Random Insanity Alliance Forum, Mark V
Cactuar Zone => Random lnsanity => Topic started by: C-zom on September 26, 2009, 05:37:24 pm
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HOLY CRAP ITS OVER
Starting October 1st and ending December 31st I am going to watch one horror movie a day. Its that simple. Every day I will watch one, review it, and then that's it until the next day. I am going to make a list of the best, and maybe a few of the worst sprinkled in, horror movies ever made. The point of this is half tradition and half boredom.
Below is the completed list of 92 horror movie hand picked by me, you, and some communites in gamefaqs. The idea is simple: One horror movie a day. It is a fine challenge and one I am willing to take. I am a massive horror buff (Movies, games, books, paranormal--you name it) and this is perfectly fitting to my personality.
And so, without further introduction, I begin the Marathon of Madness.
Total Movies: 92
Schedule: One movie per day, until December 31st
Missed Movies: 0
Current Combo: 92
Watched: 92
Left: 0
Next Movie: Its over
The Top Ten Horror Movies:
The Thing
Jacob's Ladder
[REC]
Kwaidan
Session 9
Re-Animator
The Changeling
In the Mouth of Madness
Don't Look Now
Dead of Night
The List:
1: 1408 WATCHED
2: 28 Days Later WATCHED
3: Alien WATCHED
4: Amityville Horror WATCHED
5: An American Werewolf in London WATCHED
6: A Tale of Two Sisters WATCHED
7: Audition WATCHED
8: Black Christmas WATCHED
9: Blair Witch Project WATCHED
10: Birds WATCH NEXT
11: Braindead WATCHED
12: Cabin Fever WATCHED
13: Candyman WATCHED
14: Castle Freak WATCHED
15: Chopping Mall WATCHED
16: Children of the Corn WATCHED
17: Chucky WATCHED
18: Cloverfield WATCHED
19: Cronos WATCHED
20: Dark Water WATCHED
21: Dawn of the Dead WATCHED
22: Dead of Night WATCHED
23: Don't Look Now WATCHED
24: Dr Giggles WATCH NEXT
25: Eden Lake WATCHED
26: Eraserhead WATCHED
27: Event Horizon WATCHED
28: Evil Dead WATCHED
29: Frailty WATCHED
30: Friday the 13th WATCHED
31: Gremlins WATCHED
32: Kwaidan WATCHED
33: Halloween WATCHED
34: Happy Birthday to me WATCHED
35: Hellraiser WATCHED
36: Inside WATCHED
37: Ils WATCHED
38: In the Mouth of Madness WATCHED
39: Jacob's Ladder WATCHED
40: Jo-On WATCHED
41: Inland Empire WATCHED
42: Leperchaun WATCHED
43: May WATCHED
44: Misery WATCHED
45: Nightmare on Elm Street WATCHED
46: Night of the Living Dead WATCHED
47: Nosferatu WATCHED
48: Pet Semetary WATCHED
49: Phantasm WATCHED
50: Prince of Darkness WATCHED
51: Poltergeist WATCHED
52: Psycho WATCHED
53: Pulse WATCHED
54: Reanimator WATCHED
55: Repulsion WATCHED
56: Ringu WATCHED
57: Rosemary's Baby WATCHED
58: Saw 1 WATCHED
59: Se7en WATCHED
60: Session 9 WATCHED
61: Sixth Sense WATCHED
62: Splinter WATCHED
63: Stalker WATCHED
64: Silence of the Lambs WATCHED
65: Silent Hill WATCHED
66: Sleepy Hollow WATCHED
67: Suicide Circle WATCHED
68: Suspiria WATCHED
69: Swamp Thing WATCHED
70: The Abyss WATCHED
71: The Blob WATCHED
72: The Brood WATCHED
73: The Burning WATCHED
74: The Changling WATCHED
75: The Devils Backbone WATCHED
76: The Descent WATCHED
77: The Eye WATCHED
78: The Exorcist WATCHED
79: The Fog WATCHED
80: The Hitcher WATCHED
81: The Innocents WATCHED
82: The Omen WATCHED
83: The Serpent and the Rainbow WATCHED
84: The Shining WATCHED
85: The Tenant WATCHED
86: The Thing WATCHED
87: The Wicker Man WATCH NEXT
88: The Vanishing WATCHED
89: Trick 'r Treat WATCHED
90: Videodrome WATCHED
91: Willard WATCHED
92: [REC] WATCHED
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The Last House on the Left and The Unborn.
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Last house on the left is a great idea. I hope you mean the original though. Adding it
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The original is always the best
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Stir of Echoes
Serpent and the Rainbow
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Stir of Echoes was pretty lame, I gotta be honest. I put Rainbow on the list. Been meaning to watch that.
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The perfect scary movie....
Scary Movie! lol XD yeah im j/k.
but if i may add a real horror movie to the list, how about one of the Saw movies or Silent Hill...the movie, not the game.
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Saw 1 was a decent movie. It was more of a thriller, but still good. I hated all the sequels after 2 on comparison. Just goreporn.
Silent hill? The movie? Oh god...
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Hows about Saw 12?
[embed src=\"http://www.youtube.com/v/-QwZqbLpVlM&rel=1\" type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\" wmode=\"transparent\" width=\"425\" height=\"355\"][/embed]
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Hahahaha.
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Well, you are clearly missing some of the classics. Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm St., Misery, Psycho (all originals of course)
30 Days of Night - Best new horror I have seen in years.
Not sure I would call The Abyss horror, though still a good movie.
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I purposefully avoided the classics but will add some of them back on. I don't want to get too bogged down by them. I could have sworn I have psycho and misery on there too, cause they're already ON my computer. Adding em.
I hated 30 days of night but thats just me. Vampire movies don't do it for me, and neither does that actor.
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what up z-com
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that should be a filter.
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I would only do this if every movie I was watching was one I hadn't seen before.
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I included a lot of movies I haven't seen but also some movies I have seen that are guaranteed good.
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i have done something like this before..
cept it was all porn.
and there was only like 5 videos
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Yours is infinitely superior, obviously.
Also I updated the movie list in the OP.
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Critters
Leprechaun
Children of the Corn
Sometimes They Come Back - A 17 page short story, turned into a series of shitty horror films. Gotta love it
Maximum Overdrive
The Dead Zone
The Omen
The Prophecy
Not sure why I am on a King kick, but whatever.
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this movies almost make my heart drop!!LOL..by the way,does japanese horror counts?if it does i have some movies that can make u not sleep in the darknness for a week
Real Ghost Stories: Episode 2: The Poltergeist
Planet Terror
bucket of blood
hannibal rising
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hannibal rising
That was a good one.
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You guys picked almost every scary movie I can think of.
The only ones I can think of now is It and The Blaire Witch Project.
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Boo.
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Boo.
Idk about that.
It helped me one Halloween on my ex. XD
then again, she was already afraid of clowns. But it still was hilarious to hear her scream. XD Yayz for dark humor.
Besides, I already said you guys picked out everything thats good.
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The list is all done and I've watched three movies already but they're not worth noting or reviewing. Amityville Horror, The Shining, and Sleepy Hollow.
I use a random number generator to pick which movie I watch. One a day is the rate I'll be going.
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Amityville Horror
To my complete disbelief and pain the random number generator chose one of the worst movies on the list *first.* I obeyed the generator from hell and watched this movie. Its a little over two hours long and it feels like four hours. I don't know whats worse: The acting, the complete lack of any scares, or the crap editting. When I watch a haunted house movie I want to be scared and be drawn into the characters. Like the original house on haunted hill, for example. Price is the man.
To get back on subject there are no scares in this movie save one, the eyes in the window. There literally isn't another scare. No hints at monsters, no corner of the eye trick, no cat out of the bag. Its simply the details of a poorly acted family wandering around the house and the husband going insane and then breaks down into a 6 minute finale which feels like 30 seconds. Its such a rip off of The Shining that it even has a scene where the children are in the bathroom and the husband uses an axe to bust his way in, and a scene where the walls bleed.
My eyes bled too. Useless movie, and probably gonna be near the very bottom when I'm finished.
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The Shining
Kubrick can make a good atmosphere, he really can. He's got a really good use of the camera in long, drawn out scenes with no dialog or really even any noise at all besides a slow rise musical background. Best example is the kid barreling down the hallways on the tricycle. He created a fantastic atmosphere in the Overlook that shows he knows what he's doing.
Thats basically were the compliments end. Jack Nicholson as, well, Jack, is a complete miscast in my opinion. Every time tension builds up you see Jack staring at something or being an ass to his wife or kid. His slow decline into dementia isn't that: Its an odd and often annoying sarcastic escapade that has Jack not being crazy or frightening but making jokes, flipping his arms around, wildly flaring his eyebrows and grinning through his bottom lip. Its basically Jim Carrey body humor instead of frightening.
Thats my problem with the movie. Jack is a "bad" guy to begin with. An ass to his family, a bitch about his writing and he has no real decline cause he's insane to begin with.
There are some fantastic scenes without Jack in it like Halloran, the chef, talking to the kid. This is an excellent scene and set the mood for the whole movie--or so I thought. This mood is thrown out the window by the time Jack is talking to bar tenders and making bourbon jokes.
So in short I loved the atmosphere but only at times. Most of the time the movie drags on like crazy and isn't even a horror movie to begin with, more of a thriller if you ask me. But the build up and intensity surrounding the Overlook is top notch at times and some of Kubrick's best but whenever it descends into dialog or conventional job scares it loses its charm, and fast.
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Sleepy Hollow
Fun Fact: I added this movie to the list without actually looking it up beforehand. I remembered pumpkin head and the headless horsemen and I know for sure there's a real HORROR movie based on this, but uhhh I got the name wrong...
Johnny Depp (Some kind of dark ages/steampunk version of inspector gadget) gets sent to a village populated solely by weird ass looking blonde chicks and old guys and a bad case of fog. For the next 1.2 hours your head is filled with thousands of sir names, family names, maiden names and more revolving around a conspiracy designed to control the Hessian Horsemen (Christopher Walken...). The horsemen is dead but his head was stolen and this causes him to come back from the dead from someones orders. But who's? All evidence points to like eight different people who all conveniently die except one and by the time its that one guy revealed you've fallen asleep.
This isn't a horror movie: Its Tim Burton. There's lots of fog, lots of stop motion, lots of Nightmare Before Christmas ripoffage. Depp can't act and looks fucking stupid in those big goggles and using tools to determine that yes, indeed, someones head is missing.
I didn't intend to watch this movie. But I did. And hoo boy, did it suck.
