[EphelDuath666]

[Rec] double feature

Day 24: [Rec]2

[Rec] remains one of the most frightening movies I have seen so far. Mainly because of the very intense finale. And its sequel [Rec]2, well, is pretty much more of the same. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as it's a well done movie. And it actually was quite enjoyable. I'm usually not much into the found footage genre but the [Rec] movies really work. There's a few things I didn't like too much though. For example...you can really only hear the line "what is this? What's going on!" so many times before it gets on your balls. And in this movie that unfortunately happens rather quickly. It was still enjoyable though. And the idea that everyone who's "infected" in this movie is actually possessed at least breathes a bit of fresh air into the zombie(-esque) genre.

Day 24: [Rec]3

now the safest thing for the makers of [Rec]3 would have been to just stick with the formula and make this another found footage flick. And it starts out being one at first. BUT after the first act the movie shifts to a regular cinematic presentation in 2.35:1 and turns into a fun splatter movie. Which is a smart and kinda brave move actually. And what makes this even better is that the movie is really good! Haven't had that much fun watching a splatter movie in a while. Pretty good humor, really good practical splatter effects and quite good performances make this movie a real treat for splatter fans. I was surprised just how good it was. And I'll definitely watch it again sooner or later.

Argento double feature
Day 25: Suspiria

Man, what a trip this movie is. Dario Argento's Suspiria can probably be best described as horror on acid. Lots of acid. You just get bombed with colors and freaky images on an almost constant level. Suspiria is Argento's first installment of his mother trilogy. Inferno being the second one and Mother of Tears the third. I did not like Inferno all that much but Suspiria is really, really good actually. It's not like there's a WHOLE lot more plot to be found in this movie but it just works so much better. Sure, this might be one of those 'style over substance' cases. But sometimes movies like that can be just as good as movies with awesome plots. And Suspiria is one of them. I've seen this one before and I know I'll watch it again. The visuals alone make it worth it.

Day 25: Deep Red/Profondo Rosso

Next up was Argento's Deep Red which to me is Argento's best movie. I've only seen the shorter international cut before so this time I watched the longer director's cut. Alas the movie doesn't really benefit from the additional length, in my opinion, as it really just adds a lot of unnecessary dialogue so it just feels quite a bit too long. Oh well, the shorter international cut is still great and should even appeal to people who couldn't really get into Argento's other movies. Deep Red is a bit more conventional compared to Argento's mother trilogy, for example. But it's also quite funny at times and despite being more conventional, it can still be pretty odd in its own way. It's certainly every bit as bloody and gory as his other flicks. Definitely worth watching, unless you just can't handle Italian horror movies at all of course.

So obviously I've fallen behind AGAIN, so if you wanna read the last few reviews go hit up ze blog!

http://horrorbingechron.blogspot.com/

[EphelDuath666]

Day 26: The Loved Ones

The loved ones is an Australian horror film which sort of reminded me of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, except that Leatherface is an insane teenage girls in this movie. Her and her dad basically kidnap a school mate of hers who rfused to go to prom with her to have a very special prom night at their house. The loved ones could probably be misjudged as typical revenge/torture porn dreck but it really was entertaining and well done. I think this one really tries to entertain (in a sick way of course) rather than just disgust you.

Day 26: Curse of Chucky

I was sceptical when I heard that there will be a direct-to-video Chucky movie but then I read quite a few positive reviews and when I heard that this one is supposed to be more like the first one rather than the last few movies, which drifted into comedy territory, I was intrigued. And I'd have to agree. Curse of Chucky is most certainly more like the first few Chucky movies and it's actually quite good. I guess if there's one thing I did not like too much then it's all the CGI gore and blood. I understand that it's cheaper these days to not use practical special effects. But I don't think that horror movies benefit from it. Anyways. Besides that minor gripe I had with the movie I enjoyed myself greatly.

