yeah, but it's a lot more interesting and ambitious and artful than the typical gore hound might expect. The general fable-like vibe definitely made the most horrible stuff easier to handle, imo.

I don't know why I'm feeling squeamish but is it Bone Tomahawk levels of mental scarring?

No, not really. There's stuff you might read about the movie that scans like, I dunno, Martyrs level carnage, but it's really handled in a very different way, iirc.

Like, I was expecting something akin to the Indonesian installment of V/H/S/, which is insanely over the top, but this is not that.

yeah it's a lot less violent than a lot of other movies I've seen lately. they hold back on a lot of stuff.