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Poltergeist
What happens when a suburban family's every day life gets torn apart by squeeky midgets, a man eating tree, skeletons in a swimming pool and red jello from beyond the grave? You get one bad movie that isn't even horror and probably wasn't for the time.
That random number generator hates me so much. Its given be garbage and only one decent movie so far, but mostly garbage. Me and Nitemare watched this movie and I gotta be honest: It was painful, and I can stand really cheesy horror movies. I've seen this a hundred times but this was the first time in a few years or more.
The family is completely illogical and doesn't respond to the horrors correctly at all. Their kid is eaten by a fucking oak tree and they somehow get him out then don't even bother to clean the digestive fluid off him. Their daughter gets stuck in the television and they couldn't be arsed about either and wind up taking a nap. No one addresses the fact the kid was eaten. Nobody. And that basically sums up the movie. It seemed like a bunch of skits rather than a movie, based around thinking up the most ridiculous scare scenes possible without makin them connect. At one second you see a steak crawling across the counter and it explodes into more steak. Then a guy is peeling his face off. Then ghosts are walking down stairs. Then it ends.
EATEN BY A TREE.
Maybe for its time it was revolutionary in the scare department. The special effects look ridiculous now but in the 70's they were probably pretty respectable. But its really not scary now and the bad editting/chop up job is all too noticeable.
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28 days later..... O_O
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The Vanishing
To begin this random number generator is satan.
I'm usually professional or mature about my movie reviews. I give the high points, the low points, and describe it as is. But I need to lose the professional attitude for a second: This movie absolutely sucked.
To begin the editting was completely bad and often to the point of unwatchable. At one scene the two main characters will be laying down in the grass. After a quick exchange of dialog the next scene is this guy we don't know with a broken arm smoking in a hotel room. After his introduction the next scene is the couple we saw before... three years earlier. The next scene is the boyfriend in a panic looking for his lost girlfriend. It goes on, and on, like that to the point where you don't know what the fuck is going on.
The entire story is left up to assumptions too. There is very little dialog in total, maybe even two or three pages MAX in a 1:46 movie. At random times the villain or hero will be shown somewhere doing something that has nothing to do with the main story, or they'll wind up running somewhere to find the other guy without any build up to it. Its just random as hell.
The main villain is more of a putz experimenting with morals and religious overtones, trying to "kill" someone because he feels he's already done the most good by "saving" someone. He wants to be three dimensional. He has a fucking neckbeard, horn rimmed glasses, and doesn't say more than fifteen words.
As for the hero he's looking for his kidnapped girlfriend who's been gone for... three years. He didn't give up hope or motivaiton to find her and still puts up plea signs for her after THREE years of being gone. This makes the villain feel sad so out of no where, for no reason, the villain somehow finds this guy in another country and tricks the hero. That description there makes it feel like it has direction or good editting for an ending, but it doesn't. Cut inbetween the final car ride or conversations are clips of birthday parties, flashbacks to his childhood, someone swimming in a lake, the hero ordering coffee--All 20 second random clips through in with NO lead in or purpose.
Fucking bad movie.
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I'm joining this if it isn't already apparent. We're watching the movies together and both doing a review. As for the movies C-zom previously reviewed, I'll leave those there. I've seen them all and watched Poltergeist with C-zom so his reviews basically reflect my opinion. Anyways, to move onto The Vanishing.
Review:
Acting: It's not revoltingly bad, but it's bad enough to make a point about it. The acting is generally just mindless banter between two people or just one of the actors/actresses staring off into space with a blank face. The King has more facial expression then these people.
Editing: I can usually let a movie off for editing. With most movies, it's a difficult thing. But when it's a movie like this, where it's simply a plot that just DRAGS on, the editing should be top notch. That's far from the case for The Vanishing. You're constantly jumping from one scene to the next to the point where you have no sense of direction for the movie. You have no idea what the point of all of it is. You spend half of the scenes trying to figure out what the previous scene had to do with the movie. And more times then not, it had nothing to do with the movie.
Writing: Just simply one of the worst scripts I've ever had the displeasure of experiencing. As I mentioned with the Editing, most scenes really have no reason to be in the movie. They are simply there to make the movie longer. They don't add to the plot in any way nor even add to character development. The movie leaves you assuming what is what and who is who and where is where. And it's not a movie where they try to keep you guessing at who the killer is. They just show a guy faking a broken arm and then you see him at his home life. The entire first hour of the movie is a waste of time. Problem is, the entire second half of the movie is too. You end up with illogical moves by the guy we assume is the main character. And then end up with a basic fade to black screen that's just ridiculous.
Directing: I'm not sure I can say the directing was all that bad due to what it had to work with. The greatest directors couldn't have saved this movie. So I'm basically going to leave this blank.
Final Result: This movie is without a doubt the worst horror/thriller I have seen. I can't put it more clearly then that. It was a borefest that just dragged on with terrible acting, jumping between scenes(And at times different years without you knowing whatsoever), and writing that makes Lady In The Water look brilliant. Watching this movie was simply a waste of time, just like every scene in the fucking movie. No point whatsoever for almost every scene.
0/10
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would ghosts in the darkness be considered a horror?
also, I hate any movie or anything that has a title that tries to spell itself with numbers. (like se7en. wtf retarded. that's not, nor was it ever, cool. I swear the people who finance the movies sit around tables in meeting rooms thinking of ways they can mangle the name and dumb it down)
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1408
I'll say I came into this movie not really expecting much. I had heard good things but just don't generally trust the opinions of others.
Review:
Acting: It's a solid acting job. It's not as if you'll get any academy awards for these performances but they were far from bad. Cusack did a convincing job in the scenes with his daughter. And everyone else had rather minor parts that you can't really notice whether they were good or not. All in all, I'd say it's above average acting. 7/10
Editing: It's a bit choppy at the beginning but it gets better. It settles everything in nicely and the changes in camera angles end up combining rather well. 6/10
Writing: I think it's one of King's better stories and I think they did a good job of bringing it to the screen. I've seen many books turned movies that are absolute trainwrecks and this isn't the case. 8.5/10
Directing: Hafstrom does a good job of getting multiple directions without any clutter or mistakes. Obviously not amazing directing or I would've mentioned that, but solid on all aspects of directing. 8/10
Final Result: This movie is just a well made movie. By no stretch amazing but far from bad. Overall, they do a fine job of...well...generally everything. It's either average or above average on all accounts and the final product shows that. I enjoyed this far more then I expected that I would. The random number generated had given C-zom and I a streak of awful movies that left a bad taste in my mouth. This was, quite simply, a breathe of fresh air. I will say I wish we would've gotten the ending shown in theaters rather then the original ending that they ended up pulling. Other then that and the slightly drawn out beginning, I had no serious problems with this movie.
7.5/10
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Be nice if you gave the title in the review. Don't make me work for it.
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Be nice if you gave the title in the review. Don't make me work for it.
Indeed. >_>
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hannibal rising
That was a good one.
but not scary.
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Silent Hill
This movie is bad enough I'm not even going to take this review seriously. It was a terrible movie overall that made no sense story wise. Terrible camera angles, oxshit plot that didn't have much to do with the games...Overall just a fuck awful movie.
0/10
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I can't be arsed to review silent hill, it was that bad. I'll have one up for 1408 in a bit.
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Games made to be scary and good, like Silent Hill and Resident Evil = Awesome-Sauce.
Movies that are riped off from these awesome games = COMPLETE FAILURE EVERY TIME!
Im sorry I even offered the movie in the first place. -_-
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Dawn of the Dead(Newer version)
Another movie bad enough that I'm too lazy to write a full review of, so I'll just sum it up. The entire movie is riddled with pointless scenes. There is no build up to the outbreak or climax whatsoever. Most everything they do is illogical and they generally don't plan out anything except for a basic "We'll go here, then here, and then here". The inconsistencies with how you turn into a zombie and how long it takes to effect you is ridiculous. Some guys have to die first(Die from the virus) to turn into a zombie and it takes quite a bit of time, other guys turn into zombies without dying and within 2 minutes of being bitten. Overall just a horribly written movie.
1/10
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1408
I went into this movie not really expecting much more than a few conventional scares, poor acting and overall not enjoying it but what I got wasn't a bad movie. Scary? Not really, but it was a clever thriller that was genuinely evil at times and really convinced me haunted "house" movies aren't all bad.
Qussack plays a stubborn jackass writer who has a minimal fan-base who's job is to solely hunt down haunted hotel rooms and post fake reports on them or debunk them alternately. He stumbles upon the room 1408 in a Hotel run by Samuel L Jackson who presents a decent, but short, cameo. The build up and tension to the room is better than the actual scares but both sides of the coin still present a good story.
The camera angles are excellent and so is the pacing, hinting at the horror of the "unknown" lurking in the corners of the camera or even the camera acting as something sinister's vision at times. And the pacing really developes a slow decline in mental stability until the room takes full control and starts delivering sucker punch after sucker punch to the main character's sanity. Its an enjoyable, and believable, thing to watch unfold until the bullshit ending (The ending played in theaters would have made the movie a solid 8/10 for me if it was there.)
It was a good, but not perfect, movie that showed there's still some energy left in the age old house on haunted hill story. The room was almost a character too, it was menacing and straight up a dick.
7/10
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Dawn of the Dead
This is an inconsistent look at the zombie outbreak without any actual tension, consistency or excitement. The outbreak happens in five minutes into the movie and is summed up in 30 seconds with a cheesy intro to Johnny Cash. From then on its a boring ass ride where five people (Five idiots who are each a "part" of a normal person so five of them amount to the intelligence of one fucking guy) run around a mall without any actual idea or motive and wind up following whims and goose chases. The action is pathetic and quick, the slow motion is ridiculous (But its Zack Snyder after all) and you don't give a shit about *any* of the characters.
And then its over. Tada!
1/10
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Black Christmas(Old Version)
Another short review for a terrible movie. Just a boring movie. Everything the cops do and everything the girls do is entirely illogical. There's no build up. There's no sense of actual horror or scare factor. There is no atmosphere whatsoever. They try to creep you out with the voices the killer does, but it simply is more stupid then it is scary or creepy. Second worst movie so far behind The Vanishing.
0/10
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Black Christmas
The originator of the slasher/teen murder genre also falls victim to its own originalties and cliches. The girls are purposefully dumb, the cliches pile up just like the bodies and it tries to creep you out in ways fresh in 1974 but are all but insanely boring at this day and age. The production is absolutely penny thin: The mics are ugly sounding, the killer's voices are done so poorly you can't hear what he's saying, there's no gore, etc. It tries to creep you out with how he walks or the phone call but it becomes ridiculous when the movie's timeline goes on for a week or two as bodies sit in the house and he LIVES in there with no showering or food as everybody else goes about doing their usual shit.