Day 27: The Evil Dead (1981)

What can you say about this timeless classic that has not already been said? Exactly, nothing. I love it, no matter how often I've watched it by now. I guess the only thing I can say is that this movie looked quite impressive on Blu-ray. I had a very shitty DVD of The Evil Dead for years and the Blu-ray is a revelation. Looks as good as it can look, considering that the movie was shot on 16mm.

Day 27: Evil Dead (2013)

I guess a lot of people were really pissed off when they heard that there will be a remake of The Evil Dead...that probably did not get better when they heard that Bruce Campbell would not be in it. Well, having seen the movie a few times now I can at least say for myself that I really like it. If you see this one as a re-imagining rather than a remake per se then there's not much not to like about it, I think. It's well shot, looks creepy, there's a shit ton of blood and the gore effects are sweet too. Sure, there's no Ash in it but I guess that's the point of a reboot. To do things a bit differently. And if they had put an Ash character into this movie then people would have bitched about that. Guess you can't make everyone happy anyways.

Alright, so: films for the last couple days.

10/26: Today's flick was Paul W.S. Anderson's Event Horizon. By and large this is a pretty cool movie, despite it's being a total Alien ripoff, for the most part. Granted, Alien largely laid down the formula for lost-in-space sci-fi horror, but Event Horizon at times almost feels like a shot-for-shot remake of it. Despite that Event Horizon brings an original enough "shell" story so to speak to make the more unoriginal "under the hood" stuff seem ok. Essentially the movie is about a crew that is sent to explore the Event Horizon, a ship that has been missing 7 years when it used it's newly invented technology to create a black hole and travel across space. However, when it returned it was no longer just a ship--it had become something else and the only remains of the Event Horizon crew are bloody smears on the wall.

What ensues is actually a really cool, different idea, even if it is Alienesque. I don't want to give up the ending, but it's pretty freaky. The movie is largely shot pretty well too, with the Event Horizon feeling very otherworldly. Some of the special effects are outdated, but most surprisingly hold up. The unfortunate thing is that Anderson sort of undercuts these good parts of the movie with a fair amount of 90s-y cheese that keep the movie from being a truly great horror (I especially like mandatory sassy black man). Still, it's an entertaining movie with a cool story and some truly horrifying scenes.

8/10

10/28: Let me preface this review by saying how much I love Guillermo del Toro. The man has a vision for filmmaking like few others and what really sets him apart I think is his comfort in his own filmmaking skin. del Toro movies always feel unabashedly like del Toro no matter what type of movie it is because they feel completely honest to what they are. Take Pacific Rim and Pan's Labyrinth, for instance. Both are completely different types of films but both are exact perfect examples of what you would hope that type of film would be. del Toro loves his material and audience enough to respect them and create something that isn't pandering but rather is what you would want to see watching that movie. Add on top of that his understanding that practical effects are vastly more impactful than CGI majority of the time and you have one of the best directors working out there right now.

With that in mind I watched del Toro's horror film The Devil's Backbone and saw the above exactly. I admit this was my first foray into del Toro's horror (unless you include Pan's Labyrinth in that genre, but it's a bit of a hard fit) and I was not disappointed. With this film del Toro asks, "What is a ghost?" the first line of the film. To answer that question del Toro takes us through a story that is not a ghost or horror story in the traditional sense but rather looks at how living humans and the situations they find themselves in are ghostly. There is a ghost in the movie but it is more a backdrop than at the forefront of the story; del Toro instead spends time studying childhood, camaraderie, misplaced love, the effects of war, and the bitter evil that can be found in a person. The Devil's Backbone is, for lack of the better word, a "thinking man's" horror film.

The acting is stellar here as well, especially with the young boy who plays Carlos. His luck of utter despair and brokenness after being left at the orphanage at the beginning of the film cut right through your soul. Without knowing too much about del Toro I would guess he has projected much of himself as a child into Carlos as the child feels so real and poignant.

The Devil's Backbone is del Toro at his finest, and it's interesting to see him playing the film a little smaller than some of his other films as well. The movie feels just as I said before: real to what it is. After watching so many ghost films this month it's great to see one that's not about the scares but rather about something deeper and more quiet.

