#501

Saw Love and Monsters on Netflix today. That was a 12 certificate I think.

Nothing gory. The monsters are big and silly looking. When they eat someone, they just get eaten whole. No biting of the body with blood and guts everywhere.

#502

Yup, they’ve seen Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline and Corpse Bride and enjoyed them all :+1:

#503

We watched that earlier this year - good fun and definitely child compliant :+1:

#504

Somehow never saw this til now. Simon Barrett discussing The Guest, some really great background if you’re a fan of the film.

#505

Enjoyed Cloverfield on a rewatch. It’s a shame that some of the CGI has dated a lot, but everything else looks great - it’s a bit weird to have a found footage film that has a gigantic budget, compared to the rest. The chaos in the first half, with extras legging it, is especially good and tense. I do think the guy behind the camera is very strange, and they should have dialled him back a little, but “annoying cameraguy” is one of the staples of this silly genre.

Also watched The Poughkeepsie Tapes again. Really like it - one of the eeriest fake documentaries. I do think the acting is questionable, some of the errors are very weird (someone being on death row for 1 hour instead of 10+ years), and that it romanticises the killer way too much. It’s very good but you’ve got to ignore the janky stuff (perhaps another found footage staple lol).

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#506

Watched the first two Cloverfield movies shortly after the beginning of the pandemic with my son - figured they’d make entertaining ‘when the shit goes down’ viewing. Don’t remember the CGI being too bad, but I always seem to miss stuff like this unless it’s glaringly obvious.

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#507

Trying to think of horror films for kids and thinking back to what scared me which was pretty much everything back when I was a kid. The Witches and bizarrely Ernest Scared Stupid were the ones I remember most. And this trailer (or one like it) for Alien 3.

I vividly remember being on holiday when I was 13 or so sharing a room with my sister with my parents in the room next door. I remember we were watching Friends and this came on, must have been an ad for the VHS. In my memory the entire advert was just the alien beside Ripley’s face but I’m sure it wasn’t, but that part paralysed me with fear. I couldn’t look away or change the channel and I didn’t sleep well for weeks afterwards.

Gremlins mightn’t be too bad a shout for slightly older kids. I don’t think I got the humour side of it back then because I was too focused on the Gremlins themselves

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#508

When I was a kid, my dad used to have one of those ‘friends’ who would supply him with VHS copies of films of dubious provenance. One of my earliest memories are of him watching The Beast Within and a film that goes by the name of The Witch or Superstition. I must have been really young at the time, like 6 I’m guessing and in no way were these appropriate viewing. I remember being genuinely freaked out by both. I think I made it most of the way through The Beast Within but didn’t make it far into the other. i think there’s maybe a fairly unpleasant decapitation via window, which did for me. Thanks dad!

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#509

The guy from Yellowcard is the barman in Cloverfield at the opening party

#510

Gremlins does have a Santa isn’t real reveal depending on the age of the kids watching :thinking:

I read my two The Witches last year so we watched the 90s adaptation shortly after - was well received. Last week we watched the recent adaptation which scared my 5 year old senseless :+1:

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#511

anyone seen In The Earth, the new Wheatley one?

#512

Watched last night Godzilla Vs Kong…

Quite enjoyed Kong: Skull Island - had a good cast and a nice 70s setting. Not seen any of the recent Godzilla films, but this team up falls into the familiar trap of just being a series of creature vs creature set pieces, and this is just not as interesting as say Pacific Rim in that respect. Part of the problem is that of the two, Kong is the more character driven creature so the story is largely his, while Godzilla is such an unstoppable force that each battle has to introduce a factor to explain why he wouldn’t just instantly vaporise Kong. There is some nice design, but the decent cast (Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall et all) are largely wasted. It’s all a bit of a slog for almost two hours. 4/10

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#513

We got my son the Criterion set of original Godzilla movies a while back and have been gradually making our way through them. They’re mostly wonderfully entertaining. This week we’re up to All Monsters Attack, which is supposed to be a bit of a low point.