Also, this movie is *slow*
The writing is terrible, the acting blows, there's only 3 kills in the movie and two are off screen... its a mess of a movie. No atmosphere, no horror: The only thing it did was create a forgettable genre.
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There's one on screen? I remember the first girl dying which was less then shown, the house mother dying which was less then shown, and then the other 3 girls were also not shown.
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There was just one on screen, the plastic bag kill. Rest are off camera, you're right.
I watched The Blob. Not gonna bother with a review, how the fuck is this movie's budget 9 million?
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cause its the blob......review the THING too please, me lieks!
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I will once it comes up. The Thing is one of my favorite horror movies, in my top 3.
The Blob
A bad, conventional, been-there-done-that B-movie that is just about weak on all fronts. I'm going to leave this review pitifully short as its hardly even a horror movie and was put on the list as a joke. Its mildly entertaining when people get killed by the blob but there's only around four kills in the whole thing. It goes on for way too long and doesn't show a penny of its nine million dollar budget; a Sci-Fi channel movie at most. Bad movie, waste of time.
Up next: Pet Semetary (Yet another crap movie. This is ridiculous!)
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at the end, review this thread. that shall be your punishment.
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I remember seeing Pet Semetary on TV as a kid. I think it gave me a nightmare because of the toddler that went around killing people.
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Pet Sematary
Not as bad as I remember, but still extremely weak compared to 1408 or the rest of the good movies on the list. I gotta be honest; I have little complaints about Fred Gwynne. He plays an unsettling but believable character and the scenes with him are arguably the best in the film. The rest of the movie isn't as good as his performance though; it builds up some decent tension now and then (The "Timmy" flashback was cool, but too much like Frankenstein.) and also Fred's narrations of the sematary in general.
However I feel like its wasted potential. It all amounts to gore scares our, quite literally, cat out of the bag jump sequences that leaves you with a been there done that taste in your mouth. With a bigger budget, less focus on lame "gore" scenes, it could have been a fun thriller.
3/10
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Misery
This movie has little to no good qualities, and I never understood the excessive praise it receives when people discuss the best possible stephen king movies. Its not scary, or intimidating, or immersive. The paper thin plot servers as a floatation device for 3 or 4 awkward moments between a crazed fan and a writer stuck in her house until to achieve a completely unexpected conclusion. The map is thrown into the river too soon on this one; you know that he's in trouble almost right away and this isn't made a trick or surprise. For an hour and a half it drags on, and on, methodically making her more evil while sacrificing consistency.
Then he begins to snoop around and basically *asks* to get "hobbled". At this point the cliche side story of a hero to the rescue gets turned on its head and instead of ending here it goes on for another half hour (So one wonders why the sheriff was even thrown in.) and then one of the silliest ending fights closes the movie.
Waste of time
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Audition
This was an interesting watch but certainly wasn't a horror movie. Its essentially what happens if you mix Jacob's Ladder and Fatal Attraction. What starts off as an innocent (and very, very long winded...) love story turns into a completely insane and nonsensical array of weird scenes, images, and torture until you don't know what the hell is happening anymore and then it ends. Its quite a finale to a boring and completely non-scary movie. What was done well are two things: The narrative and atmosphere. You learn quickly that everything isn't as it seems and that you might just have a case of an "untrustworthy" directing meant to mislead. On top of this the atmosphere is well done, there's a very slow creeping sense of dread so to speak--Its small, and minor, but there. The main problem with this is you WANT the main sucker to die. You know the chick is batshit crazy and sadly that was the biggest flaw: They give it away 20 minutes into a movie thats a bit over two hours.
I can't hate it because it wasn't terrible, but it wasn't as good as I've been lead to believe either. Its essentially a mystery romance until the last 30 minutes where its just a wall of scenes some people would regard as disgusting. Passable but not gripping.
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Suspiria
I went into this movie only knowing its name and its consistently high praise among gateway horror watchers. And upon completion I cannot meet this praise and even could say its the worst movie I've watched yet, behind The Vanishing. Its an artsy look at witches and the occult with a color pallet of red, and more red, and an aggravating one-song score that replays over and over and over during every single scene the director assumed was an edgy or scary scene. We follow an italian ballet student to an academy and confusingly learn that its not really an academy, but the real purpose is housing a coven of witches.
Its a loosely connected story with quick exchanges of dialog or confusing written passages. At the end of every other scene someone dies, someone we barely know, and its supposed to be striking but I couldn't help but think "who were they again?". Most of the time the camera lingers painfully on "mysterious" scenes or on "artsy" architecture that is supposed to be, I don't even know what, refreshing?
What I'm saying was this was a needlessly complicated and artsy movie that can't even be labeled as horror, more like dark fantasty. Thoroughly disappointing movie
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I now need to upload reviews for
1: The Innocents
2: An American Werewolf in London
3: Nightmare on Elm Street
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The Innocents
This an oldie ghost story with a surprising slew of special effects for the time which is something to give it props for. Anyway, the story is a woman looks after two orphans while their uncle is away and soon discovers the house has a secret (Who'd a thunk with a ghost story?) and the kids are in on it. What unravels is just, uh, linear as far as I can describe it. Everything that you'd think would happen does and while not hostile in the least the ghosts themselves prove to drive everyone crazy when they see them. The star ends up discussing with a maid about what to do about it and drives the secret out of her, at which point the movie ends almost too abruptly.
Essentially its a love-mystery invovling ghosts and possession, and the entire movie is as simple as that summary. Pretty dry, pretty boring, but well acted. Its like 49 years old, what can you say? Still beat the shit out of Vanishing...
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An American Werewolf in London
I walked into this movie blind. What I wound up watching was a black comedy that wasn't funny at all, and a horror movie that had absolutely no on-screen kills or atmosphere. Two americans wind up in London on some un-named trip and they almost immediately come across a bar (with a secret <_<). No one talks to them or is kind and they eventually drill out some tea for themselves from the stubborn barkeep.
The two dimwits don't notice the werewolf protective signs or the crosses or religious markings all over but the viewer does. What happens after this, after absolutely no buildup, is this: They walk out of the bar and walk off road for some reason and get ambushed by a werewolf. One friend dies, one friend runs for it. He comes back like a douchebag and gets sliced up. Then the bar crowd shoots the werewolf, just once, with a shotgun. It dies.
One could argue the entire movie is pointless at this point seeing as one shotgun blast from 100m or so can KILL the werewolf. But it goes on and on for another 50 minutes detailing a romance and black comedic scenes before he finally turns and kills all of four people off screen. Waste of time movie.
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Skipping Nightmare on Elm Street's review, but I watched it. Fuck that movie.
[REC]
While not a perfect movie or filming format REC still manages to build up an unshakable atmosphere of intensity and, eventually, creepiness that's bound to stick to you for a few hours after watching. To drive this home a believable and logical plot involving an "infection" of sorts is the backbone of everything that happens after a news crew and a handful of residents get quarantined in an apartment.
Its not slow to build at all and becomes a documentary on frantic survival in a little over 15 minutes. This pacing is only dropped now and then as breathers between the action which work as speed bumps to deliver you character development. You won't be caring about any of the characters except the main female lead. The movie knows what it is, and doesn't distract with angles of friendship's or romances.
Its a bloody and frantic movie until the last act which still sits as one of the creepiest finales I've ever seen in a movie. Notice how I didn't say scary: I've yet to be scared by any movie. But this doesn't mean you can't respect, and get immersed, in the sheer unsettling atmosphere of the ending. The subliminal hints on the walls, the doctor's recording, when you see "it" with a hammer. Good lord.
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Inside
This French Slasher came out of left field for me. I don't know who suggested it or why its on the list, but after watching it I had a wealth of opinions about it. For one I've been up and down the Slasher movie road and haven't found a movie this gory since Happy Birthday to Me or The Thing (Latter is not a slasher, but the point still stands.). Inside is the tale of a pregnant woman who gets stalked by a woman. The pregnant girl, Sarah, is locked in and soon the stalker gets in.
What happens is entirely illogical and forgettable and full of cliches, but whats noteworthy is the sheer detail and amount of blood there is. Its also not for the faint of heart, *at all*, as it features a live on camera c-section with scissors and somebodies face melting in real time from a makeshift torch with a surprising degree of realism and NO computer generated effects. Every stab, gunshot, piercing, hack and slash on screen that modern movies hide off screen is here in full view and full brightness.
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GIVE RATINGS YOU N00b
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The Omen
Religious techno-garble about the end of times and satan's kid is the main idea behind this really, really old movie. The only possible props I can give it is having a spooky sound track and building up some tense atmosphere now and then but only to have it fall face first once Gregory Peck opens his mouth, or to show that stupid looking kid. Its a horrid concept but the movie isn't 100% bad. One of the more enjoyable drama's on this list, but not even close to horror or the top of the list. It has its moments but its too long, and too boring.
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The Burning
Really, really campy B-movie slasher with no budget that rips off Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday, and Halloween. Its about a guy who gets burned half to death by a bunch of drunk teenagers and then stalks a summer camp with lawn sheers to get his revenge 40 years later--Somehow he's still alive, and not really old cause he was 50 when he was burned. There are only a couple on screen kills. Four to be exact and its an hour and fourty minutes. An extremely long movie thats mostly akin to Animal House in its humor until the lawn sheer's guy shows up. There's gratious nudity however, but its too bad all the girls are emaciated and flat.
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Trick 'r Treat
I was told over and over, and over, that this was an excellent horror movie montage oozing with atmosphere and suspense. What I got was a black comedy about lots of little kids, including a minature version of pumpkin head. I must have seen a different movie than everyone else because it had no suspense or a creeping atmosphere. All it provided were cheap kills and jump scares along the lines of The Omen where the maid jumps on his back. By the time werewolves show up, Trick 'r Treat loses the last drop of B-movie charm it intended to keep the whole way through.
I can imagine the director's inspiration was this:
"Okay, what if we rip off Tales from the Crypt but made it even campier. Lets remove the Crypt Keeper and make the humor even more subtle instead of funny. Lets make it straight to dvd, and have two on screen kills. Lets have a bunch of hot chicks transform into werewolves, then never show the wolves again. Also we need Pumpkin Head jr."
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Happy Birthday to Me
A truly convoluted and boring slasher that tries to be more intelligent than it is gory or scary and it fails badly at this premise. You slowly find out a girl who has had mental surgery on her is becoming self aware and coming out of some kind of amensia. While this is happening a leather clad person is killing off high school kids with really, really silly contraptions or weapons. It drags on for an hour and fourty minutes before an extremely odd twist out of left field.
