Just finished Soul To Keep, new on Netflix. Buncha pot-smoking Generation Z-ers gather at a mildly creepy farmhouse in the middle of nowhere to party, find a black book and a ritual room and manage to summon something evil.
Sound familiar? Yeah, nothing new here, but the actors are pretty good and the filmmakers focus a lot on developing each character. Everyone is constantly signing everything they say because one of the characters is deaf, which feels new and gets incorporated into the story in a nice way.
This one’s probably more for the casuals. Not too awful scary and not much gore, but overall I’d say it was worth the watch.
A new Peter Strickland art-horror movie is always an event…in this case In Fabric, a film that seems to be about a murderous red dress of all things.
Sadly, I can’t find any record of this playing anywhere in the US so far. I suppose it’ll be out streaming somewhere at some point and I will be there first day. It looks and sounds fantastic.
‘Horror’/‘Comedy’ ‘The Dead Don’t Die.’ (Dir Jim Jarmusuch) sucked in my humble opinion it’s worst crime being I don’t believe any of the actors or the director have any genuine affection for the genre; at least they failed to convince me of such. At least Ed Wood loved what he was doing.
The trailer makes a big deal out of the weird breathing exercise they’re doing and the deformed kid, both of which get about 3 minutes of screentime in the actual movie, and I really expected them to be way more prominent. I mean, I basically expected where it was going both writ large and in smaller scenes (you know pretty much what’s going to happen to the old man and woman the moment you see the cliff, if not before, but the expectation is at least as squirm-inducing as the actual gory end), what with having seen the Wicker Man and everything, but it threw me way off about the details.
Oh, sure, it was a thematic element, and I appreciated that. But that specific thing, which was so prominent in the trailer (and I found weird and creepy) barely existed in the movie.
Finally got around to The Prodigy with Taylor Schilling, directed by Nicholas McCarthy of The Pact fame, a movie I thought showed promise even if the last act didn’t make much sense. This one has basically got a supernatural bad-seed plot that also doesn’t make a ton of sense, but honestly, who cares?
This one starts off a little slow, but it definitely picks up in the middle of the second act and the ending is pleasantly and surprisingly violent. Downright vicious in places, actually. Plus it’s a trim 89 minutes, so it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. I kinda liked it.
Been looking forward to that one. It’s written and directed by the guy who made “Some Kind of Hate”, a very flawed film that nevertheless showed a decent amount of promise. Hoping this one is less flawed.
Finally saw Midsommar last night. Like @Ginger_Yellow, my biggest complaint was that it was exactly what I expected going in. Not the specific plot beats, but the trailer basically said “Wicker Man-style folk horror”, and that’s what we got, right down to the ending. That said, I really liked it- the production design was amazing (I’d like a 4k version just to freeze frame and look at so many of the murals and embroidery and whatnot- I’m positive almost all of it was relevant), and the tension was expertly manipulated- in a way, the lack of surprises worked in the movie’s favor.
And there is certainly some depth to dig into in hindsight. Lots of little things that make the whole thing much more sinister that what was on the surface. Good stuff.
I don’t usually do horror, but my son urged me to see Midsommar. There’s just no excuse for this kind of genre picture to drag 140 minutes. The production design was nice and all, but you’d seen all that by the time the first gore scene came around, and I though it would be better if they wrapped it all up in 30 min after that.
