Bruckner made the best “episode” of Southbound too.
Edit - Oh, Tom said that. I always get those anthology movies mixed up.
Oof…that movie was funny.
Just finished another comedy Scare Me on Shudder, which I found to be pretty amusing with some great comic acting for an indie “horror” (there is very little horror in it).
About to rent another horror-comedy called Spree with Steve Harrington starring!
The Joe Hill short story that the movie is based on is much better and much less conventional horror, IMO.
You were close, though, and relevant to the thread. Because the best guys from Southbound did a little movie that was recently mentioned in this thread:
-Tom
I watched Ready or Not a few weeks ago myself and found it competent enough.
I would like to see a version with Mr. Bean in the lead role, though. Why can’t all this deepfake technology actually be used to advance the arts?
Doctor Sleep
What a bizarre sequel to The Shining. So much so I think they could have easily made this into a stand-alone movie that had absolutely nothing to do with The Shining at all. Also not much of a horror movie. I liked certain ideas here but they didn’t really explore them far enough. I still enjoyed it a bit.
My girlfriend and I watched Possum on Friday night and I really enjoyed it. It’s very unusual and slow but a lot of the appeal for me was trying to put all the pieces together. It certainly has its creepy moments too, with an excellent score by the Radiophonic Workshop. It reminded me a lot of The Babadook.
Oh, and it’s by Matthew ‘Garth Marenghi’ Holness.
The Lie - the first of four Blumhouse horror films has released to prime (by first, I mean the first I selected to watch):
When you tell one lie, it leads to another
So you tell two lies to cover each other
Then you tell three lies and, Oh Brother,
You’re in trouble up to your ears!
So you tell four lies to try to protect you
Then you tell five lies so folks won’t suspect you
Then you tell six lies and you’ll collect
A life filled with worries and fears
This is really a thriller, altough I didn’t find it to be especially thrilling. The end, uh, Mirellelolololololol.
And still more of a horror story than the book, I have to say. King really pulled his punches in that one.
Black Box - better than The Lie to be sure, but that’s not a high bar to clear. It was ok, nothing special. The other two movies don’t come out until the 13th apparently.
Spiral - bearing no connection to the famous Japanese novel/manga/animu/whatever (from what I can tell anyway), this is about a gay couple and their daughter (the biological daughter of one of them) who move someplace mountainy from Chicago and. . . it’s a bit nonsense. Uh, there’s a cult and some shit. Among the movie’s sins is a fair amount of tropey horror fakeout stuff that has no bearing on anything in the movie. The bridge scene was pretty good, at least.
So I actually read somewhere that Doctor Sleep was actually Stephen Kings response/rebuttal to Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining. Apparently he wasn’t a fan.
The focus of Doctor Sleep(the film) was mostly on Danny among others psychic powers which were a tertiary element in Kubrick’s film at best, which makes it a strange sequel.
It’s not a very faithful adaptation, not least because it directly wants to be a sequel to Kubrick’s film and while King definitely didn’t like that version (there was later a TV miniseries that a) isn’t as good and b) is much more faithful to the book that he approved of) there certainly aren’t any direct references to it in his novel of Doctor Sleep.
Yeah it’s a bit of pretzel twist isn’t it.
Doctor Sleep wants to be a sequel to Kubrick’s adaption of The Shining VS just being a faithful adaptation of King’s Doctor Sleep which was King’s rebuttal to Kubrick’s adaption of The Shining. (allegedly)
I didn’t think the Doctor Sleep book was a direct rebuttal of Kubrick as it was just the outcome of following the end of the first book as writen by a mellowed King. The status of stuff at the end of The Shining is crazy different from the movie. If you’re writing a sequel to that, there’s no way to ignore the hotel burned down and the cook not dying. Beyond that, due to the decades long gap, the writer is in a completely different mind. The Shining was written while King was still struggling with alcohol abuse and the idea of being a bad father. Doctor Sleep is written by a dude that saw his son grow into his own despite the issues King had. One is a “holy shit my addiction is taking over me” and the other is “my life was saved by AA.”
We watched I See You last night and enjoyed its unexpected twists and turns. It played us good. I think the only obvious ding for us was the phrogger’s stupid decisions in the woods. Otherwise most of it was teetering on the right side of crazy horror/thriller. Oh and that final sequence, thanks entirely to the building music, was brilliant.
Blood Quantum (2019) - Indigenous people in Canada versus zombies. The twist is that they are immune to the zombie virus while other ethnicities turn into zombies. Lots of heavy-handed exposition and white role reversal stuff. Notable for some cool practical effects and seeing a lot of native actors stretch their legs.
Ooh ooh, thank you, I will look for this.
This movie is great! By which I mean it’s a very small scale movie that succeeds on all its own terms. The reveal of what Jane Doe does everywhere is fantastic. This had one of those “everything turns out terrible” endings that feels both earned and creepy.
QQ about I See You: Where does it fall on the horror / thriller scale?
I’d like to watch it with my wife, who’s tastes are pretty easy to pin down: IT part 1 was just about unbearably terrifying, and she shuddered repeatedly after The Descent. So super violent, relentlessly dark stuff with monsters and people behaving horribly is sortof out.
But she quite liked A Quiet Place and Midsommar on the more horror-y side, and for thrillers she likes Martha Marcy May Marlene and A Lonely Place to Die.
I’m going to show her The Invitation, too, and I think she’ll really dig it. That’s more on the thriller side of things, but it’s a great small movie. Watch that and Coherence for a living-room thriller doubleheader some weekend.
We’re starting to pick up Halloween momentum, so my wife and I watched The Lodge, Jacob’s Ladder (the original, which holds up amazingly well and makes me wonder why anyone would ever remake it) and Blood Machines. I think In the mouth of madness is next up on the list.