Author Topic: Shocktober Group Marathon 2011  (Read 58768 times)

sdedalus

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Re: Shocktober Group Marathon 2011
« Reply #100 on: October 07, 2011, 08:17:36 PM »
I completely agree with your first 2 paragraphs. It's not a ratio I was referring to, it's more about how action movies can get a pass just because they have good action. Take Fast Five. The action in the opening and closing half-hours is pretty good, but the drama in the middle is given too much attention and I ended up mixed on the film. The Italian Job (both versions) had good characters and a great car chase, which is why they are superior films. So it's not a ratio of one to the other, but the quality of both. I swear I reviewed a samurai film where the action was lousy, but it got 3 stars because I liked the characters.

So maybe the confusion is I emphasized one side over the other, you could say the true test of a great drama is the battles between the acting, but that just sounds weird. It probably gets at the problem you had with my original statement, but I felt what I was saying was quite clear. I just find that samurai films, much like martial arts pics, musicals and Summer Hollywood Blockbusters, tend to put most of their energy into the kenetic set-pieces and not so much into the story and characters.

I think my problem is more with the general statement.  "Whether this movie is great or merely good rests on the drama between the action sequences."  is a statement that, while I wouldn't necessarily agree with it, I can at least understand.  Often, a few great elements or sequences is enough for me to consider a film which is merely OK the rest of the time a great film.  An example for me would be the original Gone in 60 Seconds, which has almost nothing to commend it but its car chases (going so far as to have most of its dialogue exchanges in voiceover, it clearly cares nothing about acting or characters), but is nonetheless one of the greatest movies I've seen in the last year.  I have no problem privileging the part over the whole in this way, but clearly not everyone will (or should) see it that way.

I tried to directly answer your addendum, but all the double negatives made it hard to understand. Does it help that you gave me something to think about when you posed that Curse of the Cat People is not a horror movie at all? It's something that's come up quite a bit as I've watched my Shocktober list. Many of my picks are so far outside the horror genre, I've been questioning if they're best explained at as something else.

Certainly.  A genre as expansive, long-running and varied as horror is sure to be difficult to use as the basis for determining a film's success or failure.  Especially in a situation like with Curse of the Cat People, where Val Lewton and his directors were pretty much left alone to do whatever they wanted, within their low-budgets, and their films were marketed as B-level horror movies despite their clear artistic ambitions (I Walked with a Zombie as a Jane Eyre adaptation for example).

Wikipedia on Curse:

"Although sharing some of the same cast and characters and marketed as a sequel to 1942's Cat People, this film has little relationship to the earlier one. RKO studio executives wanted to cash in on the success of the first film, and insisted on keeping the title, despite producer Val Lewton's desire to change it to Amy and Her Friend.[4] Lewton had put a lot of himself into the film, integrating into the story autobiographical details from his childhood, such as the party invitations that are "mailed" by putting them into a hollow tree. Lewton grew up not far from Tarrytown, where the story is set, and was fond of ghost stories such as "The Headless Horseman" (Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow") which is cited in The Curse of the Cat People.[3]"
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Bill Thompson

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Re: Shocktober Group Marathon 2011
« Reply #101 on: October 07, 2011, 09:42:33 PM »
Haute Tension (High Tension, 2003)

Quote
I don’t like to have to say this, but since so many people happen to be touchy on a subject that I don’t believe deserves the time of day, I will be liberally spoiling Haute Tension throughout this review. There, now you know random not regular reader of this blog, don’t come crying to me about spoilers, I won’t listen.

With that bit of pedantry out of the way I can fully inform you of how utterly disappointing I found Haute Tension to be. Before I get to what made it disappointing I need to discuss why the disappointment I ultimately felt was so, uh, disappointing. Haute Tension could be thrown in with any film from the slasher sub-genre of horror. The initial story it presents is very common, very much a story that has been done before, seen before, and heard before. Within the well worn framework of the initial story Alexandre Aja establishes a style, a setting so drenched in ambiance that it makes up for the known nature of the story.

Read the rest at my blog.

In many of the original zombie stories, the zombies were living people whose minds were taken over by voodoo and the like. Being undead is not even remotely a necessary or sufficient condition to be a zombie.

There have been stories like that yes, but I don't consider those zombie movies, more along the lines of possession movies.


