ok lets all shit our pants to something old: pre-2006 horror film thread

finally watched Maniac Cop, not the tone I was expecting and bruce campbell kinda phones it in but overall a lot of fun, stoked to watch the sequels

Maniac Cop 2 is maybe better and more fun and features a pretty novel car chase conceit that I've never seen before and I have no idea how the stuntwoman made it through the scene without sustaining severe carpal injuries. Haven't heard much good about the third, though.

I remain very interested in the refn/hyams reboot series

Finally! I've got a czech dvd of this but I'm so happy about this
https://secondrundvd.ecwid.com/#!/Beauty-and-the-Beast-Blu-ray-Special-Edition/p/367281809/category=0

Watched Night of the Eagle aka Burn, Witch, Burn! last night, holy shit did I ever love that. great script, really inventive direction, awesome effects, engaging performances, a killer premise, and an ending that doesn't shit the bed. (also, since it involves witches and voodoo, I kept waiting for overt racism and/or misogyny, but it never really materializes much - I'm sure it helped that this fellow apparently wrote the final draft) the US version, which is under the latter title, adds a wonderful voice-only intro that is already one of my favorite-ever openings to a movie

Just saw that for the first time a few months back. VG+, a much more serious-minded horror flick than most Arkoff productions of that era. As much love as I have for AIP's campy goof-fests, it's a welcome change of pace.

I wld say that Night of the Eagle/Burn With Burn is Baxt's best credit, although City of the Dead has some nice atmos.

Peter Wyngarde gives a 'full' performance in NOTE/BWB but he's pretty effective playing/conveying fear in the face of unseen terror.

he really grew on me over the course of the movie for sure

horror channel uk seems to be working through cronenberg movies. and i must've seen Scanners before, but i hadn't recognised the sample on, i think, Dubstep Allstars Volume 2 until today.

(yeah, DA2, specifically Loefah's Goat Stare

)

https://arrowfilms.com/product-detail/the-snake-girl-and-the-silver-haired-witch-blu-ray/FCD2196
Worth a watch, I have a bootleg of this. Adapted from Umezu's comic, he makes a brief appearance.

shudder just added messiah of evil. if you have not seen messiah of evil, drop everything

Dead and Buried is the other great horror film directed by Gary (Death Line) Sherman. It was actually considered a 'video nasty' in the UK on its first VHS release, probably because of the old needle to the eyeball moment.

― Ward Fowler, Monday, May 17, 2021 6:52 PM (two months ago)

Quite surprised by this. Just watched Dead And Buried and found it a little underwhelming despite good moments. Script seemed a bit cliched and the acting didn't smooth over it. Style of Death Line is just completely different.

I am psyched to see Messiah of Evil at some point but I don't have Shudder so someone needs to put the blu-ray back in print.

Fun fact: it's written and directed by the folks that brought us Howard the Duck! I won't hold that against it, though.

Abel Ferrara watching The Driller Killer, the good stuff. pic.twitter.com/QHVcyuAMhH

— John Frankensteiner (@JFrankensteiner) October 20, 2020

Messiah of Evil is gd fun - in parts it's the most proto-Lynchian film I can think of - but it does have one of the all-time lame endings (they ran out of money before they could shoot a proper finale).

I missed the recent Eureka release of Viy with the bonus limited edition extra film called Sveto Mesto/A Holy Place. Luckily it is on youtube in a probably scratchier but very watchable form.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwYk7h_wJAk
It's one of the most substantially different versions of Viy I've seen (let's forget about the recent one). More sex, ballbusting, an angry cat and the witch seduces women too. Doesn't have the full-on phantasmagoria of the other ones, but takes interesting directions, definitely worthwhile.

that ferrara commentary is hilarious

Yeah, next time I pick up any of his films I'll check for commentary. Kind of great to hear him just laughing at the really nasty bits.

Just got the Daimajin boxed set (the trilogy all came out within 7 or 8 months in 1966!) and reading an essay in the booklet about the cultural impact. A ton of famous writers and directors were going to do reboots. Katsuhiro Otomo scripted a film that was going to feature Steven Seagal and Golden Harvest was going to co-produce one featuring Kevin Costner. There's a very expensive fan film that was well liked but copyright prevents it getting a proper release

Seems that Kim Newman stuffed his recent Anno Dracula books with an extensive list of japanese monsters including Daimajin and even Kato from Teito Monogatari (the character that M Bison/Vega from Street Fighter was based on)

Daimajin and (at last) Criterion Godzilla set on their way to me, psyched for big-time kaiju filmfest

fear dot com!!!!!

i watched william malone's 1999 remake of house on haunted hill the other week and i loved it so much i needed to see the other movie he made that people actually watched, and fear dot com is maybe the most visually inventive horror movie of its era. if you like shitty macromedia flash websites that are also evil and full of gnarled gothic industrial designs that keep peeling back to reveal FURTHER gnarled gothic industrial designs and also detective procedurals that make little to no sense and also naked ghosts vomiting up blood, this is your (and my) movie. also forecasted the coming decade of torture porn two years in advance of saw