Lars, I think I've seen La Horde. I don't remember much about it, but doesn't one guy call another guy a cock garage? I heard that in a French zombie movie for sure and it was really funny.

[EphelDuath666]

Lars, I think I've seen La Horde. I don't remember much about it, but doesn't one guy call another guy a cock garage? I heard that in a French zombie movie for sure and it was really funny.

hahahaha....what? I don't remember that but now I almost HAVE to rewatch the movie. Cock garage There you go, my favorite term I heard all year.

ok, I actually googled for it and yes, a guy calls another guy 'dick garage'. Purely awesome.


Anyways, here's my latest Halloween flicks...

Day 28: In the mouth of madness

There you have it. John Carpenter's last great movie. Everything he did after that....oh boy. But In the mouth of Madness is a truely cool horror flick. And it's got Sam Neill in it and horror and Sam Neill just belong together. Well, I guess Jurassic Park and Sam Neill belong together too. ITMOM is one of those movies that I watched with friends of mine almost religiously over and over again. We probably totally wore the tape out. Never got the chance to get the movie on DVD because the German DVD was out of print rather quickly, I think even before I even started to buy DVDs. So now this lovely movie was finally released on Blu-ray. And it's still as great as it used to be. Sam Neill is convincing as always and so does J

Day 25: Suspiria

Man, what a trip this movie is. Dario Argento's Suspiria can probably be best described as horror on acid. Lots of acid. You just get bombed with colors and freaky images on an almost constant level. Suspiria is Argento's first installment of his mother trilogy. Inferno being the second one and Mother of Tears the third. I did not like Inferno all that much but Suspiria is really, really good actually. It's not like there's a WHOLE lot more plot to be found in this movie but it just works so much better. Sure, this might be one of those 'style over substance' cases. But sometimes movies like that can be just as good as movies with awesome plots. And Suspiria is one of them. I've seen this one before and I know I'll watch it again. The visuals alone make it worth it.

Good movie. As you said, the visuals are a big part of the vibe. Reading about it made me think of Fulci-movies all of a sudden. I might watch one of those again someday.

[EphelDuath666]

Good movie. As you said, the visuals are a big part of the vibe. Reading about it made me think of Fulci-movies all of a sudden. I might watch one of those again someday.

agreed, love Fulci's stuff too. Just recently watched Zombie (flesh eaters) again and still love it.

Did a double feature yesterday, funnily enough including In the Mouth of Madness. As for Suspiria, definitely one of Argento's best. I personally like Opera better but Suspira is a close second.

The first film I started the day off with was John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness. I realized that with the end of October quickly approaching I hadn't seen a Carpenter film all month so I went for this H.P. Lovecraft-inspired story. And what a mindfuck it was. Essentially the story consists of a man who catches frauds for a living (Sam Neill) searching for the horror writer named Sutter Cane. Slowly he begins to find that Cane's very Lovecraftian (even down to the titles) stories just may be real and finds himself descending into madness.

I guess the best way I could describe the movie is the horror version of Stranger than Fiction... minus Queen Latifah, fortunately. Carpenter here is constantly showing his immense love for Lovecraft and essentially the whole movie is a mash up of homages to him. You can almost feel the love coming out of the screen. The story is whack attack, twisting, and you never quite feel like you just what in the hell is going on--which is all a good thing. You as the viewer almost feel as though you too are descending into madness as you have no idea what is real. The "meta"-ness of the movie is intriguing--a reality in a reality in a reality.

Another great Carpenter film that showcases his stellar horror ability and skill at special effects., if not as good as say The Thing. But really, how can you get better than the mother fucking The Thing?