The motivation of the killer is only revealed five minutes before the twist so it doesn't have you guessing until the end, it has you clueless until the motivation is revealed--and then the twist based on the motivation, like its supposed to be some kind of shock when you only just learned the other half of it. No scares, no good kills, all garbage.
The Fog review up next
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The Fog
I'm a fan of John Carpenter. I'm a fan of his style, his atmosphere, his musical score, the writing he picks--He's a horror director that clicks with me. He often encorperates subtle scares and a rich atmosphere. He has achieved brilliance in my book with The Thing, Halloween and In the Mouth of Madness. All three are excellent movies in their own right and the former two revolutionized the genre twice in a row. He has shown he can create overbearing atmosphere without jump scares or cheap gags, and he has also shown he can be one of the worst directors in the business at the same time.
Let me introduce the Fog. A B-movie on the lowest B scale, delivering one of the worst premises in movie history that an unearthly fog houses a bright light and also killer zombie pirates that nobody can seem to out run. The MO of these guys is to get their gold back from a rich upscale yuppie township by the coast. The Fog is portrayed as the enemy, as the arch evil. Dramatic music will boom and thunder as a Fog rolls from the side of the camera and the characters *scream* and run away from it in laughable ways. Once the fog absorbs a building, the pirates show up in full gear and scallywag and often kill the people off screen with hooks or sabers or even canes.
The movie has horrible cliches thrown in, zero atmosphere, no scares--Its one of the silliest, most pretentious B-movie's I've ever seen this side of The Blob.
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The Descent
This movie sits on the fence for me. I'll be blunt: It doesn't do anything for exactly 58 minutes in a 1:30 run time besides build up an almost palpable atmosphere and loneliness in the cave system, forests and cabins. Over nearly an hour an uneasiness builds up as we're introduced to the girls before they go cave diving. I'm a strong fan of atmospheric build up but its overdone to the point of not even NEEDING the last half hour. It could have been made as a full drama, romance and mystery movie for fifty eight minutes and released on sci fi and it would get mixed reviews. The Crawlers as they're called feel tacked on. A last minute thought from the director like he double checked his screenplay and remembered "Oh, shit, this is a horror movie!"
The monsters are intelligently portrayed and use echolocation and look really gross, but they resemble their fantasty counterpart "Goblins" way, way too much. Realism and believability is a direct concern from the director and, as such, nothing is beyond belief. Well, sometimes. The girl's fight the monsters back, the monsters hunt accurately, the combat is primal and feral and its really an intense twenty minutes. Yeah, the crawlers show up twenty minutes before it ends. 3:1 Build Up and Actual Horror ratio. I'm reminded of Session 9 here.
It has a cool atmosphere but annoying characters. Cool monsters but they're gone in a second. Horror is an after thought, and the main idea was paranoia and immersion. This is The Thing without any people or monsters.
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Cronos
This appears to be the first Del Toro movie. I have mixed feelings about this director from his use of overly symbolic imagery in obvious siutations, black comedy in serious moments, and his overuse of dark fantasy out of the left field. Overall he has a style I don't like or admire in the slightest. His excuse for the black comedy and fantasty elements was given in an extremely odd manner during Pan's Labyrinth interviews. "I do it to keep myself alive during directing."
Anyway, Cronos takes a comedic and odd spin on the basic vampire tale with surprisingly little vampires. Rather it treats the whole thing like a disease, or curse with benefits. A 16th century alchemist is convinced to find a way to make himself immortal. He makes the Cronos Device, which is a scarab-like golden instrument that claws and then injects a solution into the wearer's hand or chest. The movie flashes 400 years later to show it works, which was a little un-nescessary. I'd rather have some suspense. For the next hour we're treated to an einstein-like antique collector who stumbles upon the cronos device and uses it. As he decomposes, dies twice only to come back, and so on we're drip-fed pounds of black comedy and off humor about the whole situation rather than building up any atmosphere or suspense whatsoever.
Nothing happens. Thats what I'm getting at. No suspense or mystery surrounds the cronos device. There is no explaination for it. There is no intensity as the main character transforms. Its just "Blah" mixed in with comedy. Didn't enjoy the movie.
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Prince of Darkness
As mentioned, John Carpenter is one of my favorite horror directors. He has a very particular atmosphere and style that appeals to me. He has filmed plenty of misfire movies that only bored me to tears (Vampire, The Fog, etc) but also has some of the best Lovecraftian style horror movies. In particular I'd name The Thing, In the Mouth of Madness and Prince of Darkness as his three best movies in that order.
Prince of Darkness takes a simple approach: The route of all evil is locked in a canister that is starting to leak. A Priest (The ever-creepy Donald Pleasance) hires a team of students and professors to monitor it and find out what it is. In the mean time, the "real" Bible is being decoded by some students in the same church. What we watch is a slow-drip cosmic horror story that takes some interesting looks at basic christian mythology without turning into techno garble like The Omen. Carpenter works upon a very good atmosphere and score to provide slowly building tension until the twist and conclusion which work very well to keep the feeling of doom alive even after the supposedly happy ending.
What I'm getting at is Carpenter knows how to turn odd concepts or short stories into very compelling movies without the slightest hint at professionalism or even a large budget. He reuses actors to the point of some appearing in 70% of his movies. Its the same cast doing a new thing, and its a style that works in his own charm. Prince of Darkness is not a horror movie, but it is a creepy and odd tale thats somehow oddly compelling. Its full of out of place black comedy which keeps it far off my top ten, or even twenty, horror movies but I cannot say the same for some of his other movies.
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CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER: THIS WAS WATCHED BEFORE THE DESCENT, FORGOT REVIEW
Jacob's Ladder
In short this is one of the best psychological horror movies made. Jacob Singer is a vietnam war veteran whom experiences odd things during his tour. His entire unit suffers from some sort of panic attack and starts going insane, dying, and running around. He is wounded but survives a bayonet stab from an attacker in the woods. After this dramatic opening the movie starts to become more nightmarish and slow paced. Relying heavily on psychological torture, nightmare fuel scenes and subtle and odd monsters here and there. Jacob's Ladder was made famous for launching Tim Robbins into the limelight, and also for basically inventing the odd monster designs that went on to silent hill and carpenter films. One scene in particular has Singer walking down a subway where the train goes by, and in the windows are screaming souls with heads shaking violently beyond human capability.
Never have I seen a "town with the secret" engine work so well in a movie. Piece by piece it becomes more and more aware whats going on and what is happening to Singer. He starts going crazy, switching between realities and seeing weirder and weirder things. One scene in particular stands among my favorites: Jacob is wheeled to a hospital with no name or ID and is being pushed down an abandoned and disgusting hospital which turns into an insane asylum, and then into a slaughter house. The reluctant "people" pushing him begin to leak secrets about who they really are, or where he is. It just gets worse and worse.
Its the epitome of psychological horror and sublime use of mind games, and in my top ten favorite horror movies.
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The Tenant
Polanski is a director I respect most of the time. His epitome of horror and imagery can be found in the movie Rosemary's Baby which is also my favorite from his. Its a very weird tale delivered in a dream like state with some really creepy imagery. The Tenant, however, ranks among one of his worst movies for some very few reasons:
The movie has absolutely no direction or consistency and plays similar to locking someone in a room for a week and filming the results. The main character slowly goes crazy in his life, his apartment, around friends and becomes paranoid. This is not how it starts though. It plays off rather innocently as him moving into an apartment who's previous tenant commited suicide. Soon he fits in, makes friends, etc. Its rather uneventful with only one actual horror themed scene. One where he's in a church and the Priest's message starts to get distorted in his mind and an eerie violin starts building in the background. Its the kind of "rev up" scenes you would expect in a psychological horror movie but it never goes anywhere.
Its a two hour film of pretty poor acting (Polanski cannot act, and it was a very poor idea for him to star himself.). The subtle imagery becomes absurd to the point of the last fourty minutes being some of the funniest I've witnessed. One scene in particular strikes out: Polanski is dressed in a dress, has a wig and has makeup on and is running around his apartment convinced people are trying to get in. An arm busts through the window and he begins stabbing at it while screaming "Murderers!" in a woman's voice. Its seriously funny.
This is a ridiculous movie that makes no sense beyond some obvious hints at guilt and depression. There is no twist, he's just crazy out of no where and starts seeing things and its never explained why. Its just... bam. There. And then it ends really. An hour and thirty minutes of boring writing and acting, and a finale that makes absolutely no sense.
Weak, weak movie. No atmosphere or scares at all
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Frailty
A dark thriller focusing around a serial killer who is deranged and truly believes that he is doing God's will. The movie details the struggle of a son who does not believe, and one who does and is brainwashed. Its a highly religious film discussing the very, very dark side of faith and religious murders no doubt inspired by Jones Town among other real life incidents. Anyway, Bill Paxton delivers a very well portrayed role in this movie as the troubled and emotional father who is given visions from "Angels" and eventually gets a list of names of demon's he must kill. The concept is done without too much cheese and the movie is on the fence about whether its real or not. At least, up until the god awful ending.
It's a silly idea, and not horror, but somehow I can't bring myself to hate the movie even though Matthew Mcoungahay, Bill Paxton, AND Powers Boothe are in it. The narration and atmosphere is done quite well for a dark religious murder mystery and some of the scenes and dialog are pretty striking. Not great, not bad. A passable movie with a convincing narrative, decent--but expected--twist and a dark atmosphere that keeps you immersed.
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Ringu
Perhaps for budget reasons and the extremely low production quality, or maybe its because of the terrible script and the hilarious premise but somehow, in some way, Ringu delivers less scares and less atmosphere than the Americanized remake. The story is simple: A chain letter/creepy pasta esque video tape, when watched, kills the viewers in seven days. The story follows two media-ists and researchers who try to find the source of the tape, the girl in the video, and also the hidden meanings in it to try and save themselves.
The whole movie is extremely short and predictable with no twist ending. It drip feeds answers to you and never leaves you wondering whats going on. Its a simpletons horror movie with only three actual scare scenes and the rest of it is atrociously written and acted dialog. Much more of a mystery movie than it is a horror movie, and its not good at either.
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Splinter
This is an extremely low budget horror which can be described as a mix between Cabin Fever, The Hitcher and The Thing. It borrows limbs from all three of these movies as we watch a tale of a young couple who get carjack'd and then kidnapped by a mysterious man and his pale and sickly lover. We soon learn of the enemy; a parasitic mold that infects the host and then uses it to feed on guts. Most of the movie takes place with the hitcher and the star couple locked away in a gas station trying to survive from the monster. And this works for a while as the atmosphere is built up and the intensity/realism of the movie kicks in. All too soon things become run of the mill and cliche though as one of them becomes infected and doesn't say anything and we start to "see" the monster and see exactly how low the budget was.