if you like shitty macromedia flash websites that are also evil and full of gnarled gothic industrial designs that keep peeling back to reveal FURTHER gnarled gothic industrial designs and also detective procedurals that make little to no sense and also naked ghosts vomiting up blood, this is your (and my) movie. if you like shitty macromedia flash websites that are also evil and full of gnarled gothic industrial designs that keep peeling back to reveal FURTHER gnarled gothic industrial designs and also detective procedurals that make little to no sense and also naked ghosts vomiting up blood, this is your (and my) movie. if you like shitty macromedia flash websites that are also evil and full of gnarled gothic industrial designs that keep peeling back to reveal FURTHER gnarled gothic industrial designs and also detective procedurals that make little to no sense and also naked ghosts vomiting up blood, this is your (and my) movie. if you like shitty macromedia flash websites that are also evil and full of gnarled gothic industrial designs that keep peeling back to reveal FURTHER gnarled gothic industrial designs and also detective procedurals that make little to no sense and also naked ghosts vomiting up blood, this is your (and my) movie. if you like shitty macromedia flash websites that are also evil and full of gnarled gothic industrial designs that keep peeling back to reveal FURTHER gnarled gothic industrial designs and also detective procedurals that make little to no sense and also naked ghosts vomiting up blood, this is your (and my) movie. if you like shitty macromedia flash websites that are also evil and full of gnarled gothic industrial designs that keep peeling back to reveal FURTHER gnarled gothic industrial designs and also detective procedurals that make little to no sense and also naked ghosts vomiting up blood, this is your (and my) movie.

this is my favorite sentence ever, thank you Brad :)

Amazing boxed set, I've heard the third film isn't very good but this should be fun. I'm a fan of Great Yokai War despite some notable flaws.
https://arrowfilms.com/product-detail/yokai-monsters-collection-limited-edition/FCD2205

Stuart Gordon's Dagon - This is actually an adaptation of "Shadow Over Innsmouth", I didn't detect anything from "Dagon". I liked this better than Reanimator and From Beyond, aside from some iffy special effects it's pretty good. I'm half convinced the team behind Resident Evil 4 seen this, the resemblance seems quite strong to me. All the Barbara Steele comparisons for Macarena Gomez make sense, she looks like a total goth queen in this, wish I'd seen her in more stuff but she's never stopped working.

I love Dragon, the thickness of Fransisco Rabal's dialect and unsubbed Spanish increases hugely the otherness imo.

Macarena Gómez is great, the last thing I saw her in was Hex Studios' The Black Gloves.

Shrew's Nest seems to be one of her best known films, looks alright
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuLVPWNcCqs

She's so genuinely eerie in this scene
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MANS9q9o6ec/TwuR3ZkniMI/AAAAAAAANuw/6ULB1n45_DA/s1600/Dagon%2B2.jpg

Slight Curse Of The Crimson Altar vibes here?
https://ilarge.lisimg.com/image/8224825/1024full-macarena-g%C3%B3mez.jpg

The scene with the huge well might have been a lift from Corman's Haunted Palace?

I watched the Changeling and had quite a flat reaction to it - though it has grown in my imagination since. I like a slow burn but found the pacing a bit off and as much as I'm happy with ambiguity, I don't think the writing quite managed the job of tieing up the two strands (griefwork vs uncovering of a horrible plot to bury the murder of a child). George C. Scott is fantastic though, no doubt.

I think you could invent a drinking game where you drink every time he puts on/takes off his coat. You'd be arseholed within a half hour.

Difficult to explain why I like it so much. Scott is so likable in it

A three hour documentary on folk horror? Count me in.

https://gizmodo.com/woodlands-dark-and-days-bewitched-is-the-only-folk-horr-1847599210

It's included in the massive Severin folk horror box set that just opened up for preorders.

(But the doc can also be preordered on its own from Severin.)

(But why preorder just the doc when you can drop almost $200 and also get a ton of movies that are featured in the doc.)

watched the doc already! they mention lots of stuff i've never seen, the box looks like a solid deal to me!!

a full winter's worth of horrifying folky entertainment, what else could a person ask for

I recommended it above recently but here's the new trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhfW_5dUqco

i showed sleepaway camp to someone who knew nothing about it the other night and it was the best, especially to see her register the ending

Lol I haven't had that pleasure in such a long time

Finished the Daimajin boxed set. They aren't great films but I liked the setting and the monster. They follow a very strict formula, the second film has a more artful style but not a whole lot more depth or excitement. It's not surprising there hasn't been many more revivals because it seems like hardly anyone knows what to do with Daimajin. The commentaries and sleeve notes are really good, especially the Jonathan Clements commentary of the third film, hope he does many more commentaries.

I've only watched the first Daimajin so far, but I loved the presentation - the blu ray looks absolutely lush. The period setting was a nice change of pace from Godzilla's modern day dress, and I thought the visual effects held up pretty well. Daimajin's eyes - wow!

Yeah, the parting water effect (like in Ten Commandments) in the second film is very good, part of what makes it the best film for me. The usual urban skyscrapers setting is part of why I can't get into kaiju films.

There's a bunch of behind the scenes stories about the eyes. Jasper Sharp and Tom Mes talk a lot about a film called Buddha and it seems like a mostly overlooked but important part of film history.

Seems like most of us only scratch the surface of japanese film history but the television history is talked about a lot, as if the people making it overlap maybe more than hollywood would have overlapped with american television (?). Maybe same with Hong Kong television. Wonder how much of their old tv shows are worth seeking out?

I watched the new 4K print of Prince of Darkness. I enjoyed myself but it didn't quite cohere for me. I loved elements of it (the dream sequences proper creeped me out; the final scene with the mirror) but the goofy elements were a bit duff. My favourite Carpenter is the nihilistic, fully committed Carpenter; I did laugh out loud in places but the humour took me out of the film in this case. Alice Cooper looked like he'd wandered off the set of Thriller.

Also watched both In Search of Darkness docs. Kinda gruelling across 8 hours but superbly researched and put together.

i know this might sound ridiculous but prince of darkness is a grower not an immediate mindblower

the first time i watched it i saw it after the thing and before in the mouth of madness and i was like "this is kinda cool but hmm idk"

second time i watched it the oppressive apocalyptic vibe was just so deeply intoxicating

i mean, like, when that guy just disintegrates into bugs... man

what a movie

when they keep looking in on kelly and her face is just like fucking eroding?????