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

In the Best Score category, not giving a mention to Conrad Pope's for The Presence is foolish. It was one of 2011's best film scores of any category. Will cosign the nod for Christian Henson's Black Death music though. Great score.

okay, so amer was pretty great. more than a little trying in its paradoxically retro experimentalism, but beautiful, sensual and richly atmospheric. it's usually described as a giallo homage, and it is, but that description suggests something much more narratively traditional than what amer delivers. it's nearly wordless, unflaggingly surreal, and prone to extended passages of abstract image and sound. in addition to the giallo in general and certain dario argento films in particular, i'd say that it owes a substantial debt to maya deren's meshes of the afternoon, jaromil jires' valerie and her week of wonders, and the trashier excesses of the 70s "art film". in the present moment, it's similar in style and content to recent videos by nicolas mendez (scissor siters' "invisible light" and el guincho's "bombay"), sharing with them a winking affection for yesterday's avant-garde. suspect that a lot of people would view it as a flashy but tedious exercise in vacant style, but i loved it and had a great time puzzling out what the torrent of bizarre yet evocative images might signify.

Yes, it's very good. I saw it with a group of friends who didn't really dig the lack of narrative or the heavy reliance on giallo tropes. I loved it. It is one of the most fetishistic films I have ever seen. Every object or movement is treated to such extraordinary scrutiny. It is like Argento's approach to bleck leather gloves applied to everything. The end result is disorientating and surreal.

yeah, when I initially saw dvd reviews of amer I thought it was some obscure giallo film somebody had dredged up, I mean look at the poster

http://twitchfilm.com/galleries/Amer.jpg

It is one of the most fetishistic films I have ever seen. Every object or movement is treated to such extraordinary scrutiny. It is like Argento's approach to bleck leather gloves applied to everything.

otm, and i love that poster

KIDNAPPED (2010, d. Miguel Ángel Vivas)

[contains some mild spoilers, just so's you know]

Okay, so I'm using that Fango "Chainsaw Awards" list to catch up on films that I'd heard about over the last year or so but forgotten or never managed to get around to. The Human Centipede 2 was first up, followed by Amer and now this. The first thing I should probably say is that Kidnapped (original Spanish title: Secuestrados) is an extremely efficient and suspenseful low-budget thriller with excellent performances, consistently impressive photographic choreography, and splendid execution of a clever central conceit: the whole thing is done in just 12 unbroken, real-time shots. It's gripping, brutal, edge-of-your-seat stuff, but it's also an despicably sadistic exercise in the cinema of pure torture. Due to its relative realism and apparent sincerity of purpose, I hated it far more than the much more cartoonishly repulsive Human Centipede 2.

Kidnapped is a simple film concerning a wealthy Spanish family whose beautiful and obviously expensive new home is invaded by a trio of vicious Eastern European thugs on the night that they first move in. Jaime, husband to Marta and father to Isa, is abducted by the leader of the small gang and taken into town where he is forced to withdraw money from his various accounts. Meanwhile, his wife and daughter are mercilessly tormented by the two remaining goons, with the stakes quickly rising from verbal abuse to beatings, torture and eventually graphic child rape. For a good deal of the film's running time, the soundtrack consists of nothing but the women's pleading, weeping, screaming and whimpering. I found the whole thing to be a hideous, pointless and ultimately infuriating endurance test. It has no seeming point other than the presumably "thrilling" spectacle of brutality, rape-threat and rape itself. That and the ever-helpful lesson that you should probably kill the bad guys when you have a chance.

Again I was reminded of the role that dehumanization plays in such films. Not dehumanization of the external sort that fails to recognize the people it perceives as real human beings, but dehumanization that through application of prolonged torture reduces human beings to a helpless, desperate, animal state in which basic perception and cognition become all but impossible. This process is essential to the mechanics of the contemporary torture-thriller, and it's probably my least favorite device in all of popular cinema. Fuck this movie.

[rewriting yesterday's amer review, cuz it was hard to read and wth]

AMER (2009, d. Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani)

First things first: Amer is one of the best and most distinctive contemporary horror movies I've seen in the last few years. What I want out of a horror film is a nightmare worth having, and that's exactly what this film delivers. Amer is usually described as an homage to the Italian giallo genre, and while that's certainly an accurate description, it suggests something much more narratively traditional than what this film actually delivers. Amer is nearly wordless, genuinely surreal, and prone to repetitive extended passages of abstract image and sound. At times I found the film more than a little trying in its unflagging dedication to retro-stylized "experimental" gestures, but was carried through by its sensuality, richly creepy atmosphere, wonderful period music and formal beauty.