The premise is contrived from Cabin Fever, the monster is from The Thing and the atmosphere is from the hitcher. Although an enjoyable movie this could have worked way, way better if the budget weren't two nickles. The last act of the movie is absolutely terrible and I rolled my eyes at more than one occasion. Solid buildup, decent atmosphere, terrible filming and premise.
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Nosferatu
A really, really old silent movie that still delivers on some excellent shots and scenes and moreso...one hell of an atmosphere. The story is essentially Dracula: A salesman goes to the castle of a count who is a vampire and goes crazy while in there, and also beings a vampire. Dracula, or in this case, Orlok, leaves the castle to find his wife and new blood.
The acting is as melodramatic as you'd expect from a silent movie and it needs to be to convey emotion. There still exist some seriously good scenes: Orlok's Shadow on the wall multiple times, rising out of the wooden coffin, and the ending. Orlok is one hell of a creepy looking dude and is still one of my favorite "monsters" in film.
By modern standards its a melodramatic and cheesy horror film, but if you look a little deeper you'll find a technically brilliant film visually for the time that still holds up today in some regards
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Chopping Mall
A hilariously cheesy and fun 80's horror movie about three security bots who go crazy after lightning strikes their computer controller. Its the nerds version of Dawn of the Dead: Eight teens got trapped in a mall with future technology going crazy as everyone thought it would then. It really plays on the cliches of the era quite well, moreso for taking place in the era rather than having hindsight. The one liners in this movie are so bad they're good. After every kill the robot will say "Thank you have a nice day" in the nerdiest, happiest voice possible.
The kill's are pretty terrible though, espescially for an uncut splatter movie. Usually just minor wounds or small sprinkles of blood. The only real gore kill is a super-fast head explosion when a laser hits a girl. Anyway the acting is hilarious, the robots rule, and its just a fun 80's movie and will always stand as one of my favorite B movie horrors
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Phantasm
A mysterious, bizarre and just plain interesting movie that still stands as one of my favorite "what the hell" movies. A young boy spots a tall grave robber and soon weirder and weirder things start happening that revolve around him, his brother, the "tall man" villain and two worlds begin to merge and inbetween this lonely collapse into insanity and the bizarre just plain weird scenes are cut in. The guitar scene, "girl in the forest", the dwarves, etc.
A very symbolic movie that plays off as a black comedy on first glance but if you look deep enough you'll spot a well layered and just plain odd horror movie with a bleak atmosphere. Tall Man is a great villain, one of my favorites. Really odd and enjoyable movie.
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Castle Freak
Full Moon productions usually sucks. They make shock and gore based movies that are only designed to spray blood on as much of everything with budget actors, black comedy and no horror. But Castle Freak is a different movie: A remarkably creepy and atmospheric tale of a tragic monster locked inside a Castle. The main family that inherits the castle has a cheesy backstory explained through tragic flashbacks and lots of screaming between the two parents of a blind daughter.
The Freak gets found and what unfolds is really creepy and disturbing in some scenes as the Freak simply tries to fit in and watch from a distance. It is not innocent, however, and some really gross murders unfold. Nipple bite scene and "eating out" scene, anyone?
It shouldn't be a film I like, but I do. It "works" for me and I think the atmospheric and tragic monster make this movie watchable and creepy at times.
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The Changeling
George C. Scott stars in one of the best haunting stories on film in my opinion. The acting, directing, pacing and writing--Its all top tier for a Scott film and once it gets rolling there are some legitimately creepy scenes strung across a bleak and lonely atmosphere. The psychic scene in particular strikes me as one of the top five ghost horror scenes of all time, portraying an extremely simple and horrifying scare.
The story for the ghost and the pacing is well done too, taking no taboo avenues or cliches to move the story along. It is a tragic tale and done greatly with the help of Scott and Trish Van Devere. Its rare when a ghost based horror movie comes along and delivers on a great atmosphere, and legitimate scares without relying on cat out of the bag tricks or turning off the lights or a reflection in the mirror. No, this movie is in a league of its own--Delivering some brutally effective imagery more than a dozen times before the sad ending.
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Psycho
This horror classic delivers on a few points, but fails on so many others. The actor who plays Norman Mates is still one of the best in horror movies, delivering an innocent--yet evil--character this side of Vincent Price. Hitchcock's ability to slowly build tension is at best here. There are little hints at the conclusion, hints serious reviewers can see, but most people are completely shocked by the ending delivery as it is one of Alfred's best.
The acting, the pacing, the writing--Its fluid and natural and what we've come to expect from him. Two major points, however, bring this entire movie to its knees when it comes to horror. First off, killing the main character less than half way in is entirely un-needed and actually spoiled the entire thing for me when I was a kid. I knew it was no woman killing her, even with the dress, and because of the "hermit" conversation before I knew he was nuts.
Secondly the finale in the house is more than pathetic and is surprising for Hitchcock. He resorts to a cat out of the bag scare with the skeletonized wife, and then Norman actually shows himself in the ridiculous dress. Without showing him this would have been a powerful ending and the police explaination finale would have worked. But because we see him in the dress it spoils the... mystery, the oddness of Bates and he just looks like an idiot.
My last complaint with this movie is the ending dialog from Bate's "mother" with him sitting in a chair. Talking villain syndrome hurts a lot of movies and it canned my suspension of disbelief.
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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.
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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.
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Do you like any horror movies?
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shit I just reviewed the thread
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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.
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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.
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more reviews please, i am simultaneously watching movies you say are good...so MOAR!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Willard
hoooo boy what the fuck did i watch
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Tonight is Cabin Fever. I've updated the OP with movies I've liked, didn't like, whats next etc. A lot more informal.
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Cabin Fever
Eli Roth gets close to making a strange, entertaining and gory horror movie but it falls flat around a little over the half way point into a form of parody and needless weird. A group of college students rent a cabin in the middle of the backwoods in order to "party man". Soon after they get lodged into their new cabin a hermit with a disgusting flesh eating disease shows up and the students scare him away and violently burn him, and the virus starts wreaking havoc on them.
Its a bit like The Thing in the woods or maybe more comparable to... hmm, not many virus based horror movies are there? Basically as each student gets infected nobody knows who to trust and they wind up reacting in admittedly realistic ways. One guy bails eventually, one works to quarantine everyone, two are affectionate and try to fix the problem, etc. The characters are pretty dynamic and it was where most of my enjoyment of this movie came from. I know what its like--Splinter. Except without the gigantic monster. I wish more about the virus would have been explained and many the scope increased a little. The latter is hinted at during the doom and gloom ending, but no information about the disease or its origins are hinted at beyond the box and a "curse".
The movie starts to decline into weirdness once the cop shows up and his only concern is partying but it does give a very solid sense of being completely, totally hopeless in... a town with a secret. We'll never find out whats in the box, but its more than likely supposed to be a cure. This, the bunny suit, the actual "party" and the ending are needless backwoods 'horror' that really dragged down an otherwise acceptable pacing and atmosphere. Eli Roth surprised me with this one when I first watched it. It was creepy at times, and also more gory than I imagined. A rather aimless but smart gore horror in the woods is a good summarization. Roth took his career into a level of parody after this however, and never made anything close to this movie.
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Don't Look Now
Alongside Rosemary's baby this is one of my favorite 'surreal' horror movies of this style. Heavily symbolic, oddly dream like, with strong characters and an ever impending sense of doom. Don't Look Now does the latter perfectly. After the introduction you are never at ease. Everyone you meet on screen seems strange, not to be trusted, and you're watching a magnificant spiral into insecurity and terror. There's a lot going for this movie. For its time it was incredibly ground breaking killing women, children and showing full frontal nudity and also a lot of blood. The dialog is oddly written and a little thin and could be labeled as the worst part of the movie but you can pass it off. The true horror and immersion comes from the wonderful set pieces, images, acting and over symbolism on some objects or areas.
The finale was something no one saw coming. Its a little bizarre but it makes sense after the montage explaining the twist. A trick which every single twist ending film has used following it, from Saw to Usual Suspects. Its a creepy and gruesome movies and one of my favorites.
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Videodrome
A compellingly weird Cronenberg film that first got me into his odd, body horror style and his incredibly weird writing. Though I must also say it was put on this list by mistake. Its not horror in the slightest so I can't really do it much justice by reviewing it though. Still a solid movie, but not horror.
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May
This movie had me interested for a good half hour or so. The character was really interesting, the dialog was solid, and it was relatively creepy and got me sucked in. It was just "odd" so to speak. I could tell things were going down hill for the movie at some really cliche moments. Introducing the lesbian, and biting the guy's lip, set it up to be an all too predictable gore masher and that's what it turned into. What started off as a compelling and mildly creepy character study turned into your basic revenge plot with no real substance or charisma. They just started introducing random characters just so they could die when it previously spent 45 minutes just building up the main three, then killing all them too.
Had possibility but fell short at the half way point.
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Silence of the Lambs
A really complex, intense movie with some of my favorite characters on film. The dialog is gripping and really keeps you interested and Hannibal Lector is one of the smartest, most sinister villains on screen that I have seen. To be fair this isn't a horror movie and to go into raving detail would be unfair. My favorite aspects of the movie are simple: Both villains, and the chemistry between Starling and Lector... in the first half.
I think the film goes down hill fast when Lector is put in that cage after the meeting with the senator. Plausability goes out the window and my suspension of disbelief was shattered during that hour or so it took to end. That's my last complaint; It goes on too long and the chemistry between the character's starts to unravel.
Still a remarkable, but flawed, movie.
Tonight is Kwaidan, nearly 3 hours long.
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Kaidan
This is an anthology film with four movies in one, all short stories/ghost stories put to picture. And I've gotta say right off the bat this is one of the most visually appealing and artistic movies I've ever seen. All four tales are lucid and deliver some chilling buildup and visuals. Pause anywhere and you'll have to soak in the art and the expressionist style of the film. The sky is almost always a macabre painting, the costumes are very fluid and symbolic, the stories are great and the acting in all four is awesome. I found myself a bit creeped out 5-6 times during the whole two hour thing.
The first tale is a pretty sad/morbid one about a samurai who abandons his wife in order to marry a daughter of a rich family. It all ends in horror inbetween some really unsettling imagery. Each "movie" has some great artistic and technical values ofr a 1964 film. Sound cuts in and out on purpose, huge visual backdrops, impressive scaled battle scene and other treats.