9/10

The second film I finished the day off with was Peter Jackson's Dead Alive (also known as Braindead). Having watched The Frighteners earlier this month I felt I didn't have a great first experience at Jackson's horror so I gave Dead Alive a shot. This movie holds (or held? I think past tense now) the record for the goriest movie (i.e. most fake blood) ever. The amount of gore and blood is so over the top at times there's so much flying around you don't know what you're looking at. There's a zombie crotchety mother, a demon/zombie baby, a rat monkey--you name it, this movie seems to have it.

And it's a blast. I mean, sometimes Jackson goes a little too far in the ridiculousness but majority of the time it hits that over-the-top note perfectly. The gore despite being comically out there is actually really well done; for the time Dead Alive was made most everything looks comically realistic. The movie provides plenty of "Oh lord, really?" moments as you laugh at seeing, oh, say, a woman's head getting zombie punched and the fist coming out of her mouth or a set of intestines/colon repeatedly trying to kill the main character. It's fun, it's gross, and how I pity any actor who had an aversion to blood.

The movie is a romp for what it is and I pretty thoroughly enjoyed it. My one other critique is that the movie was very obviously building to the last 25 or so minutes and the rest felt fairly "Ok, we have to fill up an hour to get to that 25" some of the time. But, the gorefest ending made even the slower parts worth it.

8/10

[JuZ]

Glad you enjoyed it!

It being Brain Dead / Dead Alive.

[youtube]ajLfYIHEqzk[/youtube]

The greatest line of all Peter Jackson's films.

Last movie I saw was Bad Ass with Danny Trejo. Ridiculous, but funny. Maybe not as over the top as Machete, plus the basis on true events is stretched very thin here. With that being said, if you want a guilty pleasure and enjoy Trejo being awesome (along with Ron Perlman and Charles Dutton being clich

I KICK ASS FOR THE LORD! So good.

Yesterday's horror flick:

10/30: A few years ago I went to a midnight showing of a J-horror (Japanese horror) film entitled Tokyo Gore Police (which, if you haven't seen, go watch the biggest what-in-the-fuck ever) at the local art house theater here in Albuquerque. Before the film the film editor from a local indie paper got up and talked a little about the movie. He said this: "If Japanese films are any indication of how the country is everyone must be going completely apeshit constantly." With my relatively few forays into J-horror I don't think I can think of more apt statement, with Takashi Miike being probably the standard by which to draw the definition of how nuts Japansese filmmakers are.

With One Missed Call, though, Miike plays it largely quite a bit straighter then oh, say, the clusterfuck that is Visitor Q. One Missed Call is more of a straight up Japanese ghost film a la Ringu, and I even worried for the first half that maybe Miike had lost his voice in trying to make the traditional Japanese ghost movie. However, the second half threw all those worries away and created probably the best J-ghost horror I've seen.

I watched the movie late at night on my laptop with headphones, no lights on whatsoever. And man... what a way to watch. Essentially the movie is about a group of teens who begin receiving calls from the future of their own deaths. These, of course, predict their death and the end up dying at the predetermined time. The scene that really got me sitting in the dark was near the end as the main character visits an old hospital and is tormented by the evil spirit. It's claustrophobic, things happen just in the periphery out of focus, and I found myself falling into the characters head; where is the next bit of horror going to come from? It feels all very Miike, somehow. From where I was sitting I was facing a huge mirror that was reflecting the light from my computer and I found myself momentarily horrified I would look into it and see the ghostly figure in the film. When a movie gets you like that you know you're watching something good.

As a whole, the movie overall felt much more effective than something like Ringu which kind of stands largely as the face of the genre. One Missed Call is a different turn than most of Miike's violent fare that gets talked about the most but none the less shows just how capable a filmmaker he is. The movie is a still a bucket o' Japanese madness but in a more subtle way. One Missed Call is terrifying, chilling, and it sticks with you--especially that god damn creepy ringtone.

9.5/10

[EphelDuath666]

gonna have to update my movie list tomorrow. I gotta get ready for a Halloween party and have to sort of work on my back a bit before that. Pulled something in my back yesterday, hurts like a sob. I will post a pic of me in my Halloween costume later

Welp here's my final horror films for the month! Whew. Thanks for reading guys, even though I sucked quite a bit this year--after awhile watching kinda becomes a begrudged job, haha.

