Best Horror Film of 1996 (part 25 of a series)

Frighteners vs Scream for me

terrible movie vs different terrible movie for me

voting szamanka in protest

The Craft > Scream

Oh, I didn't even see that on the list

The Craft or Scream or The Frighteners; would have also considered From Dusk 'Til Dawn had it not been for the first 30 minutes

The only ones I know are pretty bad on this one. From Dusk Til Dawn is kind of throwaway fun but despite the vamps I don't really think of it as 'horror'. The Craft and Scream are stupid and unscary. All I can do is shake my head at the Island of Dr Moreau. Haven't yet seen the Stendhal Syndrome, though it's probably the best one on here. I thought All of Them Witches rang a bell but then I remembered it's said in Rosemary's Baby, so nope. Szamanka has a poor imdb rating but then the 'if you like this...' recommendation has Possession as its first suggestion, so that's got to be good.

I should try to stop over-using titles in paragraphs, as the italics start to hurt my eyes.

I'm a fan of all capsing movie titles.

The Dentist is a movie I will never see

really want some sort of blinky boldface red type indicating the part 2 on henry portrait of a serial to avoid kneejerk votes :(

you know what was a terrible movie, was Bordello of Blood

lol why have I (comparatively) seen so many of these, I am not a horror dude

yeah wow bordello of blood is just super awful

That's the one with Dennis Miller in the lead, right? What terrible casting.

I had high hopes after "Demon Knight" too

The Carnosaur series is fun, if you picture the grips moving the dinosaur torsos off-camera like a Joss Whedon credit. Grrr! Argh!

Hellraiser: Bloodline - that was "Hellraiser in Space", right? Not great, if so, but the end sequence of the space station reconfiguring itself was a decent idea.

I think I actually kind of enjoyed The Island of Dr. Moreau. And that it seemed to be really fast paced.
Not that this means it wasn't bad...

I really like Dr. Moreau! Too bad the rest of the world hated it.

I recall liking the first half of moreau, brando's weirdness is so great, but they couldn't follow through

still haven't seen the director's cut tho, not sure if that makes a diff

http://liveforfilms.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/moreau.jpg

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Part 2

this happened? ugh

not a lot of good stuff on this list but it is an improvement over the previous year. I like Scream okay, altho it wears out its welcome with the "meta" stuff. Dusk til Dawn I remember being good once Tarantino's character got killed off, but iirc all the best gags in the movie are also lifted directly from other, better horror movies like Evil Dead 2

the beginning of "From Dusk 'Til Dawn" is EXCRUCIATING, and not in a good way

Clooney sure was in a lot of turkeys early on

like a lot of these! no surprise, i always do:

Bad Moon - disappointing werewolf flick from eric red. dude wrote the hitcher and near dark (!), directed body parts, i expected a lot better.
Bordello of Blood - horribly annoying dennis miller horror comedy, not a patch on demon knight.
The Craft - fun, trashy teen witch popcorn flick
The Dentist - stylized, over-the-top brian yuzna flick about a mentally deteriorating dentist. grisly as hell but still comical, and corben bernsen's great in it.
Diabolique - never saw this, fuck a remake
From Dusk Till Dawn - love this movie, even love the first act, though i wish tarantino weren't in it.
The Frighteners - a mess, but so much fun. love michael j fox, love the kitchen-sink approach. remember peter jackson?
Mary Reilly - remember nothing about this but that it was both atmospheric and deadly dull. love julia roberts though.
Organ - ghastly, deeply disturbing japanese art movie, a despairing wallow in the soul commode. worthwhile, but no fun at all.
Original Sins - know nothing about this. want to see it!
Rubber's Lover - another no-budget art film from japan, this one an industrial/sci-fi fetish piece, shot in black & white. same ballpark as tetsuo (iron man).
Scream - loved it at the time, wouldn't mind seeing it again. fast-paced, clever (to a fault) and charming.
The Stendhal Syndrome - one of the last argento flicks i enjoyed, but it's hardly a favorite.
They Bite - dumb, trashy horror comedy, reminiscent both of 80s cheese and 50s kitsch. basically homemade, but a lot more enjoyable than it has any right to be.

Stendhal Syndrome is probably a slight favourite. Organ's pretty good though.

i guess my favorites this time around are the pop movies: the dentist, from dusk till dawn, the frighteners and scream. and of those, i guess i have to go for the frighteners, with scream not far behind.

i feel like i'm slighting organ and rubber's lover here, but while they're interesting and memorable, i can't call either a personal favorite.

this is all about my high-school celeb crush: Fairuza Balk...The Craft was her high-profile project, but I saw that for the first time, like, last week (no R-rated films in my house growing up); Moreau was PG-13 I believe and it was the first time I saw her. Both movies flub badly in their respective third acts, but I gotta be real to teenage-weirdo Drugs & vote Moreau...

Gamera 2: Attack of the Legion? I remember liking this one but I seriously doubt it qualifies as horror...