Overall its a spooky asian horror film, and one of my favorites in that field.
Evil Dead review in a bit.
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Evil Dead
This is one of my favorite B-slashers so to speak. Its got a great campy atmosphere, some awesome camera effects, surprising gore--even for the time--and spawned one of the cheesiest horror heros. Though, surprisingly, Bruce is a bit of a wimp in the first one. It was all about the other guy being the hero until the end.
This movie does tension right and that is my favorite part. The chases in the woods with the camera and sound effects are spectacular. The paranoia of not knowing when one of the "things" will take over your friend. And, lastly, the very well done and gory fight scenes that rarely stray out of reality. (The deadites are made superhuman in 2 & 3 though). Another minor note: The girls are pretty hot until they mutate...
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Chucky
I don't like horror movies that play on: Toys, Puppets, and children going crazy. It just destroys my suspension of disbelief that in reality a 3 foot doll can be possessed and begin to go on a murderous rampage. A pyscho? Sure. Even an otherworldly monster? I'd buy it. But the fact a doll overpowers grown men and women and *wins* drives me up the wall. Its the same story for children of the corn.
Childs Play (I call it Chucky out of habbit) plays on the fear of dolls. It gets possessed by the admitedly excellent Brad Douriff and seeks revenge on the people that abandoned him in a police shootout. It is bought by a mom and single mom and begins to kill their friends. All of this is done in a comical, and annoying, manner. The little boy is a terrible actor and constantly whines in the montoone vocie "Chucky did it. He's alive!" I think this was said around 45 times in the movie. I couldn't stand the buildup. You never see Chucky until the last 35 minutes. Its just a constant overuse of the boy's perspective or using the camera as chucky's eyes.
When he's on screen he's a wisecracking, pun slinging Douriff-voiced stopmotion doll with some terrible facial and movement effects. And simply the fact a grown police officer couldn't kick the shit out of the doll makes it worse. And this happens over, and over, and over.
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Re-Animator
One of my favorite Lovecraft adaptions even though its not faithful. Jeffrey Combs gives a pitch perfect performance of Lovecraft's own Herbert West. A nosy, odd, poindexter scientist who has come up with a chemical that brings corpses back to life. He studies at a university and begins clashing with the head professor about brain death, confident he has found the solution. From there he moves into a couple's house which is owned by a fellow scientist. After he gets dragged into the experiments, things get quite awesome.
The whole thing is expertly done. The tension is great, the humor is smart and fits (The "cat" scene is fucking hilarious) and the gore is really over the top. This movie has a few unbelievably controversial scenes. Included: A headless corpse holding his head with his hands, and orally raping a woman who is tied down. But this serves a single point: Re-animator doesn't have any walls or boundries. The gore is great, the kills are great, the humor is great and the whole premise is just odd enough to work. Lovecraft had a different and much more sinister look, but Re-Animator looks at it with a bit more humor and a lot more gore. Keep in mind though its still scary, and still as "dream like" as most of Lovecraft's books. In short: I love this movie. In my top ten horror movies.
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if you want to watch one that's so bad it's funny, try automaton transfusion. I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone would say 'best ever' or whatever it says on the cover. they must have paid that critic in secks, and also not let him seen the movie.
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I haven't seen that one, but I will give it a watch eventually.
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Pulse
This movie left me confused as shit. I don't know if it was the poor video quality, the atrociously written dialog, the vaguely introduced characters or all of the above but this nearly two hour long mess of a movie left me just wondering what was going on. I watched it a second time to be sure it wasn't me not paying attention. The theme is a website that lets you view dead people, and upon viewing them you soon go insane and... disappear? Something else to do with rooms with red tape. Another thing to do with the apocalypse and... I just don't fucking know. There weren't any good scares, no tension--The only props I can give is a fantastic soundtrack.
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Swamp Thing
DC comics spinoff directed by Wes Craven about a scientist who turns into a plant-man in the swamps, bringing justice down on terrorists and also striving to save his love interest (adrienne barbeau, who is the best milf ever). This movie is in the top five cheesiest, most useles movies I've seen. The costume designs, the finale, the acting, the ridiculous stunts, the midgets--Its so bad its shocking Craven even had anything to do with it.
The pros this movie has is:
1: The most hilarious villain, who becomes more hilarious after he transforms into a plaster-masked wolf.
2: adrienne barbeau nude scene.
3: Four actors playing every soldier, repeatedly showing up even after they die with slight costume changes to act like new soldiers.
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The Brood
Cronenberg has a very odd style that translates to some extremely lucid and symbolic movies that almost always interest me. You need to go into his movies with a thinking, serious mind. You need to analyze his symbolic avenues, his monstrous shadowing fears and the monsters in the corner of the screen. His work is strange and incidentally fits well into the horror genre.
The Brood is about a ground breaking form of psychotherapy in which the therapist takes the form of the person's "father", and the patient will "go through" their anger to him. As in, act out to him and just be completely open. This takes the form of physical manifestations. We meet a guy who develops lymphatic cancer etc. A man's wife undergoes this therapy and he loses contact with her. As he tries to find out where she is being kept, and why, a series of gruesome murders happen around him. A brood of mutant children are the murderers and have something to do with him and his wife. Things get worse, and worse, for this guy and his kid and we soon begin to learn the secrets behind the therapy and its faults.
Its obviously a jab of a movie at institutionalization and also at the massive side effects harboring rage and grudges do to people. Its a very deep, thoughtful and personal horror movie that has some excellent gross out moments and also a meaty core/moral to tell.
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In the Mouth of Madness
This and The Thing are why John Carpenter is my favorite horror director. He has perfectly captured the atmosphere, the style, the scares--the *everything* from Lovecraft's shorter stories and put it perfectly into film. But Madness has an original story, simply inspired by Lovecraft. An insurance agent detects frauds, and is good at it, and is assigned through a series of unlucky events to find a multi billion dollar horror writer that goes missing in the fictional Hobbs End. He travels there with a female from the writing agency and must find the writer. But what happens when fiction becomes reality, when whatever the writer pens down becomes real?
You get an interesting story and, more effectively, some of Carpenter's creepiest scenes and easily some of the creepiest scenes in horror. This movie flew under the radar but has amassed a cult following, and it deserves its fanbase. It is a very subtle, very smart horror movie that works at you slowly. A painting slowly becoming more and more grotesque each time its on the corner of the screen ,eventually becoming a cosmic horror when originally was a painting of a couple at a lake. Or driving in the dead of night and passing by a young boy on a bike going away from hobbs end. After a flash, he's driving towards you again, but he's 80 years old.
If you know lovecraft, or carpenter, at all you'll know you're in for a great ride. Sam Neil is fantastic in this. The scares are great and some of Carpenter's best. It really plays on insanity, alternate reality and cosmic horror. The mutant cop scene, the "transformation", the scene with Ms. Pickmen getting revenge... This movie is just excellent.
What makes it work is its smarts, as said. It knows the source material and plays like it. Its a thinker's horror movie through and through.
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Dead Alive
Peter Jackson really hits it home with this movie. Its one of the goriest movies made and that's putting it lightly, but its also genuinely hilarious. and well acted. A man's protective mother catches him on a date at the zoo and gets bitten by a horribly animated puppet "Siberian monkey" and gets a horrible flesh eating disease and becomes a zombie, wreaking havoc on the neighbor hood and infecting others. The man keeps all the zombies in his house until things become out of control.
The gore is outrageous. Full decapitations, intestinal spills, limbs being chopped off, babies put in blenders, people killed with a lawn mower, massive explosions, zombies eating people, etc. This is one of the goriest movies of all time. The good part, for some, is that it's all done in a very light hearted manor because it is a black comedy after all. To people like me though the whole goofy style really brought a possibly excellent zombie film down a few pegs.
But the comedy is still outrageous and well done. A priest killing dozens of zombie's bruce lee style. A pile of intestines using liver's as feet and a rectum for a mouth chasing our hero through an attic. The zombies constantly wanting to have sex with the opposite gender whenever possible, etc.
Its not scary but the gore is unbelievably satisfying and its genuinely funny at times. One of the best black comedy horror's made.
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Alien
Ridley Scott's Sci Fi epic is one of the most paranoia filled, suspenseful horror movies made. Whats more remarkable is Scott hardly was, and still isn't, a horror director. But when things hit the fan Alien keeps you wondering who to trust, where the Alien is, and how the crew will react. It will also drip feed very meaty lore during the movie. Has humanity made contact with aliens yet, the technology in the ships, the reasons for colonization, etc are all very subtlely placed for the more... aware viewer. This is done by some masterful script writing and pacing made possible only through Scott's directing.
Alien isn't a masterpiece, but its close, delivering a great premise with some great scares and an atmosphere you could cut with a laser knife. The set pieces are gigantic and well detailed, the monster design is horrifying, the characters are decently fleshed out--there isn't much to complain about besides maybe the little screen time Alien actually gets.
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A Tale of Two Sisters
What starts off as a basic disfunctional family horror story turns into a very lucid, very pretentious movie about insanity and hallucinations and not letting go. A girl returns from a mental institution to her step mother's home and is greeted by her loving sister who always follows her. They play, hang out, etc. But tensions rise at the dinner table when we learn the father is a sap apparently and the step mother is pure evil. The two are tortured, hit, beaten, locked in the closet their mother died in, etc. What is mildly engaging turns into complete oddness by the end though. Expressionist imagery starts splicing in. A grudge-like monster starts crawling around the house complete with the hair over face, and the oldest sister and step mom's feud comes to a head.
The horror drops off around this time and it just becomes a very odd, pretentious look at insanity after the reveal of two really fucking out of the blue twists that don't add to much, but subtract from the plausibility of what you just saw.
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Sixth Sense
I'm not really a fan of this movie as a whole but I need to give it credit for a few things: Some excellent chemistry and dialog between Cole and Crow, a great slow-burn style to slowly revealing the secret, and an expected but still powerful twist ending that is only marred by the Ghost-esque final scene between him and his wife.
What this movie does wrong is most of the ghost scenes. They are very, very quick jump jolts that make you fling back a bit but don't provide any density or meaning. There isn't really a growing tension throughout the movie or fear of the unknown. Being completely obvious is this movie's biggest flaw. And the "sick ghost" scene and conclusion seemed tacked on. Shows up then leaves in a matter of ten minutes with no closure. I enjoyed this movie before Cole's secret was revealed. I thought the tension and mystery far outplayed the reveal and jump scares.
