The horror binge continues. We've got everything from classics to indies and from bloodlust to slapstick. Let's jump on in.
Trouble Every Day
Meh. This French movie about lovestruck cannibals was very highly acclaimed, so I went ahead and sought it out and, yeah, not really. Fucking arthouse... There are definitely some grossly bloody scenes here; the lines between sexual lust and a ravenous appetite are blurred, leading to some truly horrific sex scenes. But I wanted more substance!
Carrie
Wow - Stephen King's very first film adaptation. Imagine that! This was dated, as most movies from 1976 are today, but it wasn't shitty-dated. That's such an important distinction. There were some weird script decisions in this one - what's with the extended tuxedo-buying montage with all the nameless dudes? - but Sissy Spacek is great as the put-upon Carrie. She's a weird little loner at school with an abusive mother at home - and oh yeah, telekinetic powers - and on prom night she just fucking snaps and, well, that scene earns the movie its "horror" tag after an hour and a half of much more conventional high school drama. I wasn't blown away by this, but given my track record with movies from before, I dunno, my birth? This worked. This was good.
The Descent
Make it two straight posters featuring a woman covered in blood! The Descent is a modern classic - ten years old still counts as modern, right? - for good reason; it's not that it does anything phenomenally, but it does everything so well. By obeying all the conventional rules of horror filmmaking - make your victims feel trapped, use very little light, don't show the monsters at all early on - it just kind of manages to be a great exercise in genre. At the very least, it makes me never want to go into a cave, ever, for any reason. And that's what an effective horror movie does. It stays with you. Not that we should all be carrying around more phobias or anything.
It Follows
Lotta hype around this one, and I think it delivered. It wasn't quite as scary as most slasher films are, but that's totally in keeping with the gimmick of its slow-moving monster - an unspecified being who can take any form, and constantly walks toward you in order to kill you. Never running, never driving, never swimming - just walking. Stalking, deliberately. Completely epitomizes the idea of "you can run but you can't hide." You can drive a thousand miles away from this thing, but all that will buy you is time. It's still coming. It's always coming. It follows! As you can imagine, a lot of tension came from seeing people just walking toward the camera in the distance. And I haven't even gotten to the STD metaphors yet! Solid movie.
Tucker & Dale vs. Evil
I didn't love this. I'm all for over-the-top stupidity in slasher movies, but the plot here was just too dumb, even considering the genre. A bunch of college kids come across two well-meaning hillbillies in West Virginia, assume they're creepy serial killers through a series of misconstrued gestures and snippets of conversation, and ultimately die one by one in a series of ill-conceived attacks on the pair. It just felt too slight for me. I'm fine with absurd death scenes and ridiculous character motivations - it's horror-comedy, after all - but this, eh, less so.
An American Werewolf in London
This very pleasantly surprised me. So many horror movies - hell, so many movies in general - can maintain my interest for about half an hour or so before squandering it away and petering out. It's so often the case where the tension built up in the early going - the unsettling regression from "this is normal" to "shit, guys, this isn't normal" - is far more interesting than seeing the monster, seeing the heroes fight the monster, and so on. Not so, here! If I was bored early on during An American Werewolf in London, I was enthralled during its rising action and climax, in which our poor bastard protagonist goes on a horrifying killing spree. The effects are all kinds of dated and Jim Henson-y, particularly when it comes to animating the undead, but Rick Baker deserves kudos and praise for his then-brilliant werewolf transition sequence.
Dogtooth
This didn't wind up being "horror" in any real sense of the word, but holy shit was it disturbing. Think Room but without the kidnapping and rape and in a bigger home, but where no one ever escapes. A man and his wife have forbidden their three children - late teens to mid-twenties - from ever leaving their isolated estate. This leaves us with three young adults completely naive about the outside world, who've been brought up to believe in some really fucked up things. They're gullible as hell, and that's sad, and they're abused for disobedience, and that's horrifying, and they've got sexual curiosities, and that's - well, you get the idea. I've seen my fair share of messed up movies, so believe me when I say that this was very, very messed up. And still I kind of enjoyed it. Or at least couldn't stop watching. Looking forward to The Lobster!
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
What's cool about this black and white Iranian movie is that it's really pretty looking. The titular girl is a vampire and - this being Iran - she wears a chador, which looks so much like an old school vampire cape as she skateboards around her city at night looking for victims (dudes, it seems, and bad ones at that). Good stuff. But as with so many other subtitled movies, I couldn't fully lose myself in this one. Eh, it's an okay trade off.
Poltergeist
A while back - ten years or so? - I was talking to my dad about horror movies. He told me that this one scared the absolute shit out of him and affected his sleep for weeks afterward. It came out in 1982, which means he'd have been around my age (then) at the time - mid-college. That always stayed with me - that Poltergeist scared the hell out of my dad only six years or so before I was born. I mean, shit, this had to really be something, right? Anyway, I watched this the other night and it was a solid exercise of the horror genre - but even compared to other older horror movies I've seen, sorry Dad, but it's not clear what about this was haunting your dreams. The idea of getting sucked through the TV to another dimension? A demonic portal opening up in your bedroom? Okay, fine - there was plenty here that could scare a barely-grown man, sure. But to me this was more of a "good movie" than a "scary movie." Does that make sense?
The Shallows
I had my issues with this one - mostly factual, like how it gets tides all wrong (and tides are a major component of the story) or how certain beach-goers managed not to see the shark-ravaged carcasses of other beach-goers that had previously washed ashore - but for a quick, dumb shark movie? This was good enough. Remember in Gravity how they give Sandra Bullock the barest semblance of a tragedy that haunts her past, and then they just start flinging her around from space station to space station and her increasing will to survive is supposed to seem like character development? Yeah - take exactly that, set it on rocky outcrops and buoys instead of in outer space, and that's The Shallows.
V/H/S
This was very effectively scary, but also very bad. It's an anthology of five short "films" (all found footage) in which weird and fucked up things start happening to regular people. Some of the shorts were quite effective - the first one in particular had a generic but visually horrifying and memorable monster and the third and fourth ones made for some really good mindfucks - but the whole isn't greater than the sum of its parts, and the sum of those parts isn't even all that much anyway. V/H/S was good for some quick scares but not much else; that said, it's Halloween - what more do you want than a few quick scares?
Holy smokes, a three-post month? It's happening!
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