"Frighteners" is such an odd, forgotten film, part novel idea, part real-time R&D, part nuts, part oddly affecting. I liked "From Dusk til Dawn" the one time I saw it; read a review once that suggested it works best when you're in a horrible mood. But I was just talking to a friend about how "Scream," despite its general inadequacies, was almost single-handedly responsible for bringing back the R-rated mainstream horror film and also wresting control of the genre away from producers and back to directors. (Again, talking mainstream here.)

OTM, re: frighteners

also wresting control of the genre away from producers and back to directors. (Again, talking mainstream here.)

not sure this panned out, but it's a nice idea

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNiUQI6UY1Q

need to see that movie. love the clip, but those dudes cracking jokes are insufferable.

Think about all the sequel franchises of the '80s and '90s, and you've got a lot of producer/studio driven stuff, directed by hacks. But think about horror since "Scream," and you can often actually name the guys behind the camera. I don't mean directors are not beholden to producers/studios - that's entertainment - but there's no question we've gradually entered another golden age of the horror auteur. Not all good, mind, but horror auteurs all the same.

i get you, but my fanboy vision of 80s and even 90s horror was largely director-driven: wes craven, john carpenter, david cronenberg, david lynch, brian de palma, sam raimi, peter jackson, stuart gordon, steve miner, frank henelotter, etc. i think most hardcore horror fans see the genre in similar terms. lots of films released during this period with billing like "john carpenter's in the mouth of madness", or "wes craven's shocker".

agree that the massive mainstream success of scream (and m night sham's the sixth sense) did seem put renewed emphasis on the auteur/director, eventually giving rise to mainstream successes like guillermo del toro, rob zombie, eli roth and alexandre aja - as well as indie cult heroes like larry fessenden and lucky mckee. internet fan culture and series like masters of horror undoubtedly helped in this regard.

i'm not sure, however, that there was any real fallow period during which the director was forgotten and the producer took over. i mean, today's horror market is still flooded with producer-driven product of every imaginable sort.

Ha, well, if you consider anything Steve Miner did as "director driven," then yeah. But that sets the bar pretty low. Gordon, Henelotter, et al, those guys were pretty much off the radar and relegated to video store fame, while Raimi's and Jackson's relationship to horror in the '90s was fleeting at best; I mean, Raimi did a western and a baseball movie! Sure, Craven and Carpenter were holdovers from another era, but both had remarkably rocky late'80s and early '90s, while Cronenberg and Lynch were their own animals, and not even clearly "horror" for that matter. And De Palma isn't remotely a horror director, let alone in the '80s and '90s.

I mean, I get your point: horror geeks knew who was making what in those days. But most people only knew horror as the latest Friday the 13th, Nightmare, etc sequel. hence that really turgid, dire, fallow period in the early '90s, pre-Scream, as ratified by those particularly unexciting yearly entries in these polls. It took Scream to revitalize the box office, and after that a new crew of visionaries (for better or worse) were able to get major exposure for projects that just a few years earlier would have had their budgets halved and their films relegated to video shelf hell.

I should've known the MSTies would give me shit for my Balk <3...

"Tesis", without a doubt.

haven't seen rubber's lover but I think I saw the one he did before, 964 pinocchio?

guess I should check out organ, since every time contenderizer calls a movie a grim and nihilistic void of no fun at all it's always one of my favorites

"Ron got splinched!"

Between South Park and especially Austin Powers, the Brando Moreau might be the most popularly referenced movie that people don't even realize is being referenced.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87GvKCFlg0Q

"Tesis", without a doubt.

― daavid, Friday, June 3, 2011 7:27 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah, read the imdb entry for this and am intrigued. never so much as heard of it.

jonathan rosenbaum luvved it

yeah I've heard a lot about tesis but never seen it either

re Josh in Chicago:

yeah, lol, i knew throwing steve miner in there was a mistake. terrible director who briefly became a "name" in the genre due to the success of one film - a producer-driven sequel at that! so he lends more support to your case than mine.

anyway, i happily class cronenberg and lynch not just as makers of horror movies but as "horror directors" and think that many of brian de palma's films flirt with or at least borrow from horror. i mean, sure, dressed to kill is an extreme example, but his 80s thrillers seemed to have been influenced by dario argento at least as much as hitchcock, and few object to the classification of argento's films as horror. the line's clearly fuzzy, though, so agree to differ...

i guess the only part of your first post i took issue with was the conflation of the 80s and 90s in describing an era of, "producer/studio driven stuff, directed by hacks." the late 80s and early-mid 90s were arguably dire in that regard, but the early 80s are, in my mind, a golden era. sure, they were commercially dominated by fluffy teen trash, but they were also a boom time that elevated an entire generation of horror filmmakers.

Oh, yeah, I conflated the two decades because I meant the span you indicate - the bridge between 80s and 90s. Early 80s were ace. Then the hacking began, so to speak, to capitalize on (which is to say, flood) video and cable.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

First tie! And only one vote for Scream?

downloaded tesis, but haven't watched it yet. tonight!

I remember it being pretty good, but definitely overdetermined by plot mechanics.

Island of Dr. Moreau & Craft tied for third :D