Cold fingers around my throat - The Rolling Horror Thread 2018

A few recent watches. Holidays an anthology from last year. I liked the weirder ones, St.Patricks Day and Fathers Day. Some tosh though. 6/10

The Easter one was by far my favourite :rabbit:

(I saw this at the Edinburgh film fest year before last. Kevin Smith came out with his daughter and did a completely rambling q&a. It was kinda brilliant.)

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Paranormal Activity terrified me when I saw it at the cinema - I’d watch it again in a heartbeat. Lifeforce is cool too, bonkers 80s Tobe Hooper madness. With Mathilda May.

I really like the first Paranormal Activity. It has this real low-budget charm (I think the original intention was to use it to get a studio interested and re-shoot it with name actors, more money etc) and I remember finding it quite tense in places. I think it;s maybe unfairly assumed to be terrible because of the flood of cheap found-footage films that it caused, but it’s clearly a passion project for the director and I think that comes across.

The sequels have pretty heavy diminishing returns but I remember 3 being pretty good. There were some points where they seemed to be building some cool mythology into it, but predictably it never really pays off.

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Thanks guys!

The Autopsy of Jane Doe is the best horror on netflix.

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The Skeleton Key (2005?)

this slipped me by completely when it was released but is a really decent chiller starring Kate Hudson and John Hurt. feel like elements of it could probably be described as ‘problematic’ but if you can put that to one side it’s very good. try to avoid reading too much about it beforehand though. 7/10 just so I’m not overhyping it.

Saw Shape of Water last night. Get thee to a cinema ASAP. It’s wonderful, probably the best time I’ve had at a Del Toro movie. I’ve enjoyed most of what I’ve seen by him, but nothing he’s done before has left me completely satisfied. This did. Also, second Sally Hawkins movie in 3 days, after Paddington 2 on Saturday. What a star!

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Saw the Belko Experiment on Netflix, had a glimmer of an interesting concept at first but rapidly turned into utter carnage. The part where guy says You haven’t actually changed anything kind of made me think of the film itself but in a way perhaps that kind of worked to its advantage as it’s about as nihilistic a film as I’ve seen for quite some time.

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i think Greg McClean has lost it after a promising couple of films (Wolf Creek, Rogue). i watched his new Wolf Creek tv series, season 2, and it’s just nihilistic, heartless violence, nothing more. the Belko Experiment is really odd, there’s a couple of characters who seem like they’re in a different film (James Gunn and the desk clerk from ER) and the film can be summed up by that bit during the execution scene where one of the ‘bad guys’ vomits. it’s a nasty, nasty film and you really do wonder why you’re watching it.

Trailer here:

June 8 can’t come soon enough - this looks like it could be genuinely terrifying. Yes!

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Watched last night, Remainder

Didn’t know much about this going in, so didn’t realise that this was based on an acclaimed novel. Not sure you would know it’s a book adaptation as the visual style and languid pacing is such a feature (it’s the directorial debut by visual artist Omer Fast). The storyline is a slow peeling back of layers, and almost secondary to the general vibe of the whole thing, shot in various familiar London settings. It’s very cold, and the main protagonist is not particularly likeable. The violence, when it does occur, is both shocking and mundane. It’s built on deliberate repetition and reminded me a lot of Memento, although also with undertones of Donnie Darko. Enjoyable. 7/10

The thinly veiled was away this weekend, so managed a couple of new-ish releases…

Tragedy Girls - this was great fun.Two slasher obsessed high school girls are desperate to stage their own murder spree before heading off to college. Alexandra Shipp (Storm from the most recent X-Men) and Brianna Hildebrand (Negasonic Teenage Warhead from Deadpool) are both piss funny as the female leads in this. The teen dialogue is spot on and the kills are delightfully gory. 8/10

mother! - expected to love this. Did not love this.Started off ok, and was pleasingly unpredictable initially, but then didn’t really do anything beyond establishing an overlong allegory. Jennifer Lawrence was decent in this, and Michelle Pfeiffer did good stuff with her brief screentime, but overall this left me cold. 4/10

Definitely up for Tragedy Girls - been hearing pretty much nothing but good stuff about this.

mother! seems to be the definition of a Marmite film - personally I loved it…

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I was literally going to describe it as a Marmite film! I’ve loved every other film that Aronofsky has made, so was left fairly disappointed. I blame it being his first film without Clint Mansell doing the score - not enough Pop Will Eat Itself influence…

I saw There are monsters on Amazon last night. Very similar to the 70s version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. It’s worth a watch. A well made small budget film.

