2016 Horror Roundup Thread

I watched Train to Busan last night. I enjoyed it quite a bit, allowing for some rather turgid melodrama. The thing I want to ask about here is whether I missed some things regarding the origin of the infection. Is it ok to talk spoilers here?

[details=How did it come to pass?]In one of the news clips, we see zombies falling off military helicopters. That’s got to be someone deploying them as a weapon, right? The helicopters would crash if the zombies were just loose inside them.

Later, the broker is talking to someone on the phone I take to be his brother, and that guy is wailing about having discovered where they came from in a way that to me read as “We did this to ourselves!”

Is the suggestion that the South Koreans made this infection, deployed it against themselves without a plan for cleaning it back up? That can’t really be right, can it?[/details]

I watched Train to Busan this weekend. I thought it was pretty good, although I wouldn’t call particular parts “turgid melodrama”, that’s not very far from the truth. Still I was quite taken by the zombie effects and it’s take on the mythology (e.g. them going “semi dormant” in the dark), as well as it’s very effective look at the initial stages of an outbreak.

@baren - this is late but here is my take:

[spoiler]As per the beginning, this was all an accidental occurrence. Whether there was a deliberately engineered virus or not isn’t really anything that’s clear so I tend to go with “no”. I think that particular phone call just guilt on the part of whoever that was (I thought maybe it was a brother too). As for the guys dropping out of helicopters, I think that was just a stylistic choice and wasn’t necessarily intended to reflect either a plausible scenario or “let’s pop-bomb some places”. Although I can present the former: helicopter takes a wounded man as well as fleeing troops up in the air, man turns and all hell breaks loose. Pilot isn’t affected yet but obviously it’s a short window until something turns on him. OR alternately, people shove the infected out before they cause too much trouble.

I don’t think the exact cause is supposed to matter, so all we can do is speculate.

I did think it was a bit inconsistent with the zombies turning and how they negotiated very barriers, but I Can forbive. I thought the old lady opening the door to the infected after our heroes had moved to the place beyond the safe car was completely nonsensical. Dad’s sacrifice at the end felt over-done. [/spoiler]

I’ve seen many worse movies.

Also recently watched Train to Busan. As a parent to two girls, it had that angle going for it to pull at my emotions a bit more. As I told someone else, it didn’t really show me a lot that was unique, but as zombie flicks go, it was a great ride and through in some twists that were very entertaining.

Yeah we really enjoyed Train to Busan too. I especially liked how, as some people turn, they’re charged with emotion from a distant memory. That was a nice touch and quite intriguing at first when the infected woman clambers on to the train crying… uh, ‘I’m sorry’(? It was a couple of months back when we watched it) to herself with her head in her hands. Then at the end you get the protagonist and antagonist going all white-eyed and distant. I think the bad guy is talking about his grandma or something while the good guy is thinking of his daughter’s birth. The final moments were tense though because the film up until that point had been pretty brutal so we had no idea whether the sniper was going to pull the trigger or not. But holy shit, was that bad guy bad.

^^^LIKE^^^

Did any of you see the Wailing? It was a 2016 release (at least hear I think). It was a tad meandering and long, but I loved it. Atypical “hero” in a possession type film that was very different from much of what I have seen or at least that I can recall. Like Train to Busan, there is a father-daughter theme that hits me differently than it would have before I had kids. In fact, for the longest time, any horror film that put kids, especially daughters in danger, was more than I could watch. The fact that these two movies involve zombies and demon possession, remove it far enough from reality that I can watch. Whereas Saw I had to give up on once the daughter was abducted and the TV Series The Killing (American version), I almost turned off during the first brutally heartbreaking episodes.

I really enjoyed The Wailing and if you like foreign language horror, I would definitely recommend it. Some may find it too plodding, but it was well worth it in my opinion. I thought I first heard about it through a @tomchick review here, but I couldn’t find it through a quick, possibly inept, search.

Watched it last weekend. It of course got good reviews, but I wasn’t prepared for what I got. Much slower burn than I anticipated, and Do-Wan Kwak did a very good job playing the protagonist in what turned out to be a very tragic tale. I was a little confused as to exactly who did what at the very end (The Korean shaman Il-gwang indicates that the Japanese stranger is in fact trying to kill Moo-myeong, but then she is trying to keep Jong-goo fron entering his house with claims of having lain a trap. And we clearly see the flower/plant wilt when he crosses the threshold. But later Il-gwang has all the photos of the victims. Anyway I felt like I sort of lost the thread at the end.

I liked both the slow burn and the vagaries (for the most part). But I do think it wound up a little too long. Also full credit to the director, who I felt was very loving in showing off the rainy Korean hills and mountains the village rested among. It was a very lovely movie to watch in that respect.

Yeah, it definitely could have been tightened a bit, but maybe that’s our spoiled, fast paced American view? ;)

I would say it wasn’t as leisurely as, for example, The VVitch. Both drew on the feel of the environment in which it was filmed, but the The VVitch almost held too long for my liking. Although I did like it too.

