Marathon of Madness

[C-zom]

Leprechaun


I never thought I'd say this, but Jennifer Aniston was pretty hot as a teenager. That said she looks like a horse now, but she is the only good part of this worthless, worthless black comedy. It is in my top five most hated movies *ever*. Ridiculous kills, dead pan humor, lame ass villain, next to no gore. The only good part is her in tight shorts for one and a half hours--and that isn't even that great.

Up next is The Devil's Backbone

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Devil's Backbone

I've touched upon my feelings about Del Toro before in this topic. He has a very particular dark fantasty style that has a twinge of sarcasm and indifference built into otherwise melodramatic stories. His imagery is very saturated and usually much like a graphic novel in motion. His idea of horror seems to be edginess, and his idea of emotion is almost entirely just one of regret. He's one of the easiest directors to analyise and I can say for certain after watching 80% of his movies over time, he is not a director I like.

Devil's Backbone plays much like Pan's Labyrinth 0.5. In the Spanish civil war a poor young boy is dropped off at an orphange/shelter for boys in the middle of the desert to hide from the incoming nationalists. A ghost story unfolds in here that plays off pretty monotonely. We're introduced to all the stereotypical boys in an as-is manner. There's the tough bully with a heart of gold ,there's the little kid who follows the hero around, there's the wimp and then there's the adults who are: The respectble sage old guy, the Woman with another agenda and the evil dictator bad guy who everyone afraid of.

It IS Pan's Labyrinth, just done differently. My major complaints is just how average and "done to death" the movie is. The acting is boring, the ghost is shown way too much and is stupid looking and there is absolutely no creeping fear or growing tension like in Pan's. Its just as boring and single-toned as the desert it takes place in. Points I need to get are for the last fifteen minutes. The explosion scene is brutal and very well done. But the actual climax is really silly, and left a bad taste in my mouth.

[C-zom]

Serpent and the Rainbow

I don't know what the fuck I just watched, and I don't really care. Wes Craven once again delivers a confusing, poorly writtern, poorly acted mess of a movie. This one is about a chemical that brings the dead back to life supposedly to then be used as slaves via voodoo. Bill Pullman, one of my least favorite actors, tries to find all the answers and what happens is basically a bad pipe dream. Dream sequences are repeated dozens of times, characters are introduced and then vanish and the direction is as cloudy as the zombie's state of mind.

Useles movie, not one bit of horror or atmospheric tension. Waste.

[The Angry Alien]

Do you like any horror movies?

[Fake from State Jarm]

shit I just reviewed the thread

[C-zom]

The one's I've seen so far I've liked

Jacob's Ladder
[REC]
The Descent
Cronos (Kinda)
Prince of Darkness
Frailty
Nosferatu
Castle Freak
The Changeling


There's about 35 more movies on the list I can't wait to watch that I like. So yes, it may seem like a lot of my reviews are negative, but I have a very "both sides of the fence" style to looking at things. I take in the pros and cons, and don't like using numbers to rate.

[Gangs]

moar plz

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Session 9


One of my favorite psychological horrors and for quite a few reasons. The directing and scenes are smart. Heavy on dialog and subtle horror and building up atmosphere rather than coming out at you with some stupid lore buildup or an immediate concern of a monster. No, Session 9 plays off like a normal movie with "something wrong" for the first half. A team of "Fiber" cleaners (Asbestos) are assigned to clearing out an Insane Asylum of hazardous material. For the first half of the movie its really just explaining the characters and also slow-burning a feeling of uneasiness around everything and everyone. I respected this buildup style and even though it was played off as a normal drama, some subtle scares or voices you heard and could have missed made it interesting.

And then things get creepy. Very, very creepy--When the "sessions" are found by one of the workers regarding a woman with split personalities things get really disturbing. The Woman is plagued and quite insane and the Doctor is trying to find out what 'happened" on a night ages ago. She won't tell. But whats brilliant is her personality switches. You need to suspend your disbelief but when the other voices show up who act like different people, its quite disturbing. The buildup to Simon is greatly done.

The rest of the horror comes from a Lovecraftian approach to insanity and a slow decline into guilt and torment. This is focused on two characters only with the rest being treated as minor. As the movie goes on, more and more odd and out of character things happen and eventually one of the workers goes missing. The tension is second only to The Thing--You don't know who to trust because everyone has an agenda.

This movie has some memorable scare scenes without making you jump--"What are you doing here", and the tapes, being the main hallmarks. If you like to be creeped out and not made to jump and want an interesting horror movie, this is the one for you. Its simply well made for its budget and doesn't ever kill your suspension of disbelief. The twist is surprising, the plot is authentic and the tapes are excellent.

[Gangs]

more reviews please, i am simultaneously watching movies you say are good...so MOAR!

