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Author Topic: A Filmspotter's Marathon of Filmspotting Marathons  (Read 75762 times)

oldkid

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Re: A Filmspotter's Marathon of Filmspotting Marathons
« Reply #60 on: January 01, 2016, 05:10:19 PM »
Yeah, you won't miss a thing.
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Teproc

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Re: A Filmspotter's Marathon of Filmspotting Marathons
« Reply #61 on: January 01, 2016, 05:52:51 PM »
Good, thanks.
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Re: A Filmspotter's Marathon of Filmspotting Marathons
« Reply #62 on: January 01, 2016, 09:29:50 PM »
I'm with you on Suspiria, Teproc. That taxi scene and the one directly after it are super great and I enjoyed the film's willingness to go as crazy as it goes in the end.
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Teproc

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Re: A Filmspotter's Marathon of Filmspotting Marathons
« Reply #63 on: January 03, 2016, 04:56:12 PM »
I'm with you on Suspiria, Teproc. That taxi scene and the one directly after it are super great and I enjoyed the film's willingness to go as crazy as it goes in the end.

Yeah, the final ramp-up is excellent, kind of a creepy - or creepier - Alice in Wonderland vibe, where she unveils the horrors... what she unveils I don't necessary love, but everything leading up to that is pretty great.
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Teproc

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Re: A Filmspotter's Marathon of Filmspotting Marathons
« Reply #64 on: January 03, 2016, 05:22:14 PM »
Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)



Adam & Sam's take (starts at 49:38)

This got off to a pretty great start, with that long PoV scene : tense, well-executed with a great twist to top it off. I thought I was in good hands.

And then the next hour happened. During that hour, basically every scene follows the same pattern : we have characters doing their things, that iconic music starts playing and we see something that's supposed to be scary : generally the villain just standing around in the background, but sometimes it's a corpse or a car following them. But... it's so on-the-nose, so in your face that it doesn't work at all for me. It's the cinematic equivalent of Carpenter shouting "HE'S GOING TO KILL THEM, SEE ?" for 60 minutes, and... I wasn't scared, I wasn't thrilled, I wasn't even tense, I was just bored and mildly amused at the dull repetition of it. Even the music, which I loved initially, got tiring as it went on. I'm not sure what it is exactly, because theoretically I'm fully on-board : building up a quiet sense of dread seems like the way to do it but... Carpenter either shows too much or not enough of the villain I think. There's no room for me to imagine anything super scary, and what I'm seeing isn't that scary by itself, it's just a guy.

In the middle of all that, we have the good ol' sex=death theme. I'm guessing Halloween is the template for future slasher movies in that regard, but that doesn't make it any better. It manages to be both puritanically patronizing (if you want to live, you should knit, care for children and never have sex because that's a woman's place) and shamelessly exploitative, because how can we enjoy the deaths if they don't see some boobies beforehand ? I say "boobies" because every sex scene appeared to have been written by a 10-year old, adding to the uncomfortableness of the whole sex=death thing.

And then the last 20 minutes or so happened. It wasn't quite enough to fully redeem the movie, but I got then why this movie became a cult classic. Once we get to a character who fights back, and the villain actually chases her rather than just standing creepily behind her 5 times before quickly stabbing/strangling his victim, the movie does get thrilling and suspenseful. The fantastical aspect of the bogeyman who can never die is also an interesting turn, and that series of shots of the different locations just after he disappears, implying that there are no safe places anymore, is chilling and effective. I just wish the film overall had more of that.

4/10
« Last Edit: January 03, 2016, 05:26:29 PM by Teproc »
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Teproc

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Re: A Filmspotter's Marathon of Filmspotting Marathons
« Reply #65 on: January 06, 2016, 06:54:05 PM »
Re-Animator (Stuart Gordon, 1985)



Adam & Sam's take (starts at 15:43)

Re-Animator is a very lean movie in terms of its plot, but one that isn't quite sure what it's trying to be. Or at least I wasn't quite sure, it seems Sam & Adam took this as a comedy through and through, but I'm not sure I agree. The first hour, while campy enough with its fluorescent green liquids and re-animated cats, has some genuinely scary moments, seems to be establishing some interesting characters, including what I thought was a pretty good performance by Jeffrey Combs as a Frankenstein-type mad scientist. It even has a boring romance ! All of which was adding up to a relatively interesting thriller which might even lightly hit some themes regarding the ethics of medicine(graverobbing being a major part of the history of medical science).

Once our bland protagonist gets expelled, the movie enters a phase of transition where it's not quite sure what it is anymore. This is where the villain starts entering the action. He's there before, but somewhere around the 60 minute mark or so, David Gale decides to go full-camp, and that's even before we get into the head/body shenanigans. Then things get completely insane, frequently creepy (we do have a severed head licking a naked woman's breasts, that was ... something) and occasionnally hilarious, before finishing on a bizarre note that presumably was there to set up a sequel.

So yeah, this is a mess. Both halves of the film are pretty good at what they're doing, but I wish Gordon had picked a genre and stuck with it, because as it is, my general reaction to the movie could be summed up by the above screenshot. What saves Re-Animator for me really is Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West. He's the only member of the cast who feels equally at home in both halves of the film, both funny, scary and astonishingly relatable, given that he's playing a typical mad scientist.

Oh, and I did appreciate the remake of Psycho's soundtrack with some 80's touches added in, that was pretty great.

6/10
« Last Edit: January 09, 2016, 11:33:02 AM by Teproc »
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oldkid

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Re: A Filmspotter's Marathon of Filmspotting Marathons
« Reply #66 on: January 06, 2016, 06:58:54 PM »
Re-Animator seemed to try to be a Cronnenberg film, but didn't quite make it.  It wasn't really funny, was a little gross, but not scary.  It didn't have any deep ideas.  It didn't really make much of an impression on me, really.
"It's not art unless it has the potential to be a disaster." Bansky

Teproc

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Re: A Filmspotter's Marathon of Filmspotting Marathons
« Reply #67 on: January 06, 2016, 07:02:26 PM »
Re-Animator seemed to try to be a Cronnenberg film, but didn't quite make it.  It wasn't really funny, was a little gross, but not scary.  It didn't have any deep ideas.  It didn't really make much of an impression on me, really.

I mostly agree, though I found it did somehow kind of work for me overall. I actually did find some of the stuff in the first half scary : the cat reanimations were pretty effective on me for example.

It does get gross in ways I didn't expect (again, that naked scene was something else).
« Last Edit: January 06, 2016, 07:04:07 PM by Teproc »
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1SO

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Re: A Filmspotter's Marathon of Filmspotting Marathons
« Reply #68 on: January 06, 2016, 07:17:57 PM »
Is that image correct? Doesn't remind me of the film at all.

Teproc

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Re: A Filmspotter's Marathon of Filmspotting Marathons
« Reply #69 on: January 06, 2016, 07:21:05 PM »
Is that image correct? Doesn't remind me of the film at all.

I'll admit it doesn't. It is from the movie though, towards the end. There's the big fight in the morgue and at one point the bad guy's body (headless) is thrown out of the room, and the cop  guarding the morgue sees it.His reaction is to mouth "What the f***" and leave. Since that kind of summed up my reaction to what had been going on in the last 20 minutes, I decided to use it, but yeah it's just a throwaway moment.
« Last Edit: January 06, 2016, 07:22:49 PM by Teproc »
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