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Gremlins
Christmas Horror Comedy / English / 1984

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
It's the "family friendly" horror comedy that teaches us that Santa isn't real and to exterminate the ugly.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Dogs, Cats, Chicken.

This movie may have one of the most earwormy theme songs of any movie from the 80s and the movie's pretty memorable as well.

Some inventor with no substantial relevance to the story buys his son a "Mogwai" as an exotic gift from a half-blind mystical salesman in Chinatown (as you do). The Mogwai is basically a furry baby Yoda, but it comes with the caveats to keep him away from bright light (sunlight can kill him), don't get him wet (water causes him to multiply), and don't feed them after midnight (this begins a metamorphosis that changes the mogwai into a gremlin).

I've always questioned the rule about feeding after midnight. The "evil" mogwai that spawn from Gizmo (the original mogwai) are shown to scheme amongst each other, enough to deliberately sabotage a clock so Billy is fooled into believing it's before midnight when he feeds them. If they're intelligent enough to do that, why even go through the trouble? Can't they just legitimately ask for food, keep some of it around until Billy goes to sleep (as he does anyway), and eat it after midnight?

I suppose there's no reveal showing how intelligent they can be in that case, but it seems like a plothole.

Billy's mom also whips out the knives and starts stabbing awfully fast once she sees what the gremlins look like. She kills 3 of them in a row and the most they've done is eat cookie batter and throw a couple plates? Evil Makes You Ugly is played awfully straight here.



Before long gremlins are rampaging the town and we see them doing all sorts of absurd and dangerous things, from smoking and shooting guns, to 80s workout routines and crossdressing. There are a lot of cartoon stock sound effects which I don't think are necessary to soften their antics and the visual gags don't really make me laugh or anything. They would eventually go overboard with this is Gremlins 2.

Ultimately this movie excels in it's creature effects. The mogwai are presented to be cute like Furbys, but their transformation process shows little furballs growing and pulsating before turning into big slimy green cocoons that put the Alien facehugger eggs to shame.

The end result are bigger, creepier, cackling little monsters that cannot help but **** with every electronic that they can stick their claws in. It's all practical effects and puppetry from beginning to end and it's incredibly impressive, even today, despite the occasional bad shot where you can see Stripe on a skateboard or something.

After the initial fight at home, the escape to the YMCA where the lead gremlin Stripe jumps in he swimming pool, and a montage of the resulting gremlin invasion taking over the town, we have a scene where the protagonists blow up most of the gremlins in a movie theater then track down Stripe to a department store.

The department store fight is the most memorable to me, mainly because this where the creature effects become the most horrific and the creatures themselves are shown to be the most violent. Stripe throws a saw blade, shoots Billy with a mini crossbow, shoots at him with a gun, and even runs out of nowhere with a revving chainsaw, cutting almost entirely through a baseball bat to get to him.

That's some scary shit where you're a kid.

But it's also a fun watch, and even though the plot beats seem too-brief as I describe them, the whole movie is paced really well. Introducing Gizmo, showing the consequences of not following the rules, and even the subplot about the Gremlin who escapes the science lab at school (which I don't think is ever resolved) ties the whole experience together in a coherent developing narrative which peaks with some of the most gruesome practical effects and violence.

I consider it a classic, albeit not a favorite. Very good movie.


Final Verdict:
[Pretty Good]
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Movie Reviews | Anime Reviews
Top 100 Action Movie Countdown (2015): List | Thread
"Well, at least your intentions behind the UTTERLY DEVASTATING FAULTS IN YOUR LOGIC are good." - Captain Steel




In the Shadow of the Moon
Sci-Fi Thriller / English / 2019

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Was browsing IMDb for psychological thrillers and saw this trailer. Looked genuinely interesting.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
"Some people aren't happy unless they're mad."


Pigs, as well as other shit. Which is extremely ****ing ironic considering the message of the movie.

There are movies like Get Out, which I hear the buzz around, skim over a synopsis, and conclude "this movie wants to beat me over the head about racism and is probably written by vehement racists itself", so I don't watch it and move on with my life, content that I did not end up watching a movie with a scumbag political agenda which casts villains as good guys.

THIS is that movie, and I'm ticked the **** off right now.

I was promised a crime thriller about a possibly supernatural serial killer.

INSTANTLY my mind goes to Paranoia Agent and Death Note, fantastic ****ing works of fiction, and not ones necessarily without a message or an opinion.