In addition to giallo as a genre and certain Dario Argento films in particular, I'd say that Amer owes a substantial debt to Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon, Jaromil Jires' Valerie and Her Week of Wonders and the trashier excesses of the 70s "European art film". In terms of present-day contemporaries, it's strongly similar in style and content to recent music videos by Nicolas Mendez, sharing with them a winking affection for the campier aspects of yesterday's avant-garde (check youtube for Scissor Sisters' "Invisible Light" and El Guincho's "Bombay", both stunning). I was also reminded of David Lynch from time to time, especially in the obscure dream logic, emphasis on suggestion and fetishistic focus on mysterious totem objects.

It's basically an allegorical point-of-view journey through a young woman's sexual coming of age, visiting her as a girl, a young woman and an adult, and while much of the symbolism is quite obvious, it ultimately leaves the cumulative significance up to the viewer's interpretation. I enjoyed this strategy a great deal, especially in that the subject is retro-appropriate to the formal approach. I suspect that many viewers will see Amer as a flashy but tedious exercise in vacant style, but i loved it and had a great time puzzling out what the torrent of bizarre yet evocative images might signify.

lucky mckee's the woman is up next, though i'm not sure why, as from what i've heard, i'll probably hate it. i'm hoping for something less completely repellent than kidnapped, cuz i loved both may and the woods.

the woman is great, more later on...

man we are mirroring each others netflix queues, i just watched the woman yesterday as well.

pretty mixed here, i dig mckees sorta off kilter way of dealing with stuff like characterization, its a lot more wacky but also thoughtful than most horror stuff, and not afraid to use the somewhat ott and ridiculous to establish somebodies internal monologue. the soundtrack is a bit of a problem, there a couple points where it works, but hiring one dude to do all of the songs was a bad choice. the bigger issue for me is that this is a weirdly similar movie to ketchums earlier work the girl next door, and almost seems like a rewrite to me (although with some much more bizarro moments). i think its ok, but def loses any of the fun or lightness that mckees earlier work can achieve (the woods in particular). my thoughts are still a bit up in the air on a final verdict. better than HC2 tho!

the Wikipedia entry for The Woman is not very good

The Woman (2011, d. Lucky McKee)

I'd been dreading this one, as due to some wiener's very public freakout at Sundance last year, it's been both hyped & condemned as the last word in the ultra-brutal, rape-happy cinema of punishment. Happily, it's nothing of the sort. The Woman comes dressed (or is that undressed?) as textbook torture porn, but it's actually a subversive feminist interrogation of the genre, dressed up as a two-fisted assault on American-style patriarchy. As in his career-making debut, May, McKee's style here is a hybrid of indie and horror approaches, mixing bright pop music, clever irony and offbeat family drama with escalating psychosis and gruesome violence.

The titular character is a woods-dwelling, at seemingly feral woman who is captured and imprisoned in a makeshift dungeon by all-American family man Chris Cleek after he first spies her on a hunting expedition. Though Chris's motives are mixed at best, he pretends to his family and himself that he intends only to "help" his captive by "civilizing" her. This apparently involves shackling her to a wall and bullying her into submission. Chris's family attempts as best it can to adjust to this bizarre scheme, but begins to fragment under the stress. As the film progresses, we come to understand that they has suffered Chris's abuse for years, and that his treatment of "The Woman" is hardly a novel aberration.

Though the film does feature scenes of torture and even rape, it is never anywhere near as exploitative or sadistic as most films of this genre. I won't deny that it is at times quite graphic and disturbing, but for the most part, it implies the worst of its horrors, never stooping to wallow in suffering for its own sake. I spoke earlier about the role that "dehumanization" plays in many survival horror films, and one of the most interesting things about The Woman is how aggressively and comprehensively it subverts the genre's standard dynamics. From the outset, The Woman visually resembles the icon of the "dehumanized victim" so common to this genre: she is dirty and hunched, her hair matted, her face dark with filth. Her wide, bright eyes shine out from that darkness like those of a trapped animal. But crucially, she is never less than human. She is smarter than her captor, always thinking, always defiant, always in control of herself if not her situation. She is the return of the repressed, female identity unmaimed by male dominance, and while Chris tries to break her, to make her an appropriately subservient part of the world he imagines he has mastered, she cannot be tamed.

I suppose that all of this sounds didactic and not a little bit ridiculous. It is. The Woman is an unapologetically polemical film, and the characters are largely symbolic. It has many flaws, not the least (as jjj mentioned a few posts back), a crushing overreliance on an upbeat soundtrack consisting almost entirely of good but oddly inappropriate power-pop songs by Sean Spillane. I loved it because I like feminist horror films, allegorical horror films, political horror films, genre cinema that has something worthwhile to say. For all the terrible trials it puts its characters through, it's ultimately quite humane, respectful of identity and courage, hopeful about the possibility of resistance and change. And The Woman just kicks ass.

sorry for long. perhaps i oughtta "get a blog" or post this stuff on imdb, but i like it here, so this is what you guys get for being cool.

