My shocktober has slipped into November!
Ready or Not (2019) Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett Slick looking satirical horror piece attempts to take on the rich and their ridiculous beliefs. I liked the aesthetic of the film and most of the characters, yet the humour seemed to reduce the impact of the subtext as the numerous deaths
of the help are played for laughs. The mysticism and ending of the film also reduce the impact of the satire by giving more legitimate reasons for the rich people's abhorrent behaviours. I feel like the only way people talk about serious issues anymore is through satire which may indicate an inability of dealing with theses issues, as such this didn't quite work for me.
Mandy (2018) Panos Cosmatos
Cosmatos' slowburn story telling is not quite my cup of tea, nor is the entirely red tinted world he creates, although once the movie picks up in the second half and finally releases the Cage Rage, I was much more on board which the demonic biker fights and revenge plot.
The Purge (2013) James DeMonaco Throughout the entire movie I felt like there could be much more to say about class issues using this premise, yet the movie doesn't really stretch far enough into that territory. (I've heard that the sequels actually do this better.) Pros: Rhys Wakefield is really great at playing the entitled white supremacist private school boy villain. Cons: So many dumb character decisions, even for a horror movie.
The Wailing (2016) Hong-jin Na
I liked how it managed to balance that South-Korean humour with some classic horror movie tropes and the build up this mystery of the illness works for the first hour and a half but for how long this movie is I feel like I wanted a bigger pay-off than what we got. The movie has like 3 different twists in the last hour as it keeps going back and forth thinking it's revealed something and then actually nothing and it just became frustrating that by the end I didn't really care what happened.
Hounds of Love (2016) Ben Young More of a thriller than a horror film. I watched this with a bunch of Aussie friends and the fact that the main bad guy in the movie also played one of the idiot sons in the cult Australian film The Castle made this movie much funnier for us that it was intended to be despite how great the performances are. I think this film fits in well with Aussie crime films like Animal Kingdom and Snowtown but the premise is much simpler. It's a film about abuse, manipulation and about loneliness. Domestic abuse is an incredibly big problem in Australia and this movie is probably a pretty accurate portrayal of how controlling and violent men can be.