Death Note presents the serial killing from the perspective of the villain himself and we get his moralistic perspective and the god complex that comes with it.

Paranoia Agent is eventually revealed to be partly a commentary about the social consequences of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The law enforcement response in both series is front-and-center of the story and so too is this the case in In The Shadow of the Moon...

...but this is so far below those movies.

We open on near-future bomb site and flashback to 1988 where we see a string of random people suddenly die by having their brain melt out of their skulls.

The first hint we get as to the motives of the killer is that the bus driver victim is shown to have a book about Thomas Jefferson.

It's eventually deduced that the killer is a young mulatto girl in a blue hoodie with a bandaged hand, and the cops looking for her coincidentally run into her and chase her into a subway where she makes cryptic comments about the future before getting obliterated by a train.

WELP! Case closed. We found the murder weapon, the suspect died, the killings stopped... that's it I guess!

Well fast-forward 9 years later and there are George Floyd-style protests in the street and eventually vandalism over this nameless woman who was never identified and the public has never seen.

I've seen some pretty desperate excuses to crusade around the streets with signs, but this is REALLY stretching it. Somehow 9 years later enough people to form a street demonstration care enough about this literal nobody that was only referred to in press releases as a serial murder suspect? You ******** got nothing better to do with your lives?

Naturally this is when the killer appears again, with no apparent change to their age. This time one of the victims is shown to have a book about Andrew Jackson.

OH NO.

I just knew it, in that moment, I was on the hook for a political agenda. I hoped, I really hoped that I was wrong, but by the end of this movie I was proven right.

So HERE'S the deal: The killer is going back in time to prevent a bombing that would start what is implied to be a race war (supposedly a race war bad enough to "end the world", as in Strange Days). So the killer is essentially fulfilling the thought experiment about unmaking Hitler by preventing the sequence of events that would lead to him, BY GRUESOMELY KILLING anyone consuming the ideas that would result in the bombing.

This heinous forbidden knowledge includes writings about Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, George Washington, and Ulysses S. Grant, and strongly implied that this includes any "ideas" that could have manifested in the American Civil War.

Well, The American Civil War was over state's rights, which is ultimately a debate over democracy... but I have absolutely no doubt that the writers believed the Civil War was purely about racism... which doesn't even make any sense, because to prevent the Civil War is to prevent the United States from becoming a federation that BANS SLAVERY, so what the actual **** are they on about!?

And I'm confident that this movie is trying to lowball racism into all of this because the protests in the movie are shown to be racially motivated, Main Guy's partner is black and makes racially charged comments, the killer is revealed to be Main Guy's granddaughter before revealing his daughter's relationship is interracial.

The killer is targeting political writers with early American flags on their walls and people reading books about early American figures who owned slaves? Subtlety is out the window here.



So my impression is that some boogaloo boys blow up some random building and the entire nation devolves into chaos because idiots on both sides of the conflict are literally incapable of peacefully coexisting like Main Guy and Maddox, his non-white law enforcement partner.

It's not enough for the literal racists, the dumbest ****ing people on earth, to see that the guy accused of killing this mystery martyr in the subway has absolutely no racial animosity towards his coworkers?

Like, it would seriously make so much more sense if our protagonist was shown to be racist! To any extent at all! But he's not! There's no redemption arc for him, where the killer is revealed to be his granddaughter and she's like a serial killer of racists or something, and his personal bias changes his attitude towards her killings or something completely retarded like that, THERE WOULD AT LEAST be some sort of rationalized character development there, but NO!

She kills in 1988, kills in 1997, 2006, and finally in 2015, all in line in the moon phases or some shit that's barely explored...

She goes, "I'm your granddaughter actually, here's evidence, also you change your mind about me, and I'm still gonna die from that train eventually cause time travel" and he lets her go.

What in the actual ****, SHOOT HER.

No, instead Main Guy gets all mopey and eventually goes to see his daughter giving birth to the future serial killer in the hospital and it's ALL A HUNKEY DOREY HAPPY ENDING.

DON'T BE WRONGTHINKING, OR YOU DESERVE TO HAVE YOUR BRAIN LITERALLY MELT OUT OF YOUR FACE!

What an absolutely abominable ending to a movie that actually started out pretty interesting!

Like the acting was fine, the aging makeup looked pretty good, I genuinely liked learning that Main Guy was an officer, then a detective, then eventually a PI, I really wanted to see him get the killer! This dude has sacrificed 27 years of his life trying to hunt down this time traveling piece of shit, and it turns out it's his future granddaughter trying to execute anyone who reads anything even distantly alt-right-related?