[C-zom]

Ju-On (The Grudge)


was so bad I don't think I even want to review it all that much to be honest. A boy meowing and a gurgling girl, some jump scares, a disjointed and shitty plot and bad acting mixed in for good measure. on top of this: soap opera camera.

useless movie

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Forgot a review

Eden Lake (WATCHED BEFORE SERPENT)

This is a waste of a movie and I could even as far as to say the worst I've seen yet. The premise is a couple goes on their honeymoon in the middle of the fucking woods in no where. Fortunately for them the decide to camp out by a lake right next to the worst case of "Town with a secret". This secret is, you find out in ten minutes, that the teenagers rule the roost and all of them have the worst stereotyped british accents ever. After the guy tries to stand up to them he gets cut down to size and its up to the girl to run around and save the day, hunt the kids Rambo 4 style, and so on and so forth.

This movie tears limbs off of: Cabin Fever, Evil Dead, Children of the Corn, and so many other movies and does little to live up to any of their names. Terrible acting is mixed in with a stupid as shit premise that makes no sense and logic escapes the movie. The fact is. I, or you, or anyone on this forum could kick the crap out of those cockney teenagers and get away. Its why I hate the "kids/dolls are out to get us" horror movies. I could turn them all inside out. Hell, even canti could.

Stupid, stupid movie with some of the most unberable acting I've seen.

[C-zom]

Candyman

I have mixed feelings about Clive Barker. His voodoo/cultist style books and movies could appeal to some, if not a lot, of horror readers. He has a sense of amatuerish charm around his writing which almost all delves into the same style: Evil sorcerer/occult/magic is returning and the main character goes clinically insane before the end of the story.

He follows this same formula in what is probably his best book-to-film adaptation yet surprisingly. Candyman plays on the every day boogeyman story: If you say Candyman five times in the mirror, your shit will get rocked by a hook handed monk who is also one of the coolest black badasses in film. The naive pair of college students dig deep into the candyman mystery before two sub plots open up and a conventional slasher is turned on its head into craziness and romanticism.

Its an odd movie and isn't for everybody. Its acting, and budget, shows the strains the director must have had to make this movie as good as it was. But the fact remains: Candyman has a chilling villain, a good cast, some legitimate gory scares we've grown to know Clive Barker for and a fucking weird last half that makes this purchase entirely worthwhile. But one striking problem remains: Can't call it horror. Its a blatant mystery movie with some gory kills in it, there is no tension or atmosphere. For that, I've gotta dock points... considerable ones.

[C-zom]

Children of the Corn

Another useless "town with a secret" horror movies that takes this to a stupidly high degree. You're expected to believe a small cult of children can kill every adult in their rather large town, and whats worse is they worship a corn god. A couple shows up in the corn town and soon get in shenanigans that involve the guy running after his kidnapped girlfriend and also uncovering whats going on.

Whats going on? One of the silliest and most boring stephen king short (short short) stories being put to full length movie with some stupid characters, painful acting and absolutely no scares at all. At all! There aren't even jump scares and the ending special effects are so bad it destroys whatever atmosphere the monster reveal might have had. Ugh, just... this movie sucked.

[C-zom]

Friday the 13th

Besides for taking 45 minutes for anything to happen and only featuring 2-3 even half decent kills, 13th still remains my third or fourth favorite slasher for one reason only: Its so bad its good. The atmosphere, the acting, the style, the kills, the fake gore--its the epitome of the genre. So much show it spawned dozens of spinoffs, sequels and inspired even some half decent slashers to show up. Was it the first one? Nope, Halloween pre dates and out classes 13th. Is 13th responsible for the garbage that is modern horror? Yep!

There is so much wrong with this movie that it makes it fun to watch. The fact an old lady is killing all of these kids in the pitch black. The fact none of these kids are capable of going somewhere in pairs. The fact the talked about hundreds of school campers aren't here and its just 6 managers doing nothing for two weeks. The fact... it sucks. Its like chopping mall, but 13th tries so hard to be spooky and edgey. I loved to hate every second of this movie.

[C-zom]

The Eye


This movie tried hard with a good premise but didn't succeed in what it had in mind for the first half of the movie and that was creeping you out. The visions you see through this girl's eye are like Jacob's Ladder or more recently, Silent Hill. You see ghosts, apparitions, events or shadows play out in the corner of her eye--literally. She might walk down a road and see dozens of people staring at a wall. Look in the mirror and she isn't herself. All these conventional Jacob scares are here and it was made completely obvious by the end of the movie this was some sort of homage to Jacob at the most since it borrows so much from it.