(and, jeez, looking back i realize that i really need to spend more time reading over this stuff before posting it. so so many wrongs.)

Fuck this movie.

YES thank you that is exactly how I felt about Kidnapped, too. What a hateful, cynical waste of considerable time, technical skill, and effort.

also, Lucky McKee is probably the nicest filmmaker I've ever met.

What a hateful, cynical waste of considerable time, technical skill, and effort.

this. most galling thing about it is how fucking brilliant it is, from a technical standpoint. one of the most skillful pieces of cinematic suspense engineering i've seen in ages ... unfortunately put in service of the worst sort of cheap, sadistic nihilism.

Totally. I knew people who admired it for that reason but it was so objectionable on every other level that I pretty much thought they were nuts.

Contenderizer, have you seen THE LOST? (Mckee produced and written, based on Ketchum)

no. curious. any good? (haven't seen red either, dunno why.)

The Skin I Live In (2011, d. Pedro Almodóvar)

By far the most self-assured and visually striking of the horror-ballpark films I've watched recently, I also had more fun with Almodóvar's latest than with any of the others. It's a strange hybrid of overheated melodrama, slow-building mystery and clinically creepy medical horror, served up with enough oddball twists and turns to keep the audience in a more-or-less constant state of gobsmacked befuddlement. Antonio Banderas plays Robert Ledgard, a renowned though reclusive surgeon and medical researcher who has developed, by means not quite entirely legal, a new kind of transgenic skin replacement tissue. Unbeknownst to the rest of the world, he keeps a lovely young woman named Vera (Elena Anaya) imprisoned in his gorgeous though jarringly eclectic art and design museum of a house, and it is through experimenting on her that he seems to have perfected his invention. As the film progresses, we learn that Robert's life has been marked by tragedy, his greatest loves undone by a pair of ghastly betrayals. The puzzle pieces are doled out slowly, in an elliptically time-jumping fashion and with plenty of red herrings, so that for most of the film's running time, we're unsure of what really happened and how it all relates to the mad doctor and his strange "patient".

Though engaging, the film has a strange, herky-jerky quality, the product of jarring tonal inconsistencies, suddenly abandoned plot threads and a wildly swerving narrative arc. The Skin I Live In is an adaptation of a popular novel, penned by the director with assistance from his brother, Augustín, and I suspect that many of these qualities are the product of an awkward transition from page to screen. I wasn't much bothered by the somewhat bumpy ride, as even the most seemingly pointless digressions and revelations are at the very least colorfully bizarre. I was, on the other hand, somewhat bothered by Almodóvar's heavy reliance on rape as a plot device. It's one that the director has employed frequently in the past but seldom in such a gratuitously nasty fashion as he does here. Nonetheless, given its subject matter, this is a much less grisly film than it could be, its darkest horrors more psychological than physical.

Many reviewers have faulted The Skin I Live In for its coldly unpleasant tone and credulity-stretching plot developments. I can see some merit in such complaints, as the conclusion seems to reach for an emotional crescendo that the film hasn't otherwise earned. I'm willing to forgive this. The combination of mystery, suspense, vivid grotesquerie and Almodovar's trademark visual flair kept me happily (if queasily) engaged throughout. The performances, sets, costumes and music are all wonderful, reason enough to recommend the film on their own. It may not be "100% medically accurate", or even all that plausible, but The Skin I Live In never fails to entertain.

(cross-posted and rewritten from the human centipede thread)

The Human Centipede 2 (2011, d. Tom Six)

Well, I didn't like it. It lives up to its billing and outdoes its predecessor in the "truly revolting" department, but is also a rather joyless chore. Where The Human Centipede gave us a comically unforgettable monster and encouraged us to sympathetically identify with his victims, the sequel is a a much less engaging proposition. Tom Six displays no interest in any of his characters save Martin, the film's pathetic, deranged and seemingly retarded villain. Martin's many victims are, for the most part, mere bodies. We know nothing about them, and they seem to exist only as mute and helpless torture subjects. We cringe at the abuse they suffer, but that's about it. The film's exclusive focus on Martin, the subject of almost every shot that doesn't represent his point of view, unfortunately robs The Human Centipede 2 of any real suspense. We're no longer trapped down there in the basement with the mad doctor's victims, hoping for the best but dreading the worst. Instead, we're watching from over the shoulder of a repulsive ghoul as he goes about his repetitive business, wondering how bad it's going to get. And it gets pretty horrible.

Laurence R. Harvey, who plays Martin, is the film's biggest asset and its weakest link. Physically, he's a riveting grotesque, but the character he portrays is so pathetic and one-dimensional that he quickly becomes tiresome. Martin sweats and frets. He lumbers fatly about and he rolls his veiny, boiled-egg popeyes while emitting an awful mewling sound. That's about it. For an hour and a half. He's like the Eraserhead baby as a grown up, murderous pervert, and his capacity to fascinate is as limited as you might imagine.

