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Author Topic: Building the Horror/Thriller 1000  (Read 63113 times)

1SO

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Re: Horror: The Final Chapter
« Reply #320 on: August 11, 2018, 08:47:52 PM »
And I wouldn't try to rank all of them, but put them in categories.  600 is just too hard.  Have a top 100 ranked and the rest in groupings.
I have a solid Top 47 from my Essentials. I started back at the dawn of cinema because I'm not a fan of early Horror. I'm building alongside my current Marathon list, where I'm up to 1944 and I have a total of 32 films.


You really need a bottom 10 as well.
How about a Bottom 17. I ruled out some of the more forgettable garbage and titles that were trying to be Best Worst Movie (like Birdemic). These films still make me mad when I think about them.


17. The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence (2011)
The perverse fascination of someone making a film with a 12-person centipede as the centerpiece, the feeling that it’s carnival entertainment and manages to never sink below that, is all that keeps this from being 0 Stars

16. Dreamcatcher (2003)
S**t weasels, Mr. Gay. Morgan Freeman has never been bad in a movie. This one performance balances the scales.

15. Tusk (2014)
Kevin Smith's directing has become worse over time and now he's just as bad a writer.

14. Driller Killer (1979)
I’d rather watch the b-roll footage as a documentary than Abel Ferrara casting himself as a pretentious jerk artist. The kind of trash where someone would turn to a horror junkie like me and say, “you actually like this crap?” No… I don’t.

13. Blood Freak (1972)
A guy does too much drugs and turns into a giant turkey monster. According to Letterboxd, there are 30 worse films in this Marathon, but that would surprise me. It surpasses Terror in the Midnight Sun, though still slightly better than Night of the Lepus, also released in 1972. This barely qualifies as a film with occasional cutaways to a guy sitting at a desk to fill in story gaps. Big laugh for the sound of a turkey gobble to attempt suspense.

12. Street Trash (1987)
This is like some cinematic Fear Factor, disgusting imagery, with little surrounding it. Bad actors fake their way through terrible scenes with no story to connect them besides the toxic drink, so all you have to look forward to are gross out moments of bodies melting.

11. Snuff (1976)
A terrible exploitation film that’s sometimes hilariously bad. (Among the dubbed cast is a young girl clearly voiced by a male doing a high, squeaky voice.) Then at the end comes the film’s reason for being, an alleged actual murder of one of the cast. I’m thankful for the incompetence of the filmmakers, but it only points up the cheap gimmick and the cynical approach towards achieving cinema immortality.

10. Lady in a Cage (1964)

9. Tales From the Quadead Zone (1987)
Some people praise the filmmakers passion over the lack of a sound mix, Casio keyboard score and other horrible qualities. I came up in this era and it’s not sour grapes to say there are better examples of Trash Cinema out there.

8. The Guardian (1990)
William Friedkin's killer tree movie. The worst edited film in history with montages of unrelated imagery.

7. Beloved (1998)
Thinks it can get away with sickening imagery by wrapping itself in importance. The noisy crickets during the dialogue scenes are more interesting.

6. Night of the Lepus (1972)

5. I Spit on Your Grave (2010)
After 15 minutes of cute/clumsy antics by the lead while the camera leers at her up and down, this uncalled for remake of one of the most well-known terrible films had the bare minimum of my attention. This premise will always fail because as long as it’s written and directed by men, it will never earn the feminist shield it hides behind, and if it were ever made by a woman, an honest depiction of the horror would be more than any viewer could bear to sit through. This is better-acted than the original, but it also claims a moral superiority that it never earns.

4. The Woman (2011)
Nobody who releases a film this awful deserves the chance to make another one. Tommy Wiseau is a more capable filmmaker than Lucky McKee.

3. House at the Edge of the Park (1980)
I heard about this one years ago and debated even including it because it's crude exploitation built off the success of Last House on the Left, from the director of Cannibal Holocaust. I see the class warfare angle that somebody might have put in at one point, but this is just a lot of indefensible rape and cruelty from a director whose angry, neanderthal view of humanity didn't need to be shared with the world.