Like yourself I enjoyed Skull Island, but skipped King of the Monsters. If local cinemas were open I might be in more of a rush to see this new one but I’m guessing I’ll catch it at home at some point…

#514

Still battling on with found footage. It took me a while to make this realisation, but there are two very different types of found footage: fake documentaries that include found footage segments but are not entirely this footage, and first-person horror films that try and evoke a “one take” feel. It’s maybe a bit weird to lump them all into one genre, but trying to classify subgenres is silly too.

Willow Creek - Blair Witch but with Bigfoot. That is… pretty much it exactly. Going in I didn’t expect to find Bigfoot scary at all, but they do some good stuff with it. Also the script/characters was generally better than what you get in these films as they had more depth. Unfortunately it’s a very lopsided film, with 50 minutes of build up for 20 minutes of scares. Even though those 20 minutes are good, it’s just not enough.

Occult (2009) - By the director of Noroi. It’s a documentary about a mass stabbing and why the guy did it. It’s very creepy and effective in the first half though does become more of a comedy in the second. It has lovecraftian stuff in there that works well, and I really like the character that it centres around - a survivor of the stabbing who has become very strange. It would have been nice to see a full film that builds on the eeriness of the first half, and some of the special effects fell a bit flat, but I still enjoyed it overall. It’s on youtube in surprisingly OK quality and with decent subtitles too.

The Bay - Really cool use of many different types of footage. It’s aged better than I thought, though I do think the tone is off and it’s stuck between two different films - a silly creature feature (I get a bit of a Resident Evil vibe from it) and a no nonsense po-faced documentary. I think if this was longer and had a few more setpieces in there, it would be a classic, but as it is it’s a good one.

Diary of The Dead - Maybe the worst found footage I’ve seen. I like Romero but this is a total misfire. He’s like, blocked out the actors and framed them as though it was a normal film, so it looks wildly unnatural for found footage. It also occasionally has another character filming at the same time as the main guy, so for stretches it is just a multi-camera shoot. This would all be fine if it was either scary or funny or had exciting stuff happening, but the script is excruciatingly bad and it’s quite boring apart from when it’s making completely bizarre points about social media culture. Very much “phones but too many”. I really don’t know what it was going for. A real oddity.

August Underground - Yeah I’m not sure what to say on this. It’s the most extreme film I’ve seen in a long time, and as far as fake snuff films go it is very effective at what it does. Overall I do think it’s good and I liked it, especially the trippier visuals and the special effects which are extremely well done for something so low budget. But it’s not really a film that you enjoy and is more of an art-piece than anything… as pretentious as that is to say! There’s also a Korn cover band, so there’s that.

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#515

Very cool. I seem to remember enjoying Diary of the Dead when it came out but my excitement for a new Romero film might have overpowered my critical faculties. (Although having said that, Survival of the Dead is one of the few films I’ve given up on before the end because of how bad it was). I’m really interested to hear what you say about August Underground. I posted about this upthread saying that I think my days of watching films like this are behind me, but you make it sound less extreme than I thought it was and more artistic. Still not sure I need to see it any time soon, but you never know.

#516

I do think it has artistic merit, but it does start at an 11 and doesn’t really move from there, even though there are stretches where it isn’t super horrible, just deeply unpleasant. I expected to be bored by it because these extreme films often get stuck in a rut of horrible people doing nothing, but it did enough to keep my attention and I only started zoning out right at the end. Something really difficult about it to articulate is that somehow it doesn’t feel mean-spirited? It’s ridiculously nasty but it’s also a guy’s lo-fi effort, and I found that quite charming in a weird way.

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#517

Huh, this sounds like it’s got way more going for it than I thought it would. Is there much of a plot or is it just scenes of unpleasantness?

#518

Zero plot - you get bounced between different… incidents without much stuff happening between. Kind of like a bunch of short films stuck together, in a way!

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#519

The Bay and Wolf Creek are directed by some unexpected names

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#520

Ha very strange!