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Repulsion
This movie bored me to death. An overly symbolic and boring look at sexual frustration and insanity that goes on for forever, bringing more and more cryptic imagery and dream/rape sequences into the life of a very pent up and quiet girl who is home alone. Polanski struck gold with rosemary's baby and Knife, but this movie is fucking pretentious and bored me from start to finish. I gotta be honest.
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Gremlins
This movie and I don't get along. While it sports a very comfortable atmosphere and also some good creature design, it is absolutely destroyed by its own attempt at black comedy. Frankly I just don't find it funny. Its very low tier and immature, resulting in basically a bunch of pseudo pigs making a mess in a very 6-year-old-snot-nosed-rat kind of way. They'll imitiate disney movies and sing the theme, stuff their faces with food, fart, smoke, etc. Its a yuck-yuck sense of humor that does absolutely nothing for me. Period!
The props I can give is that, for the time, the creature animations and designs was excellent and at multiple occasions gizmo still seems incredibly realistic akin to E.T. Also its surprisingly gory and helped make the pg-13 rating which still lives today. You'll see one explode in a microwave, stabbings, stuffed into a blender, smashed, run over, etc. All shown on screen with gratious gore.
But it doesn't save this slapstick and very annoying movie.
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Se7en
While not literally a horror movie, Se7en sports a very grim and dark atmosphere that does something right for me. The pacing, the acting, the clues, the atmosphere, the villain--this movie is fucking excellent in my book and really drives a grimy and hopeless atmoshere home all the way. Morgan Freeman plays one of my favorite characters on film as a lonely, broken down, wise detective who's days away from retirement who takes up the "Seven deadly sins" case. The crime scenes he and Brad Pitt visit are beautifully done. The sets are disgusting and detailed from top to bottom. Gore is not hidden off screen either. Its a shocking movie to some but I love the detail and atmosphere it creates.
There are only two main characters and two important side characters, and of course the villain at the end. The incredibly small cast is the main downfall of this movie as it makes the characters extremely stiff and wooden. Pitt gets along with his wife. Him and Freeman become cautious allies and disagree all the time. R. Lee Ermey plays the loud mouthed and shoot-first sheriff. Its really run of the mill interactions even if the character's themselves are well acted. Kevin Spacey and Freeman deserved oscars for their input but Pitt plays a character I absolutely despise. The way he says his lines, his fake new york accent, his mannerisms and paper-thin character is easily *the* worst part of this movie. Key scenes that make me facepalm: The ending car ride with spacey and pitt's lines. When he kicks in the door. The bar scene. I could name dozens of scenes he sucked in.
Still this movie is excellent despite a few short comings. Great atmosphere, great acting, fantastic villain and a twist nobody expected that really elevates this movie into the top tier category horror or not.
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Halloween
John Carpenter is my favorite horror director. His early career was innovative, horrifying and had some fantastic camera and atmospheric effects. His style, his scores--there is so much I could say about Carpenter and how much I like his movies. Halloween, arguably one of the first slashers made, is his most popular movie for good reason. It invents the "girls get slashed with a butcher knife" genre of slasher but does it intelligently.
The story is a kid goes crazy and kills his sister and then is put into a mental asylum. He is looked after by Donald Pleasance, who plays a wonderfully creepy role. After 15 years of trying to deal with him Donald Pleasance is about to drop him as his patient and when driving to the mental asylum finds out he has escaped after 15 years of silence. Michael Myers hasn't ever said one word, but now is on the run back to his home down. From here we find out his backstory, we're introduced to a group of girls (One of them has something to do with his past) and we're also slow burned into a really thick and creepy atmosphere of uneasiness and surprise. Every time Myers is on screen he is silhouetted in the distance or in the shadows subtley on the side of the screen, easy to miss. He is the "darkness", he is "evil" on screen. While the murders themselves are *easily* the weakest part of the movie Myer's mask and sheer personality despite not saying one word make up for it.
Another complaint is the weak ending but the 15 minute chase scene before it are truly intense and exciting, propelling the movie from subtle horror into pure slasher and intensity. John Carpenter proves he can reinvent a simple genre and for 30 years after, its been used thousands of times but never quite as good as the original Halloween.
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Dark Water
This confusing, often annoying J-horror is one of the weakest I've seen it a while. It follows the life of a mother raising a small child in an apartment room. The room hasn't been sold in years and is often the concern of plumbing problems, water leakage, etc. But she takes what she can get. Water starts to become a symbolic nuisance--dripping from corners of the screen and out of applicances left and right during the span of the movie. As the mother settles into a new job and every day life she starts to uncover a mystery about a missing girl who lived in the apartment above her with her mom. The girl looks awfully like her own daughter and she starts to see her everywhere, almost always accompanied by water.
The premise is ridiculous to me--Its obvious almost from the get-go what the conclusion is and the whole thing reeks of being pretentious. It complicates itself with little reason with time warps, loop holes, repeating scenes, and general cosmic oddities that ultimately boil down to the filler category. The fact is its a murder mystery with a stupid twist anybody could see coming. I didn't enjoy this movie at all
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The Hitcher
This movie owes more than a fair bit to The Duel by stephen king. However Hitcher remains its own beast, detailing an odd and complex villain cast alongside dull and boring teenagers. The killer, played convincingly by Rutger Hauer, is a hitchhiker who is picked up by travellers who he then quickly kills in a sadistic and morally complex manner--at least in his own eye.s He toys with them along the road, using a sickly layered sense of humor mixed with plain sadistic and violent qualities. And thats really the quality and drawing point of this show. His character and his odd bond with the main star and victim, played by C. Thomas Howell.
Its an unsettling psychological thriller but its not horror, and is one of the unfortunate "miscast" movies on my list. But the finale, the early killings and the constant tension and paranoia in this movie is really well crafted and present. It also features some fantastic shootouts and driving scenes in paticular, though completely farfetched as they are. So to wrap this up the villain is sweet, its a tense movie and has some gripping moments. My main complaints go to how farfetched it is, how silly the main actor is and also the very-very end of the movie itself
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Cloverfield
There are some things this monster mash movie does right. First off, it keeps the monster shrouded in mystery even after the credits roll. You don't know what it is and you don't need to--the movie plays off like you're in the eyes of HUD, the guy with the camera. Thats the second part it does right, its really cool to be confined to an FPS perspective the entire time like you're in on the action. This movie manages to feel authentic without sacrificing too much quality. This movie sheds pounds in realism though--While trying to maintain a psuedo immersion of being there, it also decides to leave any logic outside of the film set.
While our heroes travel the war torn city, the military engages the hundred story monster with brutal speed and reckless efficiency for collateral damage or even quality. Apparently the generals running this program decided attacking a 1000 ton monster with infantry and jeeps would work. If this didn't work, its fine, we'll use rocket launchers and jeeps. Oh, right, its as big as the towers we're protecting. Lets try 250lb bombs and napalm instead. Logic is also lost when cruise missiles, bunker busters, carpet bombs and so on don't kill a big, but still soft, creature.
My last complaint is it takes WAY too long to get started. An exact 35 minutes in a 1.2 hour movie before the creature even shows up. This entire time is spent in a nauseating party scene that serves no purpose later on other than to briefly introduce dozens of characters we'll never see again.
Anyway lets talk about the atmosphere. Its not really all that good up on the streets, reminds me of independence day or other mass destruction movies, but once we get indoors or more specifically in the subways things get excellent. In a homage to aliens the big monster sheds parasites that feed off it. Now they feed on people. We see these crab-like things in the sewers in a very intense and frantic fight scene. Although this is their only introduction its all that is needed; its a gripping scene and probably the best in the movie.
This tension is lost when a tell-all scene follows in a military camp and it becomes a tedius "race to the finish" on a time limit before manhatten gets nuked or so its implied. And really I just explained the entire movie. Its a very little bit over an hour long, a painfully short run time thats surpassed even by the black and white godzilla epics.
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Ils (Them)
This extremely brief french horror is a lot like The Strangers, an American horror that came much later after its release. This movie chronicles the events of a couple who move into an apartment to be attacked and harassed by short, hooded, people or creatures. As they invade their house you get glimpses of them, hear the sounds they make, and see the overall panic among the couple. But like the Strangers its anonymity is its greatest flaw--It becomes so concealed in the secret and lucid atmosphere of it all it becomes painfully whats going on only 25 minutes into the movie.
What Them does right is creating a pretty decent atmosphere in the opening, and ending, scenes. But as soon as the secret is thrown out there to the viewer all of the suspense goes out the window. "Oh, I thought so. Well, great. Now to wait until it ends". The "twist" into reality comes way too soon and takes another 15 minutes to close during a painfully obnoxious chase scene
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Rosemary's Baby
This movie is a lot like Suspiria. They both deal with the same subject, both of them have an otherworldly atmosphere and both movies fail to deliver any real coherent point until the last 30 seconds. Rosemary's deals with a young couple who move next door to very strange neighbors. The husband takes very kindly to them very quickly and the couple plans to have a baby. Rose begins to have dizzy spells and headaches after eating a chocolate mouse prepared by the neighbors, and then collapses on her bed. She has a lucid dream she is being raped... by satan... and then wakes up in her room with scratches on her back and her husband having a satisfied look on his face.
From here on out we're really just drip fed a very lucid, surreal story of paranoia as she researches her neighbors and as allies drop dead around her. Throughout this two hour movie nothing really happens beyond this--Her husband acts shady and protective of the neighbors, the neighbors push and push themselves into her every day routine and even the doctor she is seeing is acting odd. We find out whats up at the very predictable conclusion, and overall you're left with a bad taste in your mouth. Oh, so it was that obvious. Oh well... two hours wasted.
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Stalker
This isn't really a horror movie but its still one of my favorites. It is a devastating, bleak look at the life of a poor russian family and the heartbreak between them. The man is revealed to be a stalker--a tour guide, of sorts, into the Zone which is a very mysterious and deadly area quarantined by military and police alike full of wonders. Stalker meets up with two men, Professor and Writer, at a bar and they begin to discuss their lives and goals there and finalize some details. This is when you realize two things about the movie: Almost every scene is a work of art in some form or another. The color pallete, the shots, the angles--the entire movie looks spectacular visually and it only gets more and more stunning once you enter the lush Zone.
The other thing is just how good the writing in this movie is. No taboo, no emotional state, is left untouched by these three men as they converse and travel the Zone. The dialog is very fluid and mostly driven on by Writer, an analytical and jaded man who hates Writing but sees nothing better to do with is life. He is the most complicated character in the movie and it really shows. Professor is a quiet, elderly man who keeps to himself but sometimes joins in on Writer's arguments--often taking the role of the other side. Stalker keeps to himself, but mostly butts in about purpose/religion/cruelty of life.