That has got to be one of the most ****awful endings to a movie I've seen since Out of the Blue and The Chumscrubber, and those are two of the most dogshit movies I've ever seen in my entire life.

And to make this movie even worse... the scenes involving the police are handled terribly. They draw their weapons and move within arms reach of the killer just to be disarmed, Maddox ****ing dies because he doesn't shoot the killer in the back when she's plainly pointing a shotgun at his partner, Detective Guy even has to use Maddox's radio to call "officer down" because HE doesn't have a radio for some reason and Main Guy didn't do it for some reason!

Also, immediately after the killer gets run over by the train Main Guy is going to see his wife in the hospital and INSTANTLY another cop is claiming that they completed bullet ballistics for a bullet found in her hand and it matches his gun. Literally when!? How!? That's not how any of this works!

Also also, other times I'm just waiting for them to update dispatch on where they are because they're chasing the killer alone in an unknown location! The radio chatter is just fake as hell, and maybe that's because I'm used to hearing police radio chatter, but this movie was pretty bullshit in almost all aspects related to policing... which is no surprise if the writers really are as politically skull****ed as they seem.

Martha from Rotten Tomatoes has my back on this:

Originally Posted by Martha
I didn't realize, when I started watching this pathetic little propaganda film, just how low it would sink. The final premise of the film, is that a "hero" goes back a generation to assassinate political dissenters. Warped, sick, immoral and stupid. Do not waste your time.
I will benevolently grant this movie half a point for decent acting and for keeping me engaged, but any movie deserves it's brains to melt out of their face when the unironic happy ending is to assassinate wrongthinkers.


Final Verdict:
[Bad]
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Cube
Sci-Fi Thriller / Japanese / 2021

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
In my perusal of IMDb I discovered that there was a remake of Cube. I'm sure somebody considers that blasphemy, but I am 100% game for a remake of Cube, I think there are a lot of ways it could have been improved, namely by deepening the investigative process of the characters and cutting back on the gore a bit, though being that this is a Japanese remake, I'm not too confident about that.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
"I hate adults."
"I hate young people."

We are not spared gore in this version of the story, unsurprisingly, though thankfully it's about as graphic as the original and not moreso.

To quickly summarize the original Cube: Multiple characters wake up in a series of cubic rooms all connected by doors on every face. Each room looks identical save for the lighting, however some rooms are trapped and those rooms are identifiable by the prime numbers found in the coordinates inside each door. The characters begin by "booting" each room, throwing boots into rooms to trip any possible traps before eventually discovering the traps can be noise sensitive too.

While the relationships between the mutual strangers becomes worse and worse, one of them is found to be an autistic savant who can calculate 3-digit prime numbers in his head and this is used to determine the first room of the building and find the exit. As tensions heighten and people kill each other, only the Savant makes it out alive, or so we guess. We never see outside the Cube, we never learn who made the Cube, why it exists, or why anyone was placed inside.

It's a big cliffhanger ending and as a high-concept psychological thriller, it works.

This is... similar, but different in some good ways and mostly some bad ways.

On the positives side, the characters are shown to be more resourceful with what they have, they not only use their boots to test for traps, but they use their shirts to make a rope ladder and even use the buttons on those shirts to write out equations on the surfaces in the rooms.

It's worth noting that given the mystery of the Cube, a remake has a lot of wiggle room to take creative liberties, though hopefully not so much as to totally expose everything about the Cube as the sequels did. One way in which the story is changed is the twist ending in which it is revealed that Main Girl is a robot of sorts who exists to secretly observe the other characters. I appreciate this twist especially because when we're shown her reintroduced into the Cube and happening upon another group she demonstrates an artificial series of blinks directed at every individual character, clearly registering each as a "player". If you restart the movie and watch her initial appearance again you can see that it's edited in a way that makes her appearance seem much more natural.

I think that's clever and I genuinely don't dislike the idea that one of the group is secretly an aspect of the Cube itself spying on them, like the cameras they assumed must exist.

What I don't like about it is while her behavior is eventually rationalized in this way, until that reveal, she just looks like a terribly written character. She doesn't emote, she's rarely the focus of anything that's happening, and when the characters are having an audible fight to the death in an adjacent room with an open door, she's just conveniently offscreen doing ****all.