Corndog

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Re: Shocktober Group Marathon 2011
« Reply #102 on: October 07, 2011, 10:02:34 PM »
Is that Julia Stiles in the picture for Dexter Season 5, 1SO? Because I <3 Julia Stiles.
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1SO

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Re: Shocktober Group Marathon 2011
« Reply #103 on: October 07, 2011, 11:36:28 PM »
Bill, pretty much the reaction I expected. Many people turn on the film with that terrible twist. I would say that most of the film doesn't make a lot of sense before this reveal too, from a staircase head splat that is physically impossible to the moment where the killer searches for the girl by checking under the sink faucet. The search is so dragged out I found myself feeling bas tension.


Corndog, did you think to at least skim the review? There's a whole paragraph about her.

Corndog

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Re: Shocktober Group Marathon 2011
« Reply #104 on: October 07, 2011, 11:50:24 PM »
I don't read things about things I haven't seen, sorry. I just look at pictures and ratings, if there is one (to the Confessions thread?). Though I have always heard great things about Dexter anyway; a show I plan on checking out if I ever get into watching TV shows.

But even as I lightly skimmed it just now I didn't see her name until I looked even closer.
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Re: Shocktober Group Marathon 2011
« Reply #105 on: October 07, 2011, 11:53:08 PM »
In the Mouth of Madness - John Carpenter.



In the Mouth of Madness completes my watching of Carpenters Apocalypse Trilogy, with The Thing and Prince of Darkness being the other two entries. This one has, perhaps, the most promise, though in its execution ends up just being pretty good.

Stephen King's entire career is based on What Ifs. What if there was a car that was evil and ate people? What if there was a store that sold you exactly what you needed, no matter what? What if there was a place so bad it made you go crazy? In the Mouth of Madness is based on its own What If: what if a horror writer's words were so pervasive that they changed reality? Sam Neil's insurance inspector guy has to find a horror writer "even more popular than Stephen King" who's gone missing with a new book waiting in the wings. He goes on a journey to find the writer in a small New England town that features prominently in his books. It's all very meta. And this is the good part. Sam Neil is pretty great at doing the dry disbeliever (Jurassic Park!) and his little sarcastic jibes play well alongside the surreal horror. We get thrown in the middle of all of this crazy shit going on the same as Neil and it's a lot of fun.

But then they start to explain things. And all of the cool images and ideas start to join together and, as happens so often in King's work, it just doesn't add up to what it should. There is, early on, a cool black church at the center of town. The story goes that the black church consumed the old stone church which may or may not be hidden deep in the bowels of the new church. It's a fantastic idea, but nothing comes of it. When we meet the writer he's suitably crazy, but not excitingly so. There is one fantastic image late in the move which involves ripping and things, but then everything just kind of goes as you expect. Nobody believes Sam Neil, things keep coming back. It's all very rote up until the last minute or so. The very end of this movie is pretty wonderful, even if it doesn't totally make sense. It's audacious, and I'll generally like a movie that goes over the edge. I don't want to spoil things, but the ending and the first half of this movie make it a worthwhile watch. There are scares, though it's not as scary as The Thing or Halloween. It's better than a lot of things, though.

(I mention Stephen King a lot here, as he is the obvious inspiration (even the cover design of the books echo his 80's output) but there's also a lot of Lovecraft going on. Talk of "the old ones" and a lot of tentacles and textual references including some word-for-word transplants.)
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Bill Thompson

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Re: Shocktober Group Marathon 2011
« Reply #106 on: October 08, 2011, 07:17:26 AM »
from a staircase head splat that is physically impossible to the moment where the killer searches for the girl by checking under the sink faucet.

The faucet didn't bother me since the film did paint the guy as pretty methodical. About the staircase, am I right to assume you're referring to the dresser usage? What did you find physically impossible about that? Because unless there was something wrong with the height of the object in proportion to the dresser I thought that was a plausible way to kill someone.

1SO

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Re: Shocktober Group Marathon 2011
« Reply #107 on: October 08, 2011, 08:30:20 AM »
If you have no skull or spine. Sure.

