I also just saw it and came away hating it completely. It is a movie that feels like it’s creating some interesting questions and building some real mystery…and then it does the inexcusable thing that for me is the worst thing possible a horror movie can do – it goes all Identity (2003) and Secret Window (2004) and does that “Ha ha! Unreliable narrator!” Jesus. If the only way you can make your plot twists in a horror movie work is to put Bobby Ewing in the shower, maybe just don’t even bother.
Watched Crawl, which was short and mildly entertaining. Although I think the writer or director or both forgot that Alligators can go out of water.
In the Tall Grass on Netflix starts out well enough, but like every Steven King movie (is it the same for his books), there is something evil that corrupts people and turns them against each other. It just feels very samey.
Oh, I loved Ghost Stories! I loved the slightly ‘off’ anthology format of it and the imagery linking all the scenes together. Some of the horror fell a little flat but some bits, like Alex Lawther’s creepy and menacing home or Paul Whitehouse on the night shift, were terrific. Seems like a pretty divisive film because my girlfriend and her friend didn’t like it either!
Edit: although she preferred it on the second viewing.
Dead House what happens when a gaggle of criminals who vary between “on a crusade against societal injustice” and “just really very sadistic” (although one is reluctant for most of the film, that goes out the window too) invade the home of a scientist who is doing some crazy shit in the lab under his house? Let me assure you, you couldn’t possibly care less. Skip.
@geggis FWIW on Ghost Stories here are some of my issues with it
A lot of movies have taken the “it was all a dream/vision/etc” approach. I’m not a huge fan of the approach in general. But if a person wants to do a movie like this, I don’t care for presenting themes and ideas that the movie might end up being about, only to discard them without getting deeply into any of them. Especially when discarding them this manner.
So it turns out it’s not about a Son’s troubled relationship with his father. Or about skepticism and faith in a modern world. Or how people handle trauma. It’s not even about carrying guilt from some long ago childhood incident. Both because none of these things is explored in enough detail after being presented, and because “j/k” it was all a dream!
The moodiness and atmosphere that pervade the start of the movie, and are firmly present in the first investigation and up until we get into the car with the kid in #2, are just tossed aside too casually (I found case #3 uneven, but I was already annoyed at that point). The final sequence - is it real? who knows (who cares) - doesn’t work because creepy magical elf Martin Freeman being kind of a dick is overriding everything.
To me, the Shyamalama twist makes it seem like the creator didn’t actually care about much of anything, and in the end the entire thing feels rote and formulaic. I can’t be bothered to care about the proceedings if they can’t.
Oh my God. This movie got all my WTFs. Such a waste of time.
Apparently, this was originally titled Beautiful People, which I think cynically matches the theme better than Dead House. That younger brother crook bullshit was infuriating.
Yep. It’s another case where there are a couple of decent foundational (did I just make up a word?) ideas but they get lost pretty quickly.
100% agreed. Also, the younger brother thing was just so far out of left field.
Also, I only recently discovered how many horror movies (and how many amazing ones) Hulu has available. I’m watching these movies instead, though, because someone has to!
Well that’s the thing, I didn’t see it all as a dream to be disregarded. It seemed like a mash-up of memories, manifestations of feelings, and waking sights and sounds to me. I’ve only seen it once and it was a while back now so the details are fuzzy, but it’s the sort of horror I’d like to watch again knowing what I know now to try and make some sense of it. I honestly can’t say that about many horrors. Some movies I feel resist interpretation but I think Ghost Stories invites it, even if it doesn’t necessarily promise answers. I don’t know. I recall finding it funny too, which is difficult to balance with a few genuine scares and some good atmosphere.
Each of the three principles from the stories is a character in the “real world” at the end: The security guard is the janitor, the kid from case #2 is a medical student or somesuch, and Freeman is the doctor. That’s typical in this sort of tropey fakeout, where the entire movie wasn’t real and the characters from it are people/doctors/paramedics/rescue workers/etc who are around a wounded/dying/comatose/etc person who was the main character.
Different strokes for different folks, of course. But I think that’s pretty clearly presented in the movie as “it was all a dream” (although the childhood memory could be real). I don’t see anything there to interpret, but that’s my two cents.
A couple of weeks later and I still can’t get over the ending to Hell House LLC 2. Man.