The characters excel and are some of my personal favorites ever on screen. The last thing to mention is the sheer stunning atmosphere The Zone has. It is a creepy, unsettling, mysterious world full of things in the side of the screen and vast imagery and "traps". There are some select scenes that are impossibly tense without doing anything really. The Meat Grinder, for example.
The movie's ending is also my favorite almost of all time. The final 30 minute conversation and struggle between the three men, the moral choices put into action, and the finale are some of the most well executed scenes I have personally seen. It manages to stay atmospheric and unsettling the entire way through without showing any monsters or goblins. Its about human emotion, survival, and the mysteries of The Zone itself
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Eraserhead
David Lynch's masterpiece is know as Eraserhead. A fucking bleak, disturbing look at odd families, having a new born, desires of life and by the nescessity to sleep. It is an experimental and artistic movie in every single sense. There is no coherency in the sense of what you're accustom to. The narration, the progression, the actors, the imagery-- it is disturbing and bleak. Every scene is and artistic and pessimistic reimagining of the frustrations of every day life for a man who is forced to marry a cautious lover of his after she gives birth to a mutant baby.
He lives in his apartment with the baby, it constantly spitting and crying to eat disgusting food as he simply tries to sleep. I'm explaining too much already--to give away the progression is to make it seem like this movie is normal. Its not. The imagery you'll see, and the drawn out scenes, are highly symbolic and plain disturbing in some parts. I... can't really review a movie like this. What I can say is its not horror ,but its bleak and experimental. I can also say I highly enjoyed it, and it is Lynch's best work by far.
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Saw
This movie is so painfully pretentious and strung along that any single minute detail or half second scene being altered in any way would completely change the outcome of the movie. It is so linear that it makes Dark Knight look plausible and dynamic. The entire premise is two men locked in a bathroom on opposite ends, between a dead body from a third man who was there. They must follow clues around the bathroom explained to them via sound tapes from an un-named "Jigsaw" killer. The basic premise of the movie is one man needs to kill the other, for reasons untold, according to Jigsaw. The doctor who must kill the man also has his family kidnapped by a third party. This is the premise explained 15 minutes into the movie.
What happens next is so strung along, so poorly acted, that you need to wonder how many drafts the screenplay had before it was just launched through customs. Logic is not present--None of the men try to escape how most people would. Break the shackles with a heavy brick, saw through the shackle lock instead of the 2 1/2 inch industrial chain, etc. The Doctor, who's only goal is to kill Adam, never even attempts it. He tries to save Adam--who is, by the way, a fucking annoying character. Instead Lawrence tries to save both of them. Even after the "reveal" in the end, his solution is to saw his own foot off to get help.
You need to remember that the Doctor's family is kidnapped and the doctor only needs to kill Adam to escape. He is given, across the movie, over 15 items to kill him quickly with. He does not try to use one of them.
And the fabled twist in the end is only a cliff hanger. It only catapulted the series into cult fame. The twist doesn't change a thing and is so out of left field that it doesn't really even matter.
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Event Horizon
This is the movie that could have been. It could have been one of the ultimates in space horror, sitting proudly next to Alien. And while Event Horizon is still one of the creepier movies in space, the sheer annihilation it received in post production and the amount of cliches thrown in on the last minute bog it down to a near unwatchable level. Anderson apparently only got a fraction of what one would call "post production" time so he wound up shaving off a whole 40 minutes of random scenes to make the MPAA happy and to bring the apparently brutal gore down a notch. What we get is like the worst paper art you can imagine, whole chunks and slices ripped or scissored off but still connected by the thinnest strip of paper.
The movie is about a rescue crew who gets flung into far un-colonized outer space around Neptune. The reason they are there is briefed to them by a guest on their ship, doctor Weir. Apparently a top tier experimental ship--Event Horizon--was testing out a new gravity drive when it disappeared from reality for seven years until to reappear off Neptune's Orbit. The gravity drive is code black and could revolutionize space travel.
After an introduction to the very lively and charismatic crew that could have been a dynamic cast, we're dropped onto the ship and things go down hill right away without any buildup. What happens across the rest of the movie is skippy, badly narrated and poorly acted for one reason only--entire scenes and leaps in time are made to try and make the progression coherent. After one scene it could be days later and they could be discussing something we never got to see. It could lurch foward in time to a scare scene where they show you a monster you're supposed to know from the backstory. The movie was butchered.
It still retains a creepy atmosphere though. Weir is an excellent villain up until the end and the ship itself is very remarkably detailed. My last point to note would be that the gore and imagination in this movie is top notch. The tech and space suits are still my favorite in any film and the whole movie is intelligent and--was--well planned out and didn't break your suspension of disbelief. Its too bad though, this could have been great.
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The Abyss
This isn't a horror movie and is one of the few "accidents" on my list. I won't review it, I don't need to. Its a science fiction/fantasy movie with a thick love story and pink aliens underwater.
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The Thing
This is John Carpenter's masterpiece. He is, in my eyes, the best horror director currently alive. He mastered all of the genres with this one ingenius, horrifying, paranoia driven chilling tale of a group of scientists in an Arctic outpost who come upon a mimicing, shape shifting, disgusting alien lifeform. There's a lot of good I can say about this movie but I won't bloat this mini review; The gore is fantastic for including 0% CGI. The acting is great and when the paranoia gets going, it becomes so thick you could cut it with a knife.
The monster designs are apalling and creative; the mystery behind the film really drives it foward and it has the best atmosphere out of any movie I've seen. The best part though is the pacing which is completely perfect. Its a slow burn style that slowly drip feeds the tension and paranoia into your head after the first opening scene. Who to trust? Who to kill? Where is the thing? Etc etc. Every character on screen is thinking this and so is the viewer and it becomes such an engrossing, nearly perfect, horror movie.
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The Birds
Its one of Hitchcock's worst movies if you ask me. His signature suspense, shock moments, tense scenes, striking camera angles, and crafty scripts--they are completely unpresent in this really cheesy, really campy thriller that really just seems to exist to show off the gory, special effects version of Hitchcock. The two main characters are really unbelievable--literally. The entire movie is a string along with the most absurd notions of flirting and chase/catch I've seen in a movie.
Anyway most of the scares come in the form of really random, but really technically good looking for the time, bird attacks. There is no subtle horror or classic tension Hitchcock has been obsessive about. No.... its just random gore and bird pecking swarms. Meh, I don't feel like saying anything else
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28 Days Later
The atmosphere and tension this movie builds up in the first 45 minutes is classic. Its gripping, its got great zombies, its got great combat, its got great directing and acting. The abandoned atmosphere complements all these qualities to make one of the best zombie movies of all time. Well if you don't watch the second half...
28 Days Later is about Great Britain becoming the victim to a disease only called Rage. When bitten (Or if blood gets in your mouth or eyes or an open wound) you turn into a oozing, screaming, insane person who's only purpose is to devour people and presumably animals alike. The disease almost wipes out all of London and apparently most of the surrounding country. Its an uninteresting concept done well. The art style, the bleak imagery and the gripping action scenes really help drive the story home. Furthermore this movie rebooted the idea of a "zombie". Actually they are just live people infected, bodies do not ressurect. Furthermore the infected run fast as hell after their pray with no sign of endurance.
The movie has a ton of memorable scenes up to the half way point. As soon as it goes to the army base the entire thing degrades and basically turns to shit. Realism is out the window in favor of sexual tension and really lame action scenes. The main star turns into rambo and really the entire thing just goes to shit, I can't put it any other way.
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The Exorcist
Some people still like to praise this as the scariest, most nerve racking horror movie ever made. Personally I don't believe a word of that. The Exorcist's greatest strength is in its imagery and its subtle reveals of captain howdy. It all breaks down to crap when the possession actually happens and we're dealing with a demon that acts like a five year old. When the pea soup starts flying and the heads start twisting, I can barely watch this movie anymore for how plainly boring and direct it is. The sometimes beautiful buildup of imagery in the beginning with Merin vs Pazuzu amounts to nothing as he only makes a last minute appearance, I was disappointed because instead some whiney faithless priest is the main character and Max Von Sydox got stuck on the baaack burner.
The horror in this movie, I thought, was the unknown and sensitive taboo horror that surrounded everything. Once the possession actually hits it becomes an explosion of cheesy effects, gore and vomit.
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Dr Giggles
Hehehehehehehe
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Dead of Night
Much like Kwaidan, Dead of Night is an anthology film where there are multiple short stories filmed by multiple directors. The story revolves around some backbone literature written by H.G wells and is immensely creepy at times. The gist is a man arrives at a house where a party is about to start; there are five guests. The catch is he remembers each and every one of them because they are a part of a recurring nightmare he's been having. He introduces himself, predicts the future in multiple occasions to set the mood all while being scrutinized by a psychiatrist present who doubts the predictions, and eventually the five people all share a ghost or horror story of there own. Some of these are misfires--Well, only one. The other five told are really chilling and match Kwaidan's mystery and delivery.
The first is "Room for one more'', which used to be a famous horror story. A man who is not well wakes up in the dead of night to hear the roaring and rumbling of a hearse outside in the gravel. He peeks out the window and the driver turns to him with a disgusting face and says, "Just room for one more inside, sir". The man dives back into his house and the hearse drives away. It used as a premonition of the future where a bus driver, who looks exactly the same, repeats the line in the same delivery. He does not enter the bus and it crashes and burns, killing all inside.
The other stories are all as.. familiar, as engrossingly inviting and the entire movie ends in a bombtastic twist and climax that almost no one will see coming. I love the camp-fire style of the movie, I love how it dips in and out of the stories, I love the acting and line delivery and--most of all--the extremely disquieting horror stories. The last one, a ventriloquist who thinks his dummy is alive, is perhaps one of the scariest short stories I have seen played on film and the ending of it is absolutely horrifying.
This movie got to me a bit, despite being made in 1945. Easily placed in my top ten.
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Inland Empire
Fuck this three hour garbage movie.
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Night of the Living Dead
Oddly fitting to me that the movie that ends my marathon is the one that sort of started it all in some ways. It made the zombie genre in film and paved the way for non-Hollywood endings, extreme gore, bitter confrontations and the lumbering enemies we all know and love. While this movie isn't really up on my list in quality I have to give it points for originality, moreso based on the budget of the film. The indie budget really shows in the gore and acting department which is often below average or borderline terrible. The best part about this movie is the pacing though, and how information is fed to us. I love the radio and tv bits, I love the speculation, and the mystery. The radiation copout was lame and never again picked up as a handle for a zombie movie and I can easily see why.
But really why this review is so special... its the end of the marathon folks. Its over. The results topic will be made shortly.