A girl is given the gift of sight through a cornea transplant. As she regains her vision she sees strange shadowy figures or people or straight up monsters and she is slowly driven insane by this until forced to confront it. This is a very simple premise and is interesting because she is never, ever safe as she always has her vision. This premise takes a nose dive at the half way point until it becomes a ghost movie and one about tragedy. Its out of left field and boxes up the atmosphere and ships it to "throwing the map in the river" land. At this point in the movie we learn the ridiculous truth about the eye and the last 15 minutes of the movie are akin to Dead Zone and Independence Day merged into one.

It had it, it almost did, but it got lost half way and decided to take an odd route home. The scares themselves didn't deliver much punch either, more style over substance I suppose.

[Gangs]

try the carver if you want gore, dont have to review it, just watch it, i promise you that you'll wear an american football abdomen guard for the rest of your life...

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Hellraiser

Hellraiser is Clive Barker's best movie. How much is this saying? Well, not a lot, but its better than other slashers or gore flicks of the era. Hellraiser shows how "cosmic horror" Barker can read about until spewing his own versions of it all over the table in a bloody maelstrom. This movie is about a zombie who escapes the "Cenobites" who are dimension traveling, reality tearing mutants of ancient ages who are really saints of hell. Their goal is to torture everyone S&M style who finds a puzzle box they're trapped in. Its an odd story told in an even weirder and more dream like fashion. None of the characters seem to "see" each other, the interactions all seem so lucid and meaningless and out of no where cenobites start showing up and a zombie is trying to rape his daughter and you realize "Oh, yeah, I'm watching a Clive Barker movie".


You'll walk away from this movie with a bad taste in your mouth and there's no escaping it. The movie is a twisted and perverted look at violence but it does not achieve any sense of immediate danger or horror--the cenobites are morally ambigious so they don't appear as enemies. The gore is almost all off screen or low budget, and there is no impending doom. It is a forgettable and dream like "meh" gore based cosmic horror.

[C-zom]

Blair Witch

The epitome of modern horror, the antithesis of boring and trendy and the summary of fucking stupid--Blair Witch is all these things. It single handedly created the internet hype driven horror movie with browser games, riddles, and so on. Blair Witch delivers in hype and flare with flying colors--It was one of the most talked about movies I ever experienced thus far when it comes to advertising campaigns.

The reality is this movie threw the map in the river before it even started. The idea is "lost footage" style to make you believe what you are watching really happened. Real tapes of this style exist--Fishy ww2 footage, the "catacombs" guy and so on. Fake movie versions of it were around way before Blair witch (Cannibal holocaust etc.) but BW is what threw it into the spotlight kicking and screaming. So why does this map throwing pioneer suck so badly?


Story telling reasons is why. The movie plays much like a sincere movie but instead also tries to appeal to the campfire feel. One second we'll be getting a sincere monologue from one of the guy's talking about how things are going downhill. The screen will flash and the camera will be arguablly twisted and upsidedown with the colors inverted and someone in the background is taking a shit. The screen will flash for a second and we're supposed to hear some monster. Queue movie cut, and back to swears and jokes.


Inconsistency in the story telling and atmosphere (I might be killed if I include acting in this) is what kills this movie. It isn't scary, and never will be. It has three actual scenes of tension building or unnerving. It has 95% of people screaming and swearing, talking about maps or making campfire gossip or talking about food. The ending is bullshit, the characters suck--You know what? Reviewing this movie is like being lost in the woods without a compass. I don't know where to take this review, or what direction I'm going in, or whee to start.

Its a directionless, boring movie. And it sucks.

[C-zom]

Suicide Circle

A famous and highly regarded "edgy" gore thriller... as I was told. Suicide Circle is really just a lucid, odd, movie that has a loose direction and a really odd premise but one that doesn't really leave any taboo intact. It breaks a lot of conventional movie rules and has a striking, but strange, look at the idea of suicide. A detective tries to uncover the reasons for mass suicides all over japan, including 54 girls jumping in front of a train.

Direction becomes a secondary goal later on to a really lucid atmosphere, random jump scares or gory suicide deaths all shown on screen. Girl putting her top half into an electric oven, a woman chopping her left arm off chunk by chunk while smiling and talking to her daughter, a bunch of kids jumping off a 4 story roof and watching their agonizing deaths, etc.

Small animals, children, teenagers and women are also murdered on screen in full detail. This is lucidly strung together. It was harder to follow than most movies simply because of its overused symbolism or just plain weird scenes. People offing themselves in sequence to J-pop, a transsexual playing electric guitar j-pop while a girl gets raped next to him by one of his friends, etc.

There is no real substance or conclusion but as a really odd movie with a lot of kills, it gets high marks for me. As a horror movie? Zip, nadda. Nothing remotely scary about this film.

[C-zom]

Willard


hoooo boy what the fuck did i watch