2. I Spit on Your Grave (1978)

1. Demons (Dèmoni) (1985)
Demons is slightly less off-putting to watch than 2 Girls, 1 Cup. And it's about as professional in the technical qualities. Screenplay would be a tie.

smirnoff

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Re: Horror: The Final Chapter
« Reply #321 on: August 11, 2018, 09:17:33 PM »
16. Dreamcatcher (2003)
S**t weasels, Mr. Gay. Morgan Freeman has never been bad in a movie. This one performance balances the scales.

Dumb as it is I've seen it twice through to the end. There is a wtf entertainment value there. It never comes together, the tone is a mess, the dialogue is often stupid... and yet I can sit through it. If that count's for anything it surpasses half of the movies I put on these days.

Junior

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Re: Horror: The Final Chapter
« Reply #322 on: August 11, 2018, 10:30:39 PM »
Beloved is a really interesting entry on this list. I've only read the book so far, but that was really excellent. I know things can easily get lost in translation, so I'm eager to see the movie and find out if you're right on this one.
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oldkid

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Re: Horror: The Final Chapter
« Reply #323 on: August 12, 2018, 01:45:03 AM »
That is a truly marvelous bottom 17.  The fact that I Spit On Your Grave gets on the list twice is remarkable.

The comments by you and smirnoff makes me want to see Dreamcatcher, just to see Morgan Freeman in such a car wreck.
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Sam the Cinema Snob

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Re: Horror: The Final Chapter
« Reply #324 on: August 12, 2018, 11:45:19 AM »
My former boss touted Dreamcatcher as this thoughtful, interesting horror film and made us feature it in one of our horror film festivals. I think everyone else involved was left scratching their heads as he tried to justify its brilliance to us. Such a terrible movie.

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Re: Horror: A New Beginning
« Reply #325 on: August 12, 2018, 08:19:17 PM »


King of the Zombies (1941)
★ ★
Perhaps cinema’s first zombie comedy, mostly due to the antics of a reviled black character actor names Mantan Moreland. This isn’t my first time watching Moreland’s jittery, bug-eyed routine (though this is by far the biggest part I’ve seen him play). He seems like a nice enough person, but most of his material has dated uncomfortably. There is one great moment when he’s tricked into thinking he’s become a zombie. He walks up to a couple of actual zombies and says, ”move over boys, I’m one of the gang now.” Nominated for Best Score, this remains the only Oscar nominated zombie film.


Night Monster (1942)
aka. House of Mystery
★ ★ ½
Old Dark House gothic occult murder mystery is so over-stuffed, the only role for Bela Lugosi is butler. This one kind of works in small moments, including a great shot where the killer’s shadow on the wall grows until it consumes all light in the room. The script cannot answer basic logic questions that pile up along the way. The final explanation is so unsatisfactory it makes all the plot holes even bigger.


The Return of the Vampire (1943)
aka. Vampires of London
★ ★ ½
Unofficial Dracula sequel, not made by Universal, has Lugosi playing the Count with a different name. The fun twist is his servant Renfield is a Wolf Man, transforming under Lugosi’s spell rather than a full moon. Lugosi goes through the motions, but Matt Willis as the morally conflicted Wolf Man makes this one of the better classic monster films of this period.


The Mummy’s Ghost (1944)
aka. The Mummy’s Return
★ ★
For as famous as the Universal monster movies are, it’s amazing how little care went into them. Just borrow a plot from one of the other films – this one is Bride of Frankenstein – throw in the usual suspects (Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, George Zucco) and keep it around an hour. Carradine is always fun and Warner Bros’ Barton MacLane is here, doing his usual tough cop act.


Voodoo Man (1944)
aka. The Tiger Man
★ ★ ½
We must be getting into Lugosi’s later work because this film has no money. It looks cheap and there’s very little plot as scenes stretch to get the film to 60 minutes. David Carradine is fun as Lugosi’s crazed, love starved assistant, and with the smallest amount of care this might've been an actual good movie.