Oh yeah, I’m aware of that (and I enjoyed the twist and its delivery, for what it’s worth), but I still believed the stories represented different aspects of his past and psyche, but mapped to the people closely associated with him in the hospital. I don’t feel like it was all pointless nonsense. Next time I watch it, I might, for once, put the commentary on!
I watched All Hallows Eve, which is (sort of) a prequel to Terrifier. You probably know Terrifier as the horror movie with the image of the gross clown that Netflix keeps trying to push on you. If you’ve seen Terrifier, you’d know it as the mean-spirited shitty movie that Bone Tomahawks a girl and somehow fails to make you care.
All Hallows Eve is three of the director’s early shorts (maybe his film class projects) stitched together into an anthology movie. Director/writer/producer Damien Leone has been obsessed with his Art the Clown character for years, I guess. He’s in every one of these shorts. They’re low budget and awful. One of the stories does feature what may be the shittiest alien costume ever shown in a modern movie. You’d think even a student film director would know not to keep putting his micro-budget alien costume in full room light for uninterrupted minutes, but whatever.
I don’t normally attempt to profile directors based on their work, but after watching All Hallows Eve and Terrifier, I really feel like Leone may have some issues to work out. Art the Clown abuses the Hell out of women and the victims have no character arcs, backstories, or personality. They are just meat to be cut up in humiliating ways. Just one gross encounter after another. Maybe Leone is a great guy - a total ally to feminists - you’d never know it from his movies.
They Come Knocking, another one from the Hulu into the Dark thingy. It starts decently and stays at least somewhat intriguing for most of the first half, and then falls completely to shit. It felt like two different people trying to make a movie. One wanted to do a straight creature film. The other wanted to make a movie “about shit”. Nothing wrong with either approach but they clash nonsensically in the second half of the movie, undoing what works in the first.
Next up - the Hulu series thingy featuring Jimmi Simpson, because that dude is such a baller.
Also, I remain hung up on Hell House LLC’s finale. God, that was so amazing. Ly-terrible.
Hahahaha. I wish there was a poster of this movie that had this as the tag-quote on it.
After Wounds’ only made it to halftime in terms of story, I am finding Midsommar to be very good (and a good palate reset) so far. Although it’s paused so I can watch a terrible college football game.
I don’t want to be the “you’re doing it wrong!” guy, but as a fan of both movies, it seems to me Wounds and Midsommar lose something if you watch them in dribs and drabs. They both rely on a steady escalation of tension and unease, ideally in a dark room. And I don’t want to set up any sort of expectation, but you can’t really judge either movie until you see where they’re going.
Post again as you finish them. I’ll be curious what you think.
Wife and I watched Eli last night on netflix. We figured it might be some sort of cure for wellness sort of movie, but it really wasn’t nearly as ambitious. Indeed, the movie was pretty boring (aside from throwing in some random science mumbo jumbo that’s pretty close to my field of training that elicited a lot of sighs and “that…doesn’t work like that” stuf from me) until the finale, where you get the inevitable twist.
Points to them for the twist not being what I expected, but I like movies where there’s a twist you don’t expect, and then the movie runs with it. 10 cloverfield lane is an excellent example of a movie that throws you a twist, then devotes a whole act of the movie to it, instead of the writer saying “Haha, we fooled you. The end!”
In search of a good, satisfying horror movie, we also watched MidSommar (based on recs in this or another one of the horror threads, it seems like the only horror movie to come out recently multiple people have spoken positively about here), and it was quite good. Midsommer feels rooted in actual traditions/reality so much that when it begins to deviate into a horror movie, it feels incredibly grounded, and thus much more terrifying.
Well I didn’t watch in “Dibs and Drabs”. I watched Midsommar in two parts and lost nothing, and I watched Wounds all the way through. I was saying I didn’t think Wounds got anywhere (and meant to type “halfway” where I typed halftime but football).
I felt like Wounds was torn between going down a couple of different paths and didn’t commit to or embrace either and just took a hard turn to the weird at the end because there was nothing else to do. It’s well acted, but I didn’t think it worked ultimately. I ordered the novella (a collection it’s told in, to be specific) and look forward to reading it.
Midsommar is excellent. I might call it better than Hereditary even though they are very different films. It felt like it didn’t contain any wasted motions or effort. Extraordinary soundtrack and visuals.
