Hey it's halloween, everybody should shit their pants - ilx horror crew top tens.

That's a bit extreme - it has some of the same kinetic energy. (Personally I love it but it might be the most divisive horror movie of the aughts.)

It also has a lot of errant fluid in unwilling mouth gags.

It's plenty like Evil Dead, the possessions, demons, splatstick and regular assaults are there and she even says "I'm gonna get some! Yeah!" in a very Ash manner. But most of the visual style is completely different.
I'd recommend Within The Woods too (a short before Evil Dead that follows roughly the same template).

I've never seen his Crimewave but I've heard it has a very similar style. The trailers certainly support that.

Dare I once again mention how much I LOVED the evil dead remake from last (this?) year?

I think most people liked it better than they expected. I thought the outdoor scenes looked beautiful, nice and wet.

omg that Pleasure Toast thing had me rolling, thank you TT

Drag Me To Hell is great, very much in the style of the older Raimi

Drag Me To Hell was indeed great! All the talk about multiple instances of nasty shit going into people's mouths made me a bit wary but the OTT audacity of it was cracking me up. I wish it had happened more, if anything. My only quibble was the obvious transparency of the envelope mix-up (even if said transparency was clearly intentional on Raimi's part) but the bluntness of the ending definitely made up for it.

Truly the best horror movie finale since I don't even know when.

haha yes. great use of main title and the front and finish, too!

http://www.avclub.com/article/25-best-horror-movies-2000-227068

got all the way to 25 before i realized this list was total garbage prepared by sacs of trash

There were some good ones in there, but the order was all kinds of f'd up.

Drag Me to Hell (which I still love) is basically Night/Curse of the Demon, right down to the train station finale.

I believe both Drag Me To Hell and Night/Curse of the Demon (which is still in my Halloween queue for this year) are based on M.R. James's 'Casting The Runes' (which I recently read and which, to be honest, bears only a superficial resemblance to Drag Me To Hell).

After I first saw it I was amazed there was not so much as a "adapted from" or "inspired by" credit.

Some strong scary movie contenders I thought of have been Grave Encounters and the first two Rec films. Oculus has also stuck with me. And has anyone (or I?) mentioned "S&Man?"

Ohhhh yeah S&Man! Jesus. That thing creeped the SHIT out of me.

Fans of S&Man, see Megan Is Missing, which seems like it ought to be illegal to watch.

Didn't someone describe that in one of the other horror threads as Deathdr0ne: The Movie? I am as likely to watch that as I am A Serbian Movie. Which is to say: no.

"A Serbian Film" was kind of surreal in its ridiculous horrificness, and while I've since read a couple of things about the civil war there to make me reconsider many of the objections I've had, the movie still works better in a vacuum than in practice. But S&Man was clever and sort of incisive (or at least provocative) about why we watch horror films.

I was lumping Megan Is Missing in with A Serbian Film, if that was unclear.

Read the synopsis of MiM, ugh. At least ASF was claiming to be making a point, however facile one thinks it.

Hate torture stuff, but I still think this is the one I want to see the least:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/91WVkmGhDJS._SL1500_.jpg

Wow, that's big, sorry.

when did that come out?

cuz it looks like a cheap ripoff of a Grant Morrison Batman villain

Dunno. A decade ago?

Also, there was Grotesque (2009, Japan), the first film to be outright banned in UK for a long time. Director also did Noroi, which I didn't care for much but lots of people seem to love it.

Don't have the interest or patience for endurance test torture films anymore. Not my preferred cup of harrowing.

It's not even just the torture, it's the entire direction I'm not interested in.

The Butcher is 2009, this is 2007:

https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fbatmanytb.com%2Fbios%2Fvillains%2Fp%2Fpyg01.jpg&f=1

There are pig masks all over horror movies.

the pig plus butcher's smock plus chainsaw is def something that appears in the comic, I just couldn't find an online image

Pig mask plus chainsaw is also in Motel Hell (1980).

And like 40 other things

huh ok then

I have seen Motel Hell but only remember random things - the "harvest" etc.

Wait sorry, like 400 other things.

Megan is Missing is brutally brutally sad among other things. My tastes run towards the bleak in horror so I thought it was excellent, but yeah, it's a rough watch on a lot of levels.

Xpost Korean Butcher also 2007, actually. It's a tie!