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Shocktober Group Marathon 2011 - Hausu (House) by 1SO
« Reply #108 on: October 08, 2011, 02:46:24 PM »
Hausu

Quote from: MartinTeller
This movie has quietly and slowly been building some buzz over the past few years.  Although I was a bit curious, I was inclined to write it off as either campy B-movie trash or incomprehensible jibberish.  But I took the plunge, and I say that neither is true.  If it's campy, it's because the effects are "cheap" (which only adds to its infinite charms) and the tone is tongue-in-cheek (think Evil Dead).  As for incomprehensible, no more so than any other supernatural horror flick.  Everything that happens makes sense within the internal logic of the film... it's just cranked up beyond the maximum.  I've heard this movie compared to an acid trip, which is fair, but not in the way people usually think.  An acid trip isn't crazy things happening for no reason.  It's reality heightened and amplified.  Everything in this movie is completely over-the-top, from the syrupy-sweet intro to the insane deaths to the brilliant use of music and sound design.  It's one of the most (if not THE most) audacious films I've ever seen, and I haven't felt this exhilarated in quite a while.  It's extremely entertaining, infinitely bizarre, sometimes quite funny, and always surprising.  Instantly one of my new favorites.  I'm going to watch all the Obayashi I can get my hands on.  If his other films are anything like this, I've got a new obsession.  Rating: 10

I learned about Hausu not from Martin’s high praise (which isn’t too far off the mark) but from an article called The 5 Most Baffling Horror Movies From Around the World. The article describes the plot as “A group of schoolgirls goes to visit a lonely old lady at her isolated property, when suddenly God has an acid flashback.” I would call it a cross between Moulin Rouge and Japanese Nutty Super Happy Fun Time! On the surface it appears too stupid, but Martin’s right. Try explaining to people why in Evil Dead II it’s awesome when the guy chases his possessed hand around the cabin. It just is.

Hausu fits neatly into 3 half-hour sections: before the house, things that are kind of explainable and everything tries to kill them. Had the first third not worked so well, the style would’ve been too much to take. It reminded me of The Cell, which I also liked more for the creative filming of scenes set in reality than all the crazy fantasy stuff. Director Nobuhiko Ohbayashi comes up with some audacious but thematically fitting style tricks, like heart shaped frames within frames or a brilliant image involving a girl and her father. He separates the frame into thirds using glass doors on the set. The girl and her father are on opposite ends while her scarf blows off into the middle. She freezes in the frame while the father in regular motion watches the scarf fall in slow motion.

I really liked the fun of Hausu, and the style tricks get more and more complicated. They don’t all work, but the amount that does is astonishingly high. There are even a couple of musical numbers. (I probably would've been disappointed if there wasn't.) Throughout is a simple melody that plays over and over again, in different forms (my favorite being when it’s done by a meowing cat jump cutting across the piano). There’s color and sound effects and just a sheer joy of filmmaking that carried me happily through the first hour. No matter what I say in the next paragraph, know that this is a great Halloween film for a group, and a much more upbeat pick than Tetsuo: The Iron Man.

The divide between Parts 2 and 3 contains an unusually long camera shot that uses Wong Kar Wai style blurry motion and muffled audio. This is one of the tricks that doesn’t work. For a film that uses a ton of camera style, it’s odd that by staying with one shot for so long the film suddenly feels self-conscious. After that, Ohbayashi cranks the crazy knob up past 11 to 12 and Charlies Angels fun becomes Charlie’s Angels 2 overkill. The scares and creepiness get washed out in a slew of WTF bits. I would call it a cultural difference or a sign that I’m getting old that I wanted the film to relax a little if not for others of my Nationality and age who love Hausu front to back. Still a recommendation, and I’m very excited that so many others are watching this one for Shocktober. It’s just not one to own for me. I’m very interested in Ohbayashi’s other films, especially if the style is more like the first third and nothing like the end.
RATING: * * *
« Last Edit: September 28, 2013, 08:01:58 PM by 1SO »

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Re: Shocktober Group Marathon 2011
« Reply #109 on: October 08, 2011, 05:44:04 PM »
The Devils

The Devils is a horror movie like Passion of the Christ is a horror movie. The "frightening" moments consist mostly of brutal torture and nuns going crazy and having an insane orgy. Its a very odd and hectic movie. There's a whole lot of debauchery and almost all the characters are batshit crazy. Its unfortunate also that I had to watch a really bad DVD transfer because I do believe I could have looked really nice. I enjoyed it but it's a very roughly made film.

 

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