Thanks! I always considered it as if it were a cheap knockoff of all the other Paranormal tripe that was floating around at the time.
My quick skim to avoid spoilers seems to indicate this isn’t the case and that there’s a brain in there.
I was not particularly impressed myself - as I indicated, for me it was a lot of very minor spooks that did not move the needle on my scare meter, although it was okay in terms of acting etc. But I think I’m in the minority on that.
Incidentally, watched a third Into the Dark movie, School Spirit. Hulu says it’s kids in detention “facing the school’s legendary hauntings”. So it’s a spooky haunted school movie, right? Nope, it’s a slasher flick. It’s fine, I guess, but I’m not a slasher flick guy and it doesn’t have the chops of the Fear Street movies or the cool remixed-with-other-genres aspect of your Happy Death Days or Freaky, so I found that realization quite disappointing. The reveals around the killer are also pretty obvious, although I did at least like that there’s a beat around there being an uninvited kid at detention that’s done pretty subtly and not called out. But yeah. Meh.
I quite enjoyed the Netflix film His House, and shared my thoughts here. If you’re into slower fare with non-western leads and gorgeous lighting and mood, you’ll dig it.
Yeah, same. I preferred the build-up just because when the creepy stuff started to happen a lot of it felt very familiar. The build-up and potential of these things often excite me more than the pay-off these days. Mind you, we watched it earlier this year so we’re about 10 years late to that found footage party. I did enjoy the non-euclidean space and no-escape stuff in Grave Encounters though. I think that’s what Telefrog might be referring to. That’s when I literally said out loud ‘oh yeah, they’re fucked now’.
@Pyperkub yeah, Paranormal Activity is excellent. I prefer the alternate ending so my mind has made that canon, but it does some really subtle creepy stuff.
Yup. That’s it.
Indeed. That’s the good stuff and why I liked Grave Encounters overall. If it were just the ghosts, it’d have been fine but meh like a lot of the other stuff I’ve watched recently.
Incidentally, forgot 32 Malasana Street on Shudder. Period piece ghost movie set in Madrid. A couple and their kids (there’s some family drama around the dad, who apparently is not the father of the older children and it’s unclear what happened to said father other than she is apparently still married to him legally) sell everything in the village they were living in to move to the big city and start afresh. Unfortunately, the apartment they got is haunted. Like a fair number of foreign horror movies I watch, I felt like this was more interesting for its depiction of 1970s Spain (and Madrid in particular) than the actual spooks, although there’s a bit with a TV that’s pretty good. Apparently you had to take out life insurance on yourself to get a mortgage? Yikes. (Well, it’s not clear that it was mandatory but they were shockingly harsh re: the whole mortgage thing.) PS: There’s a trans component to the story that, because it’s the 70s and parts date back earlier than that, involves quite massive transphobia, if not on the part of the movie itself. Might be rough for some viewers.
Yeah, it was pretty great and so effective with just the small spaces in the house and the wonderful two leads.
I re-watched Cronos, the 1993 Guillermo Del Toro movie about a mysterious device that bestows immortality, kinda, with drawbacks. It has Ron Perlman in it!
It’s very good, of course. It is a bit bare-bones; I could describe the entire plot in a paragraph. But it’s very atmospheric, and has great production design for something that probably didn’t have a big budget ($2 million, according to imdb). It is only 90 minutes, so it doesn’t need to pad things out too much, luckily.
I was sort of amused to realize this is the “Greatest American Hero” of horror movies – he finds the device, but the bad guy has the manual of how to use it. They each want what the other has. Although, honestly, the guy seems to get by just fine without it.
Anyway, I’d recommend it if you’re a Del Toro fan at all, if you haven’t seen it.
Looks like a Jeepers Creepers soft reboot. Thankfully, it doesn’t look like Victor Salva is involved in any way.
