hill house was lame. Hereditary was one of the most brutal horror grinds I can remember. MANDY, was fuckin' METAL! Apostle, was pcool... I can dig canabalistic plant witches. Recently saw this movie called Spring, It was like a cool vampire love story that happens in italy. I always watch Micheal Man's The Keep. Cant keep a Nazi killing Mist Demon down, yall. <3
It's an interesting late-entry slasher. I think the version I watched was pretty poor quality so I wanna take another look at a decent transfer. Probably pretty fun on the big screen.
That's a good list. Watched two IFC Midnight flicks on Hulu with varying results. Pyewacket, meh. The hype on Twitter for this flick had me all excited. Seriously nothing happens until the last 10 minutes and when it does it's woefully underwhelming. It wasn't bad, just a short film idea stretched to full length. Midnighters, not bad, not great. My girl Alex Essoe kicks butt in a slightly-rougher-than-Lifetime crime-thriller. She's definitely the best thing about it. Also, I like to play a game where when I recognize someone in a film but can't quite place them I wait as long as possible to suss it out before hitting IMDb. I couldn't figure out who the sister was and was shocked when I finally looked her up.
I can only sit through Hill House if I allow myself to laugh out loud at the writing and acting, as well as the same scenes playing over and over. I really like the concept though so I am slowly making my way through it. I love Apostle's goddess/witch and the story. I hated the torture/snuff/violence. There could have been so much more fleshed out of the characters if the time was given to them rather than needing to find ways to show cruelty and gore. That being said, does anyone know the story behind the root head guy? Did I miss something?
Man, I'm startin' to question my own tastes with my feelings towards Hill House! Sans my aforementioned gripes, I really did enjoy it. It wasn't a masterpiece by any stretch, but I certainly was engaged! I, too, saw the new Halloween last night, and loved it. Not getting the anthology series that was originally planned for, this really did feel like a nicer, more solidified sequel to ending the chapter on Michael Myers and Lori. I love the direction they took with it, and despite it being a 2018 movie, felt like it kept to its simple, yet effective roots. I'll be seein' it again tomorrow night.
Loved Halloween! It really felt like a true sequel. Brutal but so familiar all at once. The nods to every other Halloween movie were awesome from the Don Post masks to making sure they got in a kill from nearly every other movie. Spoiler: Spoils I really wanted the dickhead boyfriend to die though.
To each their own. I loved it, and there are a TON of people out there who feel the same way. Never question your own tastes!
Late to the party, but I watched MANDY on the weekend. I enjoyed it and thought all the actors did a good job, particularly Cage. The trippy visuals were cool, but I did find some of the animated bits and the title cards a bit unnecessary. One thing, is there some hidden significance with the Klingon/D&D Axe? It seemed a bit out if place with the rest of the flick.
I went into Mandy almost completely blind. Months and months back I saw Nicolas Cage and chainsaw in the same sentence and quickly looked away, and then, a bit later, I saw the name Panos Cosmatos back in print once more - a name that I'd been patiently waiting to see in public again since 2010 - put two and two together and declared war on the internet to keep as much of my hymen intact as possible until I could be sitting in a room with whatever this thing was going to be. Okay, Joe, and I don't mean this as a criticism, but yours is in some ways the strangest reaction that I've seen to this particularly polarizing entertainment. Most folk just jumped straight to one or five stars over at the Tomato spot, but you enjoyed the film but took time to call out some of the metalest aspects of this most metal of films, ha! Brick time, sorry. Spoiler: 1 As far as first reactions go, we differed from each other rather significantly, heh - each of the aspects that you called out brought out genuine smiles and or hearty laughter from me. The way I was reading it, intertitles as chapter headings made all the sense in the world, especially in a film where one of the leads spends much of her limited screen time with her face buried in scrappy looking paperback fantasy novels. One of those intertiles is the actual title card for the film, the word Mandy in the metalest letters ever, and it doesn't even appear until after our hero forges that contentious ax, well over an hour into the film - talk about a prologue, ha! The ax, outside of being hilarious and rather badass, struck me as an amazingly appropriate exaggeration of the rage and pain that our hero was experiencing, perfectly fitting in the grand and overblown style of the film that demanded it, steeped in trailing fullscreen reds and metallic dissonance as it was. And really, now that I've seen it happen , what else would you want strapped to your back on a quest to behead a cabal of psychedelic death cultists and cannibalistic demon bikers, all of whom played a part in the burning alive of your one true love? As for meaning meaning, I personally can't speak to what gnostic and or pagan precedent may or may not be baked into such a weapon. There's no way that one or more of those dogeared books that Mandy liked didn't have a scene or three of the forging of a mystical weapon, though. I've since learned that looking at a trailer beforehand would have robbed me of the following treat: Alone, body free of mind altering substances, I actually clapped when the first animated sequence hit the screen! So unexpected, yet so fitting in a tale of two people that had to have checked out Ralph Bakshi's Wizards and Lord of the Rings no less than a dozen times each! In the context of my one and only viewing, the interludes served, for me, as a further emphasis of how beyond the scope of contemporary reality this world we've been inhabiting is, and a way back into the power of our titular character, now just ashes; they make her more than just fuel for the lumberjack's sorrow and revenge. Worked for me, man! OR, heh, there's a very simple reading of the film that might help to addresses all of your mentioned niggles: Spoiler: 2 The very last shot of the film, all the way past every single scrolling credit, to the sound of twittering woodland birds, is a few seconds of this: Mandy's work table. The whole story was dreamed up by her, in her idyllic life in the woods of Conté crayons. metal shirts and fantasy novels, with B-movies and Bakshi in the VCR, her faithful lumberjack - real or imagined - safe at work. At least that's one way to look at it! Huh. I probably should have had some coffee before I wretched up all of the above. Hope it makes sense, because I am not about to reread that blather... Lorb knows I'd never post anything if I thought about it twice! EDIT: Damn, edited it anyway! Saw a typo in the last sentence and couldn't resist correcting it.
