ok lets all shit our pants to something new: post 2005 horror film thread

The creature and the performances in Mara aren't enough to outweigh its already-seen mixture of The Grudge / Ring / The Boogeyman / etc.

Unfriended Dark Web has a decent idea and cool resolution, but the visuals (pop-up windows for actors & info with small text) quickly lost my interest. The first one - supernatural plot - I thought was decent enough to keep me engaged.

Both library borrows, so less a dissatisfied feeling, more checkboxing the genre. Besides Mandy sticking with me, the last five minutes of Kin (sci-fi, not horror) is the best thing I've seen lately.

"Revenge" is super lurid, trashy, ridiculous, OTT stylized, and OK, not really horror or even remotely suspenseful but it is pretty gory and in the end probably perfect midnight movie fare.

watching Endless and Annihilation back to back highlighted all the things the former does right and the latter does poorly.

that's rough, but i get it

rough in the sense that it's hard on Annihilation or that I'm not making my point clear?

the first. though i also think that Endless is slept on (and like Annihilation, it being a messy, imperfect but ultimately cool mystery)

I noticed there's a remake of blairw proj. Wtf. Is it as crap as I think it is?

I'm reading the Devil's Advocates series. So awesome.

xp, yeah I get it. Annihilation's gender flip of the standard "four guys confront the horror" trope seemed the only interesting twist for me. Endless is definitely messy and features an unnecessary and poorly structured first fifteen minutes or so (also, due respect, but Justin Benson shouldn't be starring in his movies)... but it is far more evocative with far less in the same general field. TBH, the Resolution callback had me bouncing off the couch so my enthusiasm is at least partially due to the stylistic approach being more wry and self-aware but hooooo boy could Annihilation have used a dose of self-awareness. Made Interstellar look carefree.

The Blair Witch remake, which I haven't seen, was directed by Adam Wingard. People were psyched about a followup to You're Next and The Guest, and it was originally called The Woods. But then it was revealed to be a secret Blair Witch reboot, and it's supposed to be terrible, so terrible that even Wingard has seemed sort of apologetic about it and almost acts like he was blackmailed into doing it. I think he did a movie after that that no one saw/liked, but then they dumped a bunch of money at his house to do Godzilla vs. King Kong, so who the fuck knows what kind of favor he did or was owed.

it's not a remake. It's a direct sequel to the first move

but it is crap, yeah

Or is it a ... soft reboot?

it's a sequel. it's not "good" but i enjoyed it in the theater regardless

not entirely sure why you keep talking about things you haven't seen as if you've seen them

Blair Witch '16 was definitely a disappointment compared to Wingard's other films. It was... OK. I suppose if you were an fan of the original you'd be even more disappointed; he had one or two interesting ideas, the rest was pretty mediocre. I still haven't seen his Death Note movie for Netflix which is also supposed to be bad, but I'll watch it someday. Surprised he got the Kong gig afterwards, but he's definitely a capable director - I still love the hell out of The Guest, and You're Next was really fun.

xpost Because it's not rocket science? Because when it came out and I saw some really negative reviews I read about the movie I was never going to see and learned why people didn't like it?

I did see Blair Witch 2, that movie absolutely sucked and I have no idea why that guy made it.

Also, the story of The Blair Witch reboot remake sequel whatever *is* the story, the movie itself came and went without a trace. It was pretty anti-climactic. But who made it and how it was made in secret is what people remember.

they put out the first trailer as "The Woods" and gave up the beans a few months later

btw - re: Endless - i was so into that, I went back to watch Resolution and was sorely disappointed; they waited WAY too long to get to the good stuff.
Endless is a rare example of something retconning the ending of the original movie and making it way better

Wingard got tabbed for G vs KK on the strength of The Guest, I think. The responsibility for helping turn Dan Stevens into a legit Hollywood contender didn't go unnoticed. And Maika Monroe, on a lesser scale.

they put out the first trailer as "The Woods" and gave up the beans a few months later

― Nhex, Thursday, January 24, 2019 9:58 AM (thirty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

still really wish i could see the woods instead

Death Note on Netflix is vomit inducing. Very very bad.

Godzilla (as we all remember like it was yesterday) came out in 2014, like The Guest. So you think (xpost) maybe Wingard got picked for Godzilla back then? Hmm. (Googles some more) OK, looks like the G v KK movie got announced in 2015, even before the release of KK and (clearly) the upcoming King of the Monsters, but Wingard didn't get named until 2017. My guess is like Marvel and Star Wars and Jurassic Park they were looking for any semi-competent and cheap genre director, but I think it's still weird, given his track record, that Wingard should even be in the mix. Maybe it'll be his comeback?

I think AW's track record is that of someone who has a distinct enough visual style who works well with a cast and he's shown he can do a lot with a relatively low budget, i mean The Guest wasn't El Mariachi but it was a mere $5 million, and people really love it. Not to mention You're Next was just shy of a million (it did flop, somewhat surprisingly...)

the Blair Witch reboot was decent enough but I think got a harsher rap than it deserved due to the fact that no one ever wanted to see a BWP film ever again.