Uncanny Annie - I swear I’m not actually setting out to watch every Into the Dark entry, but this is one of the last few that seemed like it had a maybe interesting premise or other reason to watch it. Namely, what if Jumanji, but it was a horror movie? That is to say, a bunch of college friends gather to remember a dead friend who died the previous Halloween, and to relieve some social awkwardness they decide to break out the boardgames. A selection of games are duly retrieved from the basement (with no working lights) and one of them proves to be a game none of them are familiar with called Uncanny Annie. naturally, they pick this one because it’s a horror movie and people make bad decisions in horror movies. The game itself is barely a boardgame (despite an enormous box). There’s a deck of challenge cards, and a deck of mischief cards. There’s also a timer card that’s just a drawing of a little girl with her back turned. The rules are pretty simple. On your turn, you draw a challenge. If you complete it, you add a letter tile. When you have all five letters in ANNIE, you win. If you don’t complete it or you refuse it, you have to draw a mischief card as a penalty. You have an hour. If you don’t win within an hour, you lose. It starts off relatively minor, but it soon becomes clear the stakes are literally life or death, they’re in some sort of pocket dimension, and Annie’s idea of fun is sadistic as hell. Oh, and a couple of the players have a traumatic secret they’ve been hiding. Fun fun! It’s not perfect, but it is legitimately creepy some of the time. And it’s not pulling punches. Could have done without the very very end, but, ah well.
Censor - okay, this was legitimately quite good. A tight-wound, strait-laced Niamh Algar censors “video nasties” for the Thatcher regime in 80s Britain. Her sister went missing under mysterious circumstances she can’t quite remember some years ago, and though her parents are finally ready to let go, she is not. And then she’s asked to review a new movie that revives the trauma for her and things spiral rather out of control. Some neat editing and framing here, excellent acting and mood, and things did not at all go where I expected.
Amulet - thanks to Tom for alerting me to this one. Absolutely phenomenal, harrowing horror about a man who’s living rough in London after fleeing an unspecified war. After the place he’s squatting in catches fire, a nun (played by Imelda Staunton) pushes him to help a young woman caretaking her (horribly) dying mother in a large but decrepit house. This is intermixed with flashbacks to his time in the other country, for reasons that eventually become clear as the movie walks inexorably, beautifully towards a terrible doom.
Brotherhood of the Wolf was even less of a horror movie than I expected. What a strange film. Possibly the least French French movie I’ve ever seen. Maybe next year I’ll do Gans again and watch Silent Hill.
The whole time I’m thinking, damn Mani looks familiar, and it turns out he was the chairman on Iron Chef America.
I love that your reviews give me just enough info to think “I might like this” but still be able to go into the story without it being sold. They are the opposite of a trailer, which makes all movies look good, and spoils everything.
I think I’ll try to hunt down Censor and Amulet - my wife always wants a new horror movie, especially this time of year.
They are both currently on Hulu if you have access to that.
We do. I think we have the horror of Hulu with advertisements though. Right as the ghost appears to murder someone, WHAM the Geico lizard appears, or someone tries to sell you some new drug that is actually more dangerous than the ghost, if you read the fine print. That’s terrifying!
That is the beauty of uBlock Origin and a web browser. But they may be available in some other context as well.
Loved her in Raised by Wolves. You’ve piqued my interest!
Otoh picking the game none of them had played before is only a bad choice in a horror film
None of them had even heard of. You don’t pick the random game in the basement nobody bought or knows anything about. That’s a recipe for at best a bad time. :P
I watched a weird-ass thing called Uzumaki on Amazon Prime. It’s a 2000 Japanese movie apparently based on a manga I haven’t read (which is not surprising as I haven’t read any manga).
I was listening to the radio in the car the other day and there was some segment with someone recommending scary books to read for halloween, and they recommended the manga, and I remembered seeing the movie version scrolling through horror movies, so I figured I’d check it out.
Anyway, it’s about a Japanese town where people start getting obsessed with spirals, and then spirals, like, uh, kill people? I guess?
Like I said it was released in 2000, and I’m not an expert on Japanese horror, but this really felt more like an ‘80s horror movie to me. Very slow paced, with occasional scenes of practical gore, and some quite poor CGI. Nothing in the movie makes much sense; in fact there is one scene where a journalist does some research (apparently he discovers that the Japanese words for "serpent’ and ‘mirror’ are pronounced the same way, but it isn’t at all clear what this has to do with anything), and he arranges to meet our protagonists to explain his findings, but of course he is killed before he can tell them anything.
And then as the movie draws to a close, the spirals start doing really weird stuff, again without any attempt at explanation.
I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re a fan of early 2000’s Japanese horror, I guess.
The manga is just really difficult to do justice in live action, and that movie does not. It’s probably the best horror comic I’ve ever read, though.