Went all out for Halloween! It was mostly a product of having the day off, but anyway, here's my Halloween Triple Feature.

First off I watched the vampire movie that started them all, F.W. Murnau's silent Nosferatu. Let me start off by saying how much I love German Expressionism, namely The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari--such an amazing film. I don't think Nosferatu ever quite reaches the stellar imagery of Caligari but it still has a similar mutated sense of reality found in Caligari. For a 1920s vampire film Nosferatu is actually pretty freaky looking with his long fingers, batlike ears, and long fangs. It's really fascinating to see the root of the modern vampire we've come to know (and I'm talking ones that sparkle). Some of the movie is of course outdated (and what silent film doesn't have some outdatedness), such as what I found to be a rather humorous scene of Nosferatu carrying his coffin about town, but it makes it all the more interesting to see where modern horror came from. A good classic film that's a great look back.

9/10

My next film was Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. I have of course seen this movie tens of times since my childhood and I even reviewed it last year but it screams Halloween so much I watched it again for the holiday. It's such a great film, truly. The music is stellar and catchy, the story is original and engaging, and the animation is mind-blowing. After having done some stop motion myself it's absolutely remarkable that anyone could create a full length stop motion film and keep their sanity. Every move of every set piece matters, and it's in this it's consistently fucking gorgeous.

That's all I'll say about it as I just reviewed it last year, and basically all my opinions on it still hold true from that review. I am, however, upgrading the rating to a 10, because really... separate the movie from the culture that's grown around it and it's a pretty perfect film.

10/10

Now, for the grand finale of the month... Neil Marshall's film The Descent. Essentially the movie follows a group of young women that go on an expedition into an uncharted cave and after a cave in find themselves trapped with the way out a mystery. As they search for an exit they begin to find that they are not alone in the cavern.

The films major strength is it's stellar ability at transferring the claustrophobia and helpless of the characters onto the audience. After the cave in blocks the way they came in you as the audience member feel you are right there with them, lost in the cave without a prayer. Marshall uses lighting (or lack there of) to it's utmost power, making the only ambient light in the cave that of either the spelunkers headlamps or flares. Just as they are lost in the abyss so do you feel lost with them and as they descend into madness, paranoia, and panic so do you.

Now, this isn't often said about horror movies but I'm going to say it about this one: the monsters are unnecessary. As they women delve further into the cave they discover subterranean batpeople-things that begin hunting them--and with their arrival much of what was making the movie so good is ruined. Sure, without the creatures the film would have been something totally different but I was finding myself really sucked in simply by the character's predicament and their interplay with one another; the creatures kind of shatter that and, for me, were totally unnecessary. It's sad quite frankly, as what Marshall had going was a very unique film that he soiled by making into another monsters-hunt-people movie.

That said, if you almost separate the monsters from the film The Descent stands as a very uncommonly terrifying film. Even as someone who's not claustrophobic such as myself the idea of being lost in a maze of caves with no idea how to get out is fucking terrifying. I have to applaud Marshall on the ending as well (which I read was ruined by Part 2), as it held to ambiguous hopelessness; an ending that, when the director has the balls to do it, is my favorite type of ending because it's real.

But really... you coulda had a 10 here if it wasn't for those damn monsters, bro.

8.5/10

[EphelDuath666]

Glad you enjoyed Dead Alive, Sean! Not sure if you know but there's an uncut version of the film called Braindead which is even better. They cut out a lot of fun stuff for the US version. Also glad you dug In the Mouth of Madness. Such a good and overlooked movie by Carpenter!


well, my back was fucked the past few days so all I could really do untill the Halloween party was lie around and watch movies as moving was very painful (still kinda is). So there's a huge list of movies for me to write up here and my comments on each one will probably be rather short or I'll still be sitting here next Halloween.


Day 29: Street Trash

My god is this movie antisocial and