The Official Movie Thread
- Thread starter Manic Ferocity
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RadicalThrasher
Active Member
Gave this a watch....
Man this is some fucked up shit! Probably scarred for life. Its like the guy from the persecution mania album cover taking on everything from every death metal album art that was ever created. Twisted sick shit...was awesome!
Man this is some fucked up shit! Probably scarred for life. Its like the guy from the persecution mania album cover taking on everything from every death metal album art that was ever created. Twisted sick shit...was awesome!
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
Einherjar86
Active Member
Gave this a watch....
Man this is some fucked up shit! Probably scarred for life. Its like the guy from the persecution mania album cover taking on everything from every death metal album art that was ever created. Twisted sick shit...was awesome!
Fucking incredible and incredibly remorseless film.
challenge_everything
Active Member
challenge_everything
Active Member
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
Zero likeable characters aside, yeah a lot of fun. Robot Santa butchers its way through a small town.
challenge_everything
Active Member
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
AbelTim
Member
- Jun 11, 2021
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I enjoyed this one to a certain extent. I thought the dialogue between the two main protagonists was hilarious. The SFX was good with some great kills. My main grumble though which knocked my rating down quite a bit was the shooting style. Now, I would have to see again if this was similar to the way Joe Begos shot Bliss, but the 16mm, muddy style ruined the viewing experience for me. It was way too dark in places and the grainy aspect was annoying for this. Although if I am honest I did like it utilized in Mandy. Certainly better than The Mind's Eye, but could have been better in my opinion. Good use of an axe though lol.
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
Vegard Pompey
ALLY TO GOOD, NIGHTMARE TO YOU
RIP Angelo Badalamenti.
Einherjar86
Active Member
Now that the semester's over, posting on a couple things I've seen...
Significant Other
Thought this was quite good, pleasantly unexpected and unapologetic about its genre affiliations yet also was able to refute expectations. The very first shot of the film, I was thinking "Oh ok, so this is what we're dealing with," and didn't expect much in the way of surprises after that. I was wrong. The plot was a bit leaky sometimes and not all facets of the central conceit were explained, but I could let that go for the sake of enjoying the film. Maika Monroe is making a name for herself in these non-blockbuster, low budget films, many of which are decent if not excellent.
Smile
This was a lame ripoff of It Follows (one of the excellent Maika Monroe films). What made It Follows so compelling and enjoyable was, in part, that no one questions Monroe's character; her friends fall in line to help her. In Smile, doubt is everywhere and it just feels like a tired rehash of 99% of horror films about a person who sees something no one else can see.
Dash Cam
OK, a lot of people shit on this film, and I'm not saying it's great or anything, but I enjoyed it. Yeah the main character is a shitty person, a lot of the dialogue and behavior feels cringey and uncompelling (or otherwise inorganic), and the whole shaky cam thing is overplayed. But I enjoy a good creature feature, and this one had enough late-night London weirdness to keep me on board. Recommended if you set your expectations low, lol.
Gaia
I enjoyed this but wanted more from it. An ecohorror film with an eye toward the Anthropocene (which even gets a mention), this is yet another entry in the "nature fights back" category, a la In the Earth; and as with In the Earth, the central premise felt underdeveloped. The visuals were pretty great though. A few shots could stand on their own as impressive works of environmental art.
Significant Other
Thought this was quite good, pleasantly unexpected and unapologetic about its genre affiliations yet also was able to refute expectations. The very first shot of the film, I was thinking "Oh ok, so this is what we're dealing with," and didn't expect much in the way of surprises after that. I was wrong. The plot was a bit leaky sometimes and not all facets of the central conceit were explained, but I could let that go for the sake of enjoying the film. Maika Monroe is making a name for herself in these non-blockbuster, low budget films, many of which are decent if not excellent.
Smile
This was a lame ripoff of It Follows (one of the excellent Maika Monroe films). What made It Follows so compelling and enjoyable was, in part, that no one questions Monroe's character; her friends fall in line to help her. In Smile, doubt is everywhere and it just feels like a tired rehash of 99% of horror films about a person who sees something no one else can see.
Dash Cam
OK, a lot of people shit on this film, and I'm not saying it's great or anything, but I enjoyed it. Yeah the main character is a shitty person, a lot of the dialogue and behavior feels cringey and uncompelling (or otherwise inorganic), and the whole shaky cam thing is overplayed. But I enjoy a good creature feature, and this one had enough late-night London weirdness to keep me on board. Recommended if you set your expectations low, lol.
Gaia
I enjoyed this but wanted more from it. An ecohorror film with an eye toward the Anthropocene (which even gets a mention), this is yet another entry in the "nature fights back" category, a la In the Earth; and as with In the Earth, the central premise felt underdeveloped. The visuals were pretty great though. A few shots could stand on their own as impressive works of environmental art.
