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

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.

that is the movie as well

It kind of goes without saying that a "Saw" sequel should be shitty, but this looks particularly shitty:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWiUQp0yM34

As in, seriously *looks* shitty. Filters, relentless Dutch angles, sweaty faces.

the book of saw

A popup book

p disappointed at Rock following up two of the best things in his career (Top 5 and his recent standup) with this inexplicable piece of garbage

he also came up with the idea for the movie: https://deadline.com/2019/05/chris-rock-to-reboot-saw-franchise-with-lionsgate-twisted-pictures-1202616185/
i don't know, i'm curious

Bug and Killer Joe are both nasty and great

so is color out of space worth seeing

I saw Bug so long ago I had no idea who Michael Shannon was, but I remember it being pretty good in a highly claustrophobic way. I should get around to Killer Joe one of these days.

Killer Joe's great but the stage version's even better. something about being in the same room as that maniac just raises the stakes.

I missed the point of Bug when I saw it, due for a rewatch

watched Ready or Not last night, one of the worst films I've ever seen

Wow, I guess see more movies? At the very least it's competent.

not sure how it's competent when it fails at being a horror, a comedy, a satire or anything else one would assume it's going for

colour is fine? i wouldn't get too excited but it does what it says on the wrapper.

i didn't hate ready or not but i did think it was mediocre and squandered some game performances. i agree it was weak satire and not particularly funny or scary. everybody exploding at the end did make me laugh.

ready or not is definitely ugly-looking and never gives you a sense of the mansion as a coherent space which is like basically inept filmmaking. but i had fun so who gives a shit

Its horror and satire are weak but I've seen enough shitty horror/comedy-ish movies to recognize it as better than average, if only for the goofy ending. It's not going in the Library of Congress or anything, but it's definitely not inept, come on.

Like, I have a pretty low tolerance for inept, I have no qualms walking out of movies.

no i just mean that a movie having no sense of the space it takes place in is bad filmmaking 101. the layout of the mansion and where characters are situated in it at any given time is pure randomness and confusion. i enjoyed the movie despite this

Heh, I think I appreciated the mansion and its passages and stuff as just, like, a production design McGuffin. That is, in "Knives Out" - or even "Clue" - where things are matters. In this one, not so much. Just need to be doors and cabinets and whatnot to pop in and out of, the how and where of it didn't matter much to me. For example, no matter how many times I've seen, say, "Evil Dead 2," I have no idea how that cabin works as a space.

Imo, having a likable, charismatic lead made a huge difference, and if that was all the film did well, that's enough for me these days.

that's the one thing it did have going for it admittedly, unfortunately everyone else in it bugged the shit out of me

Just saw Color Out of Space and thought it was dull af, crummy CGI & acting out of a SyFy original movie, and Cage does not deliver nearly enough of teh crazy to make it worthwhile imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoJc2tH3WBw

Brad otm about Ready Or Not and the mansion. For a film that is almost entirely about playing hide and seek, it has basically zero tension as well. Samara Weaving is always good value though.

I’ve seen to much trash recently on planes. Annabelle Comes Home and La Llorona suggest that the people making the Conjuring universe stuff, while never high art, have basically stopped trying. Just a dull slog with a cobbled together script and a handful of jump scares. McKenna Grace, despite being about ten, is vastly better than the former deserves.

Fantasy Island, which has a very strong vibe of a film Paris Hilton would have starred in circa 2004, is at least watchable.

Oz Perkins’ Gretel & Hansel looks like it might be legit good, from the trailer.

Samara Weaving is always good value though.

I thought she was a big reason why the movie didn't work tbh.

Green Knight looks cool but fuck that cgi fox.

I thought "Doctor Sleep" was pretty silly, and sometimes strange, and not at all scary, and I'm surprised it got a theatrical release rather than live on Netflix with most of Mike Flanagan's stuff. But I like him, and he did about as well as he could with the material, I suppose. I saw the director's cut, fwiw, so can only imagine the theatrical version was even more confusing.

It's a weird thing, though, this movie. "Doctor Sleep," the book, was (I guess? I didn't read it) a sequel to "The Shining" (the book, which I've also never read), but of course "The Shining" (the movie) is apparently pretty different from the book. So I suppose this this movie is trying to be both adaptation of "Doctor Sleep" (the book) and sequel to "The Shining" (the movie).

It retreads a lot of familiar territory for King; the redemptive alcoholic etc. And it kept some of his worst traits - his anti-zigianism, the predictable buddy death. And it just felt too fantastic. Sucking a soul from a flask? It just didn’t work.

I'm no King stan, but while there did seem to be tons of familiar stuff ... it's a sequel. Regardless, a more interesting story could have been told without those "Near Dark" leftovers, since it has all those themes of abuse (alcohol and child) to explore. But like I said, probably did about as well as it could with the material.

(Had to google antiziganism)

Also: de-gloving and tendon cuts, King seems to like those.

I watched Splice (2009), and it’s been a while since I disliked a film so strongly. I don’t think a single thing anyone did in this film is believable, the characters are wildly inconsistent, clumsy dialogue. Stupid and ugly.

$4 Comcast stream of "Haunt" was worth the money. Kids out driving in country see "Haunted House" neon sign, decide to visit house run by masked people. Final girl was a decent character. Not original, but done well, with a few things I didn't expect, and a satisfying ending.