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Author Topic: Shocktober 2020  (Read 29297 times)

Bondo

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Re: Shocktober 2020
« Reply #240 on: November 21, 2020, 05:47:16 AM »
In The Tall Grass

I think this clears out the queued horror films for this year. This one jumped on my list because it comes from Vincenzo Natali, who certainly has his horror cred from Cube and Splice. Based on a story from Stephen King and Son, it starts off intriguing enough, a brother and his pregnant sister are driving across the country when they stop in a rural area by a field of tall grass...upon hearing a kid crying in distress they go in and find they've entered a place where time and space is distorted. It occasionally throws in a new discovery but largely wore out its welcome as it focuses on one of those big, crazed performances from Patrick Wilson and just generally embracing the bizarre without any real goal in mind. On the whole the horror is an expression of Becky's conflicted feelings about her impending child, but it's just a mess in dealing with it.

Bondo

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Re: Shocktober 2020
« Reply #241 on: November 29, 2020, 07:09:59 AM »
Antebellum

It's a bit hard to talk about this one without spoilers (and in fact I went into it spoiled since I opted against avoiding a spoiler discussion by Slate). So rather than do that I'll just say that the base concept is an interesting one, drawing a line between modern racism/white supremacy and the evil institution of slavery, so as to emphasize the opening quote from Faulkner "The past is never dead. It isn't even past." Watching a bit of a special feature, the initial short story draft was written in a few hours based on a nightmare, and ultimately adapted by the writing duo, whose directing experience is limited to short films/music videos. And ultimately it just feels like something that needed more polishing of the story to make the story beats more compelling. It got advertised heavily as being from the producer of Get Out and Us, which given its racial nature makes you associate it with Jordan Peele, though it just means its a Blumhouse film. I'm left wishing I got the Peele version of this story.