AbelTim
Member
- Jun 11, 2021
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I also watched a recently released A24 film called God's Creatures. Stars Emily Watson, Aisling Franciosi and Paul Mescal. Quite a brooding film on toxic masculinity and the damage it does in a small Irish fishing community. The three main actors are very good but it kind of falls flat and felt a bit too short for the subject matter and needed a bit more fleshing out. Couldn't give it more than 3 stars.
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
I randomly watched this during my October horror marathon. Definitely interesting. Here's what I thought at the time;
A relationship dramedy masquerading as Invasion of the Body Snatchers masquerading as an allegory for mental health issues. Not bad, but not really for me I guess. Nails the atmosphere pretty well.
challenge_everything
Active Member
A little surprised by the negativity here. It certainly isn't original, but I thought it was a rare example of jumpscares being done well - not only relentlessly effective but actually relevant to the plot because it is the method of 'it' to bring about the mental disintegration of the victims. I think it had an interesting subtext about how you might be treated by friends and family in the event of mental illness. The alienation experienced by the protagonist might be a horror trope, but I'm not sure why it's a negative one because it's that alienation which generally provides more fertile territory for social commentary. Certainly superior to It Follows I think, which I found devoid of atmosphere (the slow, lumbering 'predator') and overstated in terms of the social commentary it supposedly provides.
Einherjar86
Active Member
I'm not gonna put a spoiler alert around these comments, but fair warning that I talk about some specifics of Smile and It Follows (for anyone who cares):
I really have a different opinion of It Follows, which I think is a superb horror film. As far as Smile goes, I realize I focused solely on what I felt were its negative aspects; I agree that its jump scares were effective and the overall tone or atmosphere of the film was one of palpable dread. I just didn't feel it to be doing much new in terms of technique or thematics. It's a quite common trope in horror films for the protagonist who perceives the harmful force to in turn be perceived by others as suffering from mental health issues; so, I feel as though that subtext isn't particularly profound. It's not ineffective, but it's not novel either. In some ways, it's a close remake of another recent horror film, The Dead Center (not a great film by any stretch of the imagination, but decent), in which a clinical therapist working with patients suffering mental health issues encounters a strange entity inhabiting a patient's body and proceeds to (possibly) suffer his own mental health issues. At the risk of hammering this to death, there's an overhead shot in Smile of an ambulance arriving at the hospital that closely mirrors an overhead shot in The Dead Center of an ambulance arriving at a hospital.
I don't agree about the lack of atmosphere in It Follows, which I felt to be dripping with atmosphere--from the early sequence in the abandoned building when she first encounters the entity, to the eerie shots of figures who may or may not be the entity approaching her. To return to camera shots, there's a shot in Smile where the protagonist sees, through a window, a distant figure in the hospital courtyard, seemingly staring toward her, which I felt to be extremely similar to the sequence in It Follows when the protagonist sees a distant figure through a window across a campus courtyard slowly approaching her. I'd say that Smile actually borrows a lot from It Follows, from its cinematographic choices, to its foreboding atmosphere, to its moral dilemma (i.e. "to survive, I have to do this horrible thing").
I also felt like the adolescent camaraderie in It Follows was such a fresh approach to the scenario as opposed to the "no one believes me" scenario of Smile. I'm not sure what you mean by the overstated social commentary of It Follows, but I'm assuming it has something to do with the STI insinuations of the entity (i.e. kids have sex, bad things happen); please correct me if I'm wrong. Consequences for sexual transgression is another common trope in horror, but It Follows gets that out of the way early by staging it, front and center. It's not something we can read into the film but the explicit conceit of the film (I think a lot of critics were wrong to make that the thematic centerpiece). Personally, I think the more interesting social commentary has to do with the collapsing, and in some cases dilapidated, post-2008 Detroit infrastructure that the film takes for its mise en scène. What's following these kids seems less like the consequences of their sexuality than a manifestation of the futureless world they've inherited from their (mostly absent) parents. The consequence of sex isn't pregnancy--or, rather, not only pregnancy; it's the winnowing of opportunity and livelihood in a society where those things are already radically depleted.
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challenge_everything
Active Member
I don't disagree with anything you said re Smile. My take is that it's entirely derivative, just extremely effective in its execution. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I still struggle with what you say about It Follows though... while you praise it for the adolescent camaraderie, for me that gave it a sense of coziness that I found out of place or inconsistent with its other ambitions. Each to their own I guess. However the dilapidated urbanism, current generations being weighed down (followed) by the previous, that's all horror trope too (Candyman to name but one).
I still struggle with what you say about It Follows though... while you praise it for the adolescent camaraderie, for me that gave it a sense of coziness that I found out of place or inconsistent with its other ambitions. Each to their own I guess. However the dilapidated urbanism, current generations being weighed down (followed) by the previous, that's all horror trope too (Candyman to name but one).
no country for old wainds
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IT FOLLOWS is more or less conpletely carried by the excellent horror gimmick for me, always found the character stuff completely disposable.