@toothaction Thanks for the wretch-up, it did make a few things clearer to me. I must admit, I never made the connection of her reading paperback fantasy novels and the animation/title graphics - makes sense. I usually just go with stuff in a flick like this but the axe just came out of nowhere and my logic alarm went off. I mean, the only hint of Cage's job was at the start (as far as i recall) when he's felling trees, and then suddenly he's smelting and casting medieval weaponry for himself. What the fuck? It just seemed to come out of nowhere, with no relation to the rest of the film, even with all the trippy acid shenanigans, it was jarring.
I guess ill be in the minority to say that i was not impressed with the "New Halloween". I saw it last night and from the reviews was really looking forward to enjoying it, Don't get me wrong, i liked it but far from loved it. The story was OK but it was pretty predictable, badly written and not scary at at all. Some of the kills were violent/brutal but i did not even flinch at the "jump scares". I just felt there were a lot of holes and dumb people doing dumb things throughout... but it was a horror flick so that is to be expected. I did enjoy the "easter eggs" throughout and liked that there were nods to the franchise but in the end it was just an OK horror movie and i was hoping for great! Music was A+ though and as always, so great to hear on the big screen!
@wizeguy I didn’t go into the new Halloween from a horror perspective, but more as a slasher/thriller. I got hit by a couple jump scares, but for the most part I took tension away from that movie the most. I was just really tense for majority of it. The Easter eggs were definitely fun, and the score was incredible. The intro alone had me so hyped early on.
I agree, The intro gave me goosies! Spoiler I did love the kid that played Julian. Dude is a little scene stealer!
So basically, it was EXACTLY like the original. With slightly more gore, and not enough "totally"! Just moments ago I finished my ?th rewatch of the original - its ridiculousness is what makes it so great! Annie being the hugest megabitch to her friends is so much fun to laugh at again and again.
Sooo there's going to be discussion about this week's episode of The Goldbergs in this thread right??
I loved the original and still do. Its a classic. I get that the new one was done much like the first but being that the original was made in the 70s and has the old school look and super creepy feel, it sits up there with one of my all time favorite horror flicks. I just did not love the new one. It is possible to not like the new one AND still like the original. Having said that, I am a fan of 80s slasher/Horror films that are often cheesy/campy (Friday the 13th, which is my favorite horror franchise) but during that time i was a kid so those films were also scary. The way horror was filmed back then was gritty and sloppy which made them more authentic. This is just my opinion. I will still see the sequel to the Blumhouse version of Halloween if/when it comes out because at the end of the day its still a Halloween movie and i always love seeing Michael Myers on the big screen. Speaking of Friday the 13th, this article just came out: https://www.polygon.com/2018/10/22/18010868/friday-the-13th-reboot-lebron-james-production
I think I get it. For me very few movies ever capture that gritty, dirty slasher feel from the 70s and early 80s. They are either to clean or try to hard to be torture porn and just aren't enjoyable. I thought Halloween did a great job of feeling like it was in a modern setting but still capturing the unstoppable killer vibe. That one shot scene of him walking through the neighborhood was pretty damn impressive especially for one continuous shot. I loved how that one kid was all "Uhh he killed a few people so what? Worse stuff happens every single day!". Yeah people do stupid things but that is true of most horror and always has been. I enjoyed how he murdered people brutally but the movie didn't go out of it's way to show them suffering. It wasn't distasteful at all, more matter of fact killing which makes the killer seem so disconnected and cold. Like it wasn't for enjoyment or even just evil. It was just who he was.
So Summer of '84. I gotta say, I kinda dug it. It could have been at least 15 minutes shorter, and they did not nail the '80s aesthetic, but I liked it nonetheless. I'm kind of a sucker for Rear Window type stories, hell I even like Disturbia, so this kinda hit my wheelhouse in that regard. The end was interesting as well. I was not a fan of the retro-jack-off-session that was Turbo Kid, but I think these guys can go on to better things after this. It's up on Shudder now, so if you're already subscribed it's worth a look, IMO.