Man, reading a description of Grotesque makes it seem 10x worse than A Serbian Film. Ugh. I need a shower.

I once listened to a podcast of horror fans watching it and they were pretty mortified and not in a way they liked.

As it happens, "GROTESQUE: UNRATED VERSION" has been banned in U.K. I'm quite delighted and flattered by this most expected reaction from the faraway country, since the film is an honest conscientious work, made sure to upset the so-called moralists.
In Japan the unrated version is available in DVD.
It's a suitable film for couples, so please take advantage and watch it in your quality time.

Koji Shiraishi, Director/ Screenwriter of GROTESQUE

Megan Is Missing has the bones of something quite good but oversteps the mark on four or five occasions in a way that renders the whole thing prurient and sordid. I'd imagine the director would argue that without the shock factor, the message would be no stronger than after-school PSAs in terms of influencing naive teen behaviour irl, and it does apparently carry a recommendation from a guy whose daughter was killed in similar circumstances, but it's not easily defensible. It's unnecessary too - it wouldn't be any less powerful with the more lurid bits taken out.

Turned off Megan is Missing because I could not rid myself of the suspicion throughout that it was made for creeps to masturbate to, and the suspicion became conviction when the last bit of "found footage" was introduced, and life is too short and good horror movies are too enjoyable for that shit. "Torture porn" as a metaphor is bad enough, don't need the real thing.

― Three Word Username, Monday, June 23, 2014 8:23 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeech. not touching that one.

Rewatched OG Halloween 1 & 2, confirming yet again that (challops alert!) I'm just not that into the first one and that the second one is about as good as the first. And I think I'm beginning to realize that my opinion isn't just colored by age or the extent to which later movies aped Halloween's moves. The characterization kinda sucks, the dialogue kinda sucks, the suspense isn't really all that (and I'm a pretty big Carpenter fan otherwise, at least in part because he eventually learned how to stage horror scenes really well). It really doesn't rise much above the level of what the Friday the 13th movies eventually did. None of which is to say that I dislike it or think it's a bad movie. It's just, at this point, not so much something I would prefer to actively watch as much as I would rather put on in the background as a mood-setter while I was doing other stuff.

Funny, I just rewatched the first one too and still love it immensely, and as I watched it I thought, man, all the subsequent copies can't match this one. Especially the Friday the 13th series, which is often poorly directed and worse acted, with even less characterization and dialog. I agree that Halloween II is underrated, though. Though in both cases the score does the heavy lifting.

The closest thing I've managed to Halloween viewing in the last few days was an impulsive decision to finally sit down and watch Trouble Every Day after its inclusion on that (fairly shaky) AV Club list. Loved it to pieces, but if Under the Skin was dropped from their ballot for not being a horror film, then wtf was Trouble Every Day doing there? The cannibalism is almost incidental, and most importantly, I never felt like Denis wanted to scare the audience, other than a constant nagging concern for the safety of the two sick people's spouses. It's far more sad than frightening.

If I can get the time tonight between class projects, I'm going to try Footprints on the Moon- I hadn't even heard of it until I watched the commentary track on Berberian Sound Studio. Strickland mentioned it as an atypical but beautiful giallo soundtrack, and further investigation showed it stars Florinda Balkan and has some gonzo nutshit moon landing conspiracy stuff; I've avoided looking too much closer and just bought the DVD blind (along with The House with Laughing Windows) in the hopes of being pleasantly surprised.

Haven't seen Footprints on the Moon, but found House with Laughing Windows a bit of a chore tbh - lacks the urban flashiness I associate with the best gialli.

I wasn't much into it either but it has enough fine moments to give it a light recommendation. I hope to see Avati's Zeder and Arcane Enchanter someday.

House With Laughing Windows starts well and ends really well but the middle is a slog and a half. Footprints On The Moon is fantastic, maybe my favourite non-Argento Giallo atm.

So Halloween 4 is, unsurprisingly, not a very good movie, but there's something about the aesthetic of not very good late-'80s/early-'90s horror movies that I enjoy so I'll cut it a little slack. And the ending is decent. Michael Myers looks like a total doof in this one, though, and is occasionally blonde?

Dyes his hair, getting vain.

Finally watched the Evil Dead remake - not terrible. Raimi and co. would do well to tap Jane Levy for Ash vs. The Evil Dead.