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

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!

I just saw Cabin in the woods for the first time a couple of months ago and I was thinking that I really liked it except for the ending. I see now that the ending is what people really loved about it.

The Shallows was really disappointing. xpost

Crawl offended me from a hurricane realism standpoint. Nobody in FL wakes up unaware they might get hit by a fuckin category 5 hurricane. A 1, maybe.

But really the reason i hated it is I hate most Floridians

except for the ones with scales, they don't fare very well in Crawl

tbf the movie works pretty well as a "what not to do if there's a huge hurricane" PSA. 1) Don't drive *into* the hurricane. 2) Don't go down to the basement to work on ... what was he doing down there, anyway? Fixing the cable? 3) Stay out of the water; they could make a sequel to this called "Cholera." 4) If the house and entire street is flooded with famished alligator-infested water, get on the roof.

do they address that houses in florida don't have basements

They might elide over it. I think at one point they call it a crawlspace, but ... it's a basement. Anyway, Aja (whose track record is pretty shitty) is predictably full of shit:

Aja, however, would like to clarify that it is not a basement featured in Crawl, but rather a crawl space. Which, given the movie’s title, makes sense.

“We looked into a lot of houses in Florida and there are indeed a lot of crawl spaces. Most of the crawl spaces are usually not higher than two to three feet,” he said.

Smaller, submerged crawl spaces — defined as an area of limited height under a floor or roof — can be found in Florida. But what about Crawl’s Florida? The movie’s fictional setting of Coral Lake, which is said to be about two hours southwest on I-75 from the University of Florida in Gainesville (my alma mater), is likely a bit south of Tampa, Florida. Quick research indicates that houses in the Tampa area can indeed have crawl spaces, judging by the numerous “Crawl Space Repair” services that populate Google. But like Aja said, most of the crawl spaces in the Tampa area appear to be about three-feet tall.

The one featured in the movie seems to be a bit taller, enough so that the movie’s 5’6” lead actress Kaya Scodelario can comfortably crouch and not bump her head.

“A lot of people now are digging the crawl space to double the space,” explained Aja. “It’s very common to dig your crawl space. So we went up to like four or five feet. But it’s not a basement. We did research. We found this house that had a deeper crawl space.”

Are there many houses in southwestern Florida with four- to five-foot crawl spaces? Probably not. Are there giant alligators on the prowl during hurricanes? Also not likely. It’s all part of that hyper-real tone and hey, if we can buy the hyperbolic alligators, maybe we can buy the hyperbolic crawl space.

I was just reading a couple of reviews tearing apart all the egregious unforced error Florida inaccuracies. Like, this seems like a big one:

One day after swimming practice, she suddenly finds out that Category 5 Hurricane Wendy is bearing down on the area and an evacuation order is in place. This by itself is weird because hurricanes are named alphabetically at the start of the year. W means there would have been a whopping 23 hurricanes already that season. There would have been no surprise hurricane at that point, and the real horror story would have been remaining Floridians fighting for limited water and food resources.

Like, give the hurricane a different name, problem solved! But no.

i'm not saying it's not dumb, i'm saying i enjoyed it!

I enjoyed the first half, honestly, before the dumbness accelerated. Like, I enjoyed most of the aforementioned "The Shallows," too, before she was being chased underwater by, iirc, a flaming shark.

I was convinced she was going to find a snake while she was crawling around under the house, that's what I would have been most scared of.

before she was being chased underwater by, iirc, a flaming shark.

― Josh in Chicago, Wednesday, January 29, 2020 8:51 AM (twenty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this sounds fucking awesome

It is innately awesome. Just perhaps not in a movie that otherwise traffics in survival realism.

Hardware, Dust Devil
― shared unit of analysis (unperson), Saturday, January 25, 2020 6:49 PM

I wasn't crazy about what I seen of them either (I stopped Hardware half an hour from the end and couldn't finish Dust Devil because the disc was fucked) but he's done a whole lot more and I've heard plenty good about White Darkness and The Otherworld.

How is William Friedkin's "Bug?" I've never seen it, but we just saw a new staging of it here (with Carrie Coon), and it was ... just OK. I wonder if it makes a better movie.

it's kind of interesting but also a bit one-note. It's color pallette is really harsh.

Not as good as Killer Joe.

The issue my wife and I had with the play is that there's not a lot of ambiguity, so it's basically 90 minutes of watching a paranoid schizophrenic behave like ... a paranoid schizophrenic.