Watched last night, The Cloverfield Paradox

First things first, yet another stylish snap release for a Cloverfield film - this one was trailed during the Super Bowl and then dropped on Netflix as soon as the game finished, which if nothing else is guaranteed to build instant buzz. Unfortunately, it’s downhill from that point. The set up of scientists in space trying to source an alternate energy source for an ailing world was pretty much nailed in Sunshine. Paradox does not have much to add to the space peril genre at all particularly, beyond some token mentions of the Higgs Boson. In fact, this film wasn’t supposed to be part of the Cloverfield mythos at all but for some reason was square-pegged in after actually filming - from the link in the OP of this thread:

Retconning already-written screenplays to shoehorn them into the Cloverfield universe sounds like a terrible idea…

Which turns out to be fairly accurate. Aside from the space set scenes, there’s a largely pointless earth-based side-story, plus some actual Cloverfield action right at the end. Taking time out from trying to shoehorn Cloverfield references in where possible, the film in general suffers from not knowing what it is - the scares are not scary, the science fiction is hugely un-scientific, and the comic relief is largely cringeworthy (Chris O’Dowd in particular seems to have parachuted in directly from The IT Crowd). It’s a total waste of a strong cast (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Daniel Bruhl and Elizabeth Debicki all do their best tbf). Just read some reviews while writing this, and unsurprisingly it seems to have gone down like a cup of cold sick across the board. Disappointing, particularly after how great 10 Cloverfield Lane was. Hopefully this is a wake up call to get the next Cloverfield installment proper up to scratch. 3/10

Cloverfield_paradox_poster

Sorry - not looking at this until after I’ve seen it. Which, knowing me, will take a while… :blush: Still, I’ve heard it’s fairly awful, which is a shame as I really, really enjoyed the first two. Hardly surprising though - re-tooling pre-existing scripts to shoehorn them into your franchise didn’t seem like it could work well for too long. I mean, that’s pretty much what all the latter-day Hellraiser movies did and for the most part, they suck…

Watched this on Friday night and… it was nowhere near as bad as I was expecting it to be. I kind of wish that I could have come to this without any preconceptions because I think I might have looked even more favorably on it. There’s certainly plenty here to dislike if you feel so inclined: nationality alone does not a character make; I really think a lot more could have been made of the alternative dimension stuff; the Cloverfield connection feels even more tacked on here than it did in 10 Cloverfield Lane. But overall, I didn’t hate this nearly as much as I’d expected to. I’d been prepared to give up on the Cloverfield universe after this one, but I’d give another sequel a shot. You have to wonder if this is all actually going anywhere at this point though – is there ever going to be a sequel that’s purpose-built as a sequel rather than just a series of sequels made up of pre-existing scripts that get Cloverfield-ised???

Right before this my son and I watched the vastly superior It Came from Beneath the Sea. They knew how to do it in the 50s. Solid characterization followed by magnificent scenes of a Harryhausen-animated giant octopus attacking San Francisco. My son and I loved it, while my wife went to bed after the first 8 minutes because the thought of a giant octopus really started freaking her out…

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Watched again last night: Get Out. What a film. I’m not even going to try to talk about how amazing this film is because hopefully you already know. If you haven’t seen this yet, try to change that ASAP. And then after you’ve watched it go here: http://www.graveyardshiftsisters.com/2017/06/horror-blackademics-get-out-2017.html for a list of articles about the film. I’ve only just started working my way through these and am already finding myself thinking about the film (and life) in ways that I hadn’t previously.

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