Ah, sorry, I misunderstood your post. But that is, sadly, how a lot of people experience movies with streaming. I certainly do it. Watch in bits and pieces while taking breaks of varying length to mess around in the Real World. Some movies still work if you watch them that way, but some suffer.
You’re in for a real treat if you’ve never read Ballingrud before. The Wounds collection is good, but Ballingrud’s real mark was made in North American Lake Monsters, an earlier collection which is all kinds of fucked up and subversive. And I think what I liked about Wounds was how true it was to Ballingrud’s style. Which is a really pleasant surprise given that the director’s only previous experience was a uniquely Iranian horror movie-- its called Under the Shadow – that appropriated Western ghost stories to tell a story about life in Iran.
And absolutely agreed about the cast in Wounds. I remember when Armie Hammer was just the guy who played in twins in Social Network and then tanked his career with the Lone Rangers movie. Nice recovery.
I have North American Lake Monsters. I am probably going to read it first.
Don’t forget Man from Uncle, starring Superman and Alicia Vikander as another robot!
I rarely break up a movie when streaming it. Midsommar was an exception (I forgot what time UGA was playing, I wouldn’t have started it otherwise). But I do it with series episodes all the time.
Couldn’t watch anything else yesterday. Was savoring Midsommar.
The Furies. Aussie horror about women being kidnapped and set loose in the outback with masked killers trying to eliminate them. The rules of this particular game were pretty intriguing.
Each “beauty” is paired with a “beast” so the killers have to safeguard their girls while trying to kill the others. When a girl dies, the paired killer’s head explodes. The girls aren’t told the rules, and the killers can’t talk.
Decent gore. Okay acting. A little bit of character development. You do feel the budget limitations in some scenes.
IMDB suggests Wounds director Babak Anvari is attached to whatever they’re trying to produce for North American Lake Monsters. Since Wounds was also a Hulu production, I wonder if it’s just the evolution of whatever they were planning with North American Lake Monsters anthology, or if that’s something they’re trying to do in addition.
By the way, I just realized my copy of the Wounds anthology, published six months ago, has a faux sticker on the cover that says “Soon to be a major motion picture.” It seems a Hulu production constitutes “major” these days. :)
I watched, and really enjoyed Black Summer. Great performances and direction. I don’t know if they are mulling a sequel series but I would be just fine if they left things as is. It’s sometimes brutal, sometimes touching, and a terrific “during the fall” story set in a zombie apocalypse.
I also watched season one of Channel Zero. It was decent.
Can I use this thread to ask for recommendations? I have a rare opportunity to visit the cinema this evening. Which movie should I go see: Parasite or The Lighthouse? I don’t really know much about either film (on purpose–I’m deliberately avoiding reviews and articles about them), and I lean toward Parasite, though only barely.
Everything I have heard suggests that Parasite is brilliant and Lighthouse is very polarizing. Having not enjoyed The Witch, I am personally planning to skip Lighthouse. That said, I also wouldn’t call most of the Bong Joon-ho movies I have seen horror as such.
So I saw Lighthouse. Mostly because the schedule worked out better. It was… interesting. I’m not sure I’m a fan of surreal horror. This reminded me a bit of Annihilation or Midsommer or The Return of the Obra Dinn. The black and white film is beautiful, packed with bleak period detail. Interesting choice to shoot the whole film in 4:3, but maybe that works with a vertical motif? I appreciate the film’s interest in folklore and historical detail and 19th century art and literature and its earthy prurience. And both Dafoe and Pattison act their asses off, but the progression of the relationship between the two characters–which should be what grounds the film–is a little uneven, and thus the film is ambiguous in ways that make it feel a bit random rather than thought provoking. I think I liked it, but it would have been fine to watch in on the small screen.
I don’t know too many people who genuinely like horror movies outside of the internet so I have some gaps in my list of watched horror movies and I’m sorry if I’m just retreading stuff.
I will watch most older horror movies (or at least the first of a series) if I have the right mindset to give them a chance at the time. Otherwise I postpone them until I want to watch them but seeing as I prefer monster/slasher gore to folk horror then I usually need to look to older movies to find stuff like that.
Clearing out my backlog of “classic” horror movies (IMO probably more action than horror) about promiscuous young adults in remote cabins in the woods, I saw:
Evil Dead: you could sense some earnestness in the characters and the rules of possession carry some consistency
Evil Dead 2: possession happens when it’s convenient and it makes this an insane non-stop rollercoaster ride
The Cabin in the Woods: unlikeable characters all around (probably the point) but at least it wrapped up into some entertaining action
Despite the setting of the woods/forest that all of these movies have in common, none of them really use it to their advantage more than just the remoteness. For all of it’s issues, Blair Witch actually did that pretty well.
Anyways I have started watching Ash vs. Evil Dead and it’s not bad and I should probably watch Army of Darkness soon.
Hehe, I know and it’s not meant to be meaningful commentary. I was going in dark as a millenial having nothing but the legend as context so my comments are mostly tongue in cheek. Evil Dead is kind of a pop cultural touchstone so it’s hard to experience it in the same context as when it came out. Although the original Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street still hold up, Friday the 13th is similarly inconsistent but doesn’t have the same amount of prop effects to keep it relevant.
I genuinely enjoyed Evil Dead 2 but I can’t stop being fascinated that the same director made the Tobey Maguire Spiderman movies (totally not for me).
Just be aware that AoD dives deep into the camp that ED2 started. It’s not really horror at all; more like gothic time travel sorta. And it’s a truly, gloriously awful movie. I saw it in the theater when it first released and seriously thought it was the worst thing I’d ever seen on the silver screen. I’ve since changed my tune a bit, but it’s on par with the Monty Python films as far as film quality and quotable lines go.
You may also be aware that there are multiple cuts of AoD out there, some of which contain more, uh, “classic lines” than others. I would avoid the Bruce Campbell vs Army of Darkness version, I think it’s called? At least the first time out. It played it a lot straighter than the version I first saw. Has an alternate ending and everything.