It certainly held the confusion almost like a whodunit throughout. I wasn’t sure if it was having to focus on the CC for me, if I was distracted or what. And yes, the father was an unlikely hero/lovable/pitiful/strong sometimes alternating between those and sometimes all at once.

It’s a tough thing as far as vagaries go. If they are blatant, it can really ruin the movie, if there is too much exposition and hand-holding, there is no mystery and that dampens the dread and fear. I’m probably the last of 1 million people who have made that point, but my point is, in The Wailing’s case, they didn’t bother me.

I can’t recall enough at this point to answer your spoiler question. I almost feel like I need a movie diary. Maybe my brain will recall later.

It’s interesting you bring up The Witch. The Wailing is over an hour longer. I didn’t think the former stuck around too long (opinions will of course vary). But a 2hr 36m runtime is looooong (and too long IMO, for The Wailing).

Yeah, I knew about the time disparity and that it sounds weird saying the shorter one seemed to drag more, but that was simply how I felt when watching each.

Sure; there’s subjectivity at play here. For me the Witch Moved briskly, but The Wailing’s slow burn turned into a smolder.

I watched Don’t Breathe. I enjoyed the new angle of the victim switching it up and what they did with his blindness. There were several admirable parts of the movie and what they did to make it not another tired trapped in a house movie, but I did not find it all that interesting despite good performances all around. I can’t help compare it to Hush which I thought was much better. I wish I could better detail why I did not like it, but words are failing me.

A couple of weeks ago I watched a movie on Netflix called Here Alone. It’s a pretty well filmed and well set up drama set post zombie/infected-apocalypse but I can’t say I liked where it went.

It starts out following a lone woman (Lucy Walters) at a campsite near a lake. The movie spends a fair amount of time following her foraging (and eventually scavenging) in silence. It flashes between the present ans the past, on the night that she, her husband (Shane West), and their child all flee their home (the lights go out and West’s character has already made it clear that things are getting dangerous and he already wanted to leave). You see their journey, their quandaries (they argue over helping strangers on the side of the road at one point but West argues it’s too dangerous, and that they have to protect themselves first). Naturally you wonder what happened to Shane and the baby as they clearly aren’t with her now, but she has the car (which she sleeps in typically).

Her tranquility, such as it exists, is interrupted when she comes upon a teen girl and her father, who is wounded. What follows is the drama that arises from this situation, since she’s been on her own for a long time (months and months, maybe longer). there’s some sexual tension between her and the dad (who is actually a step father if memory serves). It goes awry, needless to say. Overall I kind of felt like it was less than the sum of it’s parts. The movie wanted to say soemthing, but the path it took to get there didn’t feel like it worked to me.

The movie basically boils down to her arguably making a choice to save either the father or the daughter.
So motherhood prevails, and this after the mother has to euthanize her infected daughter and loses her husband on a scavenging mission. But this ignores that the daughter has already engaged in a shitload of dubious shenanigans and tried to kill the woman and very nearly succeeds. I felt like the journey was sort of tossed aside to get to that point.

That said, Walters is very good in this. The film could have used a better sense of dread and maybe questions about “well what happens when your scavenging stops turning up supplies” (she appears to be heading into a sparsely populated rural neighborhood to scavenge).

Finally saw They Look Like People. Oh man this was absolutely terrific.

I liked the movie but the ending has always puzzled me. Was the bloody sock gag on the floor in Wyatt’s mind or was the hug? I would assume that the gag was a fantasy, but I’m not sure.

Glad you liked it, @peacedog. It’s so rare to find horror movies that do something unique. They Look Like People was one of those rare finds for me.

There are no tricks at the end of the movie. What you see in the end is what’s real. Basically, the reveal is that it’s not a horror movie, but a movie about someone supporting his mentally ill friend.

-Tom

Damn, They Look Like People still doesn’t have a release date for the UK, I might have to look into Netflix proxy solutions…

100% agree. I would have loved it no matter how it had turned out in the end (it does such a superb job of building dread, and there are some superbly disturbing sequences like when the guy is remembering lying in bed with his wife), but I think it worked best as it was filmed. The journey was great and unlike Killing Ground that was a pretty profound catharsis, at least for me..

I would put this in my “post Blair Witch” top 10 horror movies if any such list existed.

Yeah, I thought it was wonderful, too. It pulls you one way and tricks you and rather than being pissed that you didn’t get what you may have expected, you realize what you got was better. Like It Comes at Night. AKA The best movie ever.

I saw They Look Like People yesterday due to the recent post here about it. Thought it was pretty good, and I agree that it ended up in a surprising (and good) place. There’s also a dearth of films that show guys being complete doofuses with each other (when they were horsing around in the apartment); I liked that.

Greater love hath no man than he who shaves his brother’s back.

-Tom