1SO

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Re: Horror: The Final Chapter
« Reply #326 on: August 14, 2018, 09:17:29 AM »
And I wouldn't try to rank all of them, but put them in categories.  600 is just too hard.  Have a top 100 ranked and the rest in groupings.
I have a solid Top 47 from my Essentials. I started back at the dawn of cinema because I'm not a fan of early Horror. I'm building alongside my current Marathon list, where I'm up to 1944 and I have a total of 32 films.
I'm now up thru 1957 and my list is only 47 titles, not counting those Essentials. It looks like the really good Horror for me starts in the 1960s.

Because there are so few titles so far I've been ranking them while I come up with a better idea. Plan A is to post the list in a chronological order, so that there's a Best Horror Film for each year. Since I most enjoy going through the genre chronologically, anyone who wants to experience something similar can follow in my footsteps watching the best representation of the genre as it evolves. I could also post my Top Pick among other picks. For example...
1959
Me: The Tingler
TSZDT: House on Haunted Hill
IMDB: The Hound of the Baskervilles
Letterboxd: The Ghost of Yotsuya


Plan B is a more simple Alphabetical list within each Rating category. It offers a little separation based on my star ratings with no need to further organize.

oldkid

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Re: Horror: The Final Chapter
« Reply #327 on: August 14, 2018, 10:35:06 AM »
That sounds so awesome.

But hard.  As the years go on, you have to make hard choices between good movies.
« Last Edit: August 14, 2018, 10:37:16 AM by oldkid »
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1SO

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Re: Horror: A New Beginning
« Reply #328 on: August 15, 2018, 07:05:27 PM »


House of Horrors (1946)
aka. Murder Mansion
aka. The Sinister Shadow
aka. Joan Medford is Missing
★ ★
“Meet the Creeper”, a cult killer made famous by Rob Zombie. The hulking murderer is actually spun off from Sherlock Holmes and the Pearl of Death (1944) Here he helps an artist by murdering critics. It’s even more simplistic than it sounds, without a single intense scene, much like most horror films of the period.


Strangler of the Swamp (1946)
★ ★ ½
English-language remake of a German horror film that’s been on my Watchlist for years. (1936’s Fährmann Maria is difficult to find.) After the parade of half-baked Hollywood films it’s refreshing to see one that has a thought-out idea, with a beginning, middle and almost an end. (Those credits come up quick.) The final product still comes off as not all the way done, but that’s probably more the blame of the American Producers out to make a cheap buck than the director who also helmed the original film.


Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956)
aka. Invasion of the Flying Saucers
★ ★
This film’s claim to immortality are the special effects by Ray Harryhausen, in particular the climax where a bunch of saucers crash into all the famous Washington D.C. landmarks. (The thought of this plays a lot less distressing today.) The rest of the film is too simple to be interesting. They come after us, we shoot back at them and finally everything explodes.


The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1956)
★ ★
Seemed like an odd inclusion since the story only contains elements of Horror, but I thought maybe they threw in more pulp like Hammer’s 1959 version of Hound of the Baskervilles. There is more talk of witchcraft and a scene of torture, but two other versions of this story are also on the list. So I guess enough people think of this as a Horror film. Gina Lollobrigida is pretty great as gypsy temptress Esmeralda, but Anthony Quinn’s mumbly, method take on Quasimodo is less articulate than Joaquin Phoenix and never connected with me.


The Werewolf (1956)
★ ★ ½
I liked the filmmakers’ attempt to reinvent werewolf mythology with a focus on humanity instead of gothic atmosphere. The transformation is fine, and the cast of unknown actors are doing their best, but the film would’ve benefitted from a little cinematic dazzle. It’s not as bad as some of the super cheap Lugosi films I’ve watched recently, but those films didn’t have a script that cared which makes it more of a letdown here. Still recommended if you’re looking for a different kind of werewolf film. FYI, director Fred F. Sears also made Earth v. Saucers and The Giant Claw, the most laughably bad film in this Marathon.

Junior

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Re: Horror: The Final Chapter
« Reply #329 on: August 15, 2018, 07:48:14 PM »
What do you anticipate being your first 3 star movie of this new batch? Anything look promising?
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