Someone I kinda sorta trust said Hagazussa was better than The Witch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_last886efA

As someone who really enjoyed the first <i>Happy Death Day</i>... I really enjoyed the new one!
Yeah, it's dumb, somewhat indefensible as a unnecessary retread, but I love time loop gimmicks and you can just see the screenwriters having fun with this damn thing. Still surprised they didn't just completely abandon the first movie, <i>Butterfly Effect</i>-style, but then I sort of admire their dedication to HOW MUCH they stuck to the characters and setting of the original. I don't feel like Jessica Roche was the main draw of the original film (enough to do a whole sequel around her - so it does kind of spread out to the other characters more) but I'll give her credit, she gives her full effort in all of the slasher/soap/farce segments. (They went even broader with the comedy, leaning way into it this time, usually it worked...)

you can just see the screenwriters having fun with this damn thing

is there info about ghostwriters out? based on the credited writer of the first one, I assumed all the good stuff came from Landon

https://scontent-lax3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/46501798_984474221756874_4122361747308806144_n.jpg?_nc_cat=111&_nc_oc=AQkUpmaR0qc1-PaWg5P2C7JT0AZN6nJhX9v-AS6UT1LfwNNDLbDyY17_IcIlJakcJ7Z3V6m3TqtAzOmptGRriZ5u&_nc_ht=scontent-lax3-2.xx&oh=294ae9eb6fdff95a90e4002291c77871&oe=5D261AA9

suspiria is a mess but is also pretty amazing I thought, one of my favorite films of the year.

can see that a lot of people would really hate it though

I don't think low budget horror has the same presence anymore, pretty much never see or hear about the stuff unless we're talking high budget indie films. Wonder what happened?

Might have already posted this, but I changed my mind about Strange Color Of Your Bodys Tears. It's just okay, but I think I wanted something like that so badly at the time that I kind of overlooked it being a bit boring. First third of Amer is still great and the short films are very good.

early 2019 list of interesting looking horror films; outside of HDD2, anyone want to steer me one way or another?

Happy Death Day 2
Level 16
The Hole in the Ground
Escape Room
Body at Brighton Rock
The Changeover
Rust Creek
The Wind
Us
Ma

Okay, these books are great and I was prepared to write this adaptation off, assuming they would wind up turning an OTT series of 'kids' books into a tepid film for babies, but...hey, it looks like they might actually be going for it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3J2k3Nhicw

http://cdn.collider.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/scary-stories-to-tell-in-the-dark-poster-red-spot-768x1137.jpg

that poster is INCREDIBLE

i’m in

I love everything about that poster except for the actual special effect

This reminds I just kicked my doctor pimple popper addiction. Usually I'm not horrified by posters, this one ...urgh. 😱

Saw The Mist again. Good gawd what an abysmal movie. Esp the ending.

We need to do a definitive "ending of the Mist: good/bad?" poll to settle this

The Wind is terrible btw

Just watched Troubled Water (which was Norwegian iirc) and it was really great. Reminded me of First Reformed only even more grim with themes of mother-grief and trauma vs religion and environmental decay. Also, some very good organ music!

First Reformed only even more grim

!

Soooo ... multiple movies on their way about people trapped in small flooding alligator/croc infested spaces? Black Water: Abyss and Crawl? Hmm. Throw in some father/son body swapping and I'm there!

so i've now watched every rob zombie movie. two of them are pre-2005 but i figured this was the more appropriate thread

house of 1000 corpses: a pretty delightful texas chain saw pastiche, the effect of which is like the first and second movies combined (movie practically screams for dennis hopper to run in with a chainsaw to save the day, which kind of happens in devil's rejects). contains several echoes of his future films (the set design of the infinite catacombs beneath the firefly clan's house is very halloween ii), inherits a lot of stylistic tics from his music video work (degraded film stock/videotape, inverted, radioactive color filters) which never really appear in his films again. a first draft but a good one

the devil's rejects: i watched part of, maybe all of this ten or eleven years ago and haaaated it, found it mean and joyless and it put me off zombie's work for a long time. the first half is still pretty mean and joyless, it's undiluted grindhouse sleaze and i find it very hard to endure the extended motel hostage situation, but the rest of the movie almost feels like a reward for living through that horror: the ice cream scene, the reversal of sympathies when the cop starts torturing the torturers which somehow didn't feel manipulative or graceless at all... really remarkable film, surprisingly political in that it's both anti-torture and anti-cop. in almost all of his movies i think rob zombie wants us to witness dehumanization but he simultaneously refuses to dehumanize any of his characters. in doing so he made this, the anti-revenge revenge film. incredible

31: the only one i had left (quick run-down: zombie's halloween is a failure, his halloween ii is a triumph, and lords of salem is equally as good and features sheri moon zombie's best performance (ymmv)). this one has the reputation of being the rob zombie film that even rob zombie fans hate. but... it's great? most of zombie's movies are really beautifully shot, he has a great eye (which is very indebted to hooper et al), but this one is Ugly and 100 percent about being Ugly. shot almost entirely in digital handheld close-up, the kills practically illegible seizures of flesh and blood, it's mean, hopeless, and there's no light whatsoever in it. i get why people hate it; i find it uncompromising and inspiring, and i'm going to add it to the "trump films" thread even though it may not really fit. also zombie's music cues are always really unexpected and wonderful and he outdoes himself with the way he uses aerosmith's "dream on" in this film

forgot to mention: 31 really lives up to the kafka epigraph at the start ("a first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die")

I re-watched Devil's Rejects for the first time in a long time not too long ago, and iirc found the motel scene even harder to watch than before and the turnaround of sympathies ... less effective than I remembered it?

31 I never saw and always forget it was even released. 1000 Corpses I saw once and don't want to see again, Salem is the one I think about the most. Easily his best directed and, iirc, the only one that doesn't coast on grotesque white trash-ery?

correct that lords of salem is the only one that doesn't dwell in gratuitous white trashiness even though i think zombie's use of that is more complicated than coasting on its grotesquery, cf. the authenticity politics and class war going on in both 1000 corpses and rejects

also if you like and think about lords of salem a lot, i highly recommend watching the director's cut of halloween ii, those movies feel very connected to me

Maybe I've seen it? It's possible it was so ugly (in every sense) that I just turned it off.

no no no it's shot beautifully! and is mostly just very sad!

however if you remember a rob zombie movie that featured a white horse, you saw it