In terms of overall narrative arc and general tone, this film isn't too terribly far removed from its predecessor. It starts out as a black-hearted, deeply grotesque horror comedy but then dives at the halfway point into crushingly bleak & dismal full-on torture porn. And yeah, that's a perfectly fair description of what's going on here, as far as I'm concerned. Six's sequel is a good deal more graphic than The Human Centipede, reveling in the splattering shit and gory mutilations the first film only implied. On the other hand, it's never anywhere near as plausible as its predecessor, so the emotional impact of all the onscreen offal is fairly minimal. It's simply sickening, but undeniably effective on that score. I will say that it's a somewhat interesting, ambitious and even a clever film, though I can't explain how or why this is so without spoiling its best ideas. Potentially worth a look if you're a jaded gorehound with a stomach of iron, but recommended to no one.

^ only movie that really makes good on the thread title, imo

also, cuz fuck a spoiler, no matter how sleazy, cynical and repulsive six's films may be, he's been braver and more honest than most in explicitly admitting the pornographic aspects of "torture porn" as a genre. the human centipede 2 frames its predecessor as a horror film with which martin is sexually obsessed (cleverly retconning that film's often bad acting into a kind of jokey verisimilitude), and we eventually figure out that most everything we see in the sequel is simply a nonsensical erotic fantasy that the human centipede has inspired in martin's deranged mind.

Haven't seen the sequel, but a friend of mine noted how impressed he was at the total contrast with its predecessor. That is, the first is sort of slick and sterile, and relatively restrained (given the subject matter), yet the second is totally grungy and septic, and explicit (especially given the subject matter). That's got to be by design, though what it means, I can't say.

Has anyone else seen "Rare Exports?" Easily the best twisted Christmas horror film since "Gremlins."

http://dailydead.com/david-gordon-greens-surpiria-remake-is-official/

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

after they remade texas chainsaw massacre I just don't give a frig anymore. go ahead, remake eraserhead, I don't care.

yeah, wicker man was my dgas breaking point, can no longer muster so much as a disgruntled expression

Well at least its dd green? He can do good work sometimes. Great work with the right material.

Wait waht

This is the dude that brought us pineapple express and your highness, he is officially fucking terrible

lol you saw Your Highness

(xpost) Enh, even if you're a fan of Hooper's Texas Chainsaw 2 (I'm not) those 90s followups were pretty bad, way before the remake and the prequel. The "brand" has been compromised for quite some time. 3D one on the way this year. No thanks.

George Washington and All the Real Girls are both great movies and i will ride for pineapple express

ok i have not seen either of those. cant get behind pineapple express myself though, and even if i could that movie gives me zero optimism abt the dude handling suspiria well, which despite its O_O moments works with a lot of subtlety, which pineapple express has none of.

DGG's career suggests the movie he should be remaking is Body Snatchers.

or white zombie maybe

Or "the stuff"

Or Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things.

Why remake Susperia? The movie is renowned for it's visual style, not it's script. Who's doing the remake Return to Reason? Jon Favreau?

This thread is hard to search for!

Anyway, "Cabin in the Woods:" what a weird fucking movie. Like "Tucker and Dale" meets ... "Cube?" Tips its hand to its best gag early, not sure I like where the film ends up. Reminds me a bit too much of Ben Stiller's "Low-Budget Tales of Cliched Horror" bit. Everybody see it so we can discuss.

I liked Tucker & Dale. Not to your point. I just wanted to post that I had a good laugh and was charmed by the movie.

CITW was fun, but felt like more of a stoned undergradute cultural studies thesis paper than a movie at times.

I wish they had more fun having fun with it, or found a better way to reveal just what was going on. By the end I was thinking of these sort of every which way but loose VHS b-movies like "Return of the Living Dead III" and "Waxwork."

(I liked Tucker & Dale a lot, too! This one had some fun with cliche subversion, but less consistently so)

I liked CITW. Merman gag was pretty solid.

Merman gag was ace. Motorcycle into barrier gag would have been good had they not revealed said barrier so early with that eagle.

i think it was pretty lolsome that you knew it was coming.

cabin in the woods was fun shit, it was pretty fucking goofy but had some genuinely startling moments, fran kranz + bradley whitford = gold.

i think it was pretty lolsome that you knew it was coming.

You mean, it was funnier knowing he would fail? In that case, I don't they pulled the gag off that well. They could have had a Sam Jackson in "Deep Blue Sea" moment, but nope.

This was so Fran Kranz's movie, and if I ever saw it again - and I'm not sure why I would need to see it again - I'd see it for him. Some dude on etsy I'm sure is getting right on that travel-bong.