It may be an unpopular opinion to take, but if your movie's plot is indistinguishable from shit writing, then your twist could use some work.

A couple more things I'll add is that the musical flavor is good, it's not all doom-and-gloom, but it's very synthy and moody, I like it. Also this movie seems to have more of a budget, so we get a greater opportunity to showcase some of the mechanisms of the Cube when the characters find the outside of it.

It's been a while since I've seen the original Cube, but I'm going to venture to say that about everything else was worse in this remake.




1.) There's some dumb lines like "who is Hiruto" after it's been established by honorifics that Hiruto is Main Guy's brother.

2.) The death of Psycho Guy looks retarded cause he's killed by some ludicrous telescoping metal tree thing that turns him into a scarecrow.

3.) When Psycho Guy tries to strangle Main Guy it looks like the laziest attempt to choke someone I've ever seen.

4.) Psycho Guy's heel-turn is stupid as shit because the rationalization is that he works at a convenience store and hates getting bullied by middle schoolers, so he wants to kill himself, but he can't kill himself for whatever reason therefor he wants to kill total strangers. WHAT.

5.) This movie inserts several lines needlessly making generational hatred a theme of the movie, where the Not-Austistic Savant Kid claims to "hate adults" while Grandpa says "I hate young people". This never amounts to anything whatsoever.

6.) Psycho Guy even says he "hates adults" and kills Grandpa then rejoins the group and says "children shouldn't get in the way of adults" to Not-Autistic Savant Kid. So you're an adult when it's convenient?

7.) Not-Autistic Savant Kid isn't autistic or a savant, he's just a kid who knows how to calculate prime numbers and he's not the only character that can do that. So instead of getting a genuine, but annoying, autistic character (who served as a danger to the group and therefor a moral dilemma), we get an amateur child actor.

8.) Grandpa's a constant ******* throughout the whole movie, there is no development of his character. He complains, he insults, and he contributes nothing. He even makes the other characters haul him upward through rooms with their shirts rather that climbing himself.

9.) The reveal that traps can be determined by prime numbers is decided after only two cases and "proven" without booting the room. The characters are very bad at booting rooms even after deciding to go purely off the prime number theory and even when it's revealed that sound can trigger traps they never conduct sound checks on rooms again.

10.) One room is trapped with lasers and forces the characters to dodge incoming laser shots and this is done by character after character grabbing each other and slow-mo pushing them out of the way AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN. At what point do you realize YOU should move your own ass?

11.) There's some early drama directed toward the Ide character for being gruff and insensitive despite the fact that he's been surviving longer than anyone and is the one who taught everyone else how to boot rooms. Needlessly antagonizing this character, more than any other character, is a ****ing stupid idea.

12.) Multiple traps make no sense when you remember that there are doors on every face of each room. A ceiling fan trap and random cage bars appear out of the floor/ceiling and we conveniently never see how these things are sprouting out of the doors.

13.) Traps will just activate with no provocation. The telescoping tree trap only shows up when it's dramatically convenient, gas starts filling one of the rooms only when the writers can't figure out how to justify moving the characters into the next room, and the cage bars don't seem to serve any purpose other than to separate the characters for no apparent reason. Traps in the original movie are shown to be predicated on different sensors and learning what those sensors could be were important plot beats we entirely skip in this movie.

14.) Main Guy has some dumb backstory about his brother committing suicide played back on a screen which ends up being the only part of the movie in which we see outside of the Cube complex. This ultimately accomplishes nothing.

15.) When Main Guy is too slow to escape the telescoping tree room we get an extraordinarily confusing edit in which Robot Girl is shown to be comforting the now safe Not-Autistic Savant Kid intercut with a similar shot of Main Guy doing the same thing... which makes absolutely no sense. This also never amounts to anything.

16.) Not-Autistic Savant Kid is shown to be happy and understanding when Robot Girl casually questions his intent to leave when they reach the exit and it's made clear that she has no intention of leaving. Nothing in the movie suggests that he ever knew that she was a robot or had an reason whatsoever to stay behind.


Phew. There are way too many problems with this movie, and that's a real shame cause there was genuine opportunity to expand on, refine, and improve the original experience.

The original experience was more about the characters' attempts to divine the nature of the Cube, it's purpose, and figuring out how to navigate it together without chewing each others' heads off.

This movie is just characters bitching at each other, whining about boomers or zoomers, and two of them can't or won't act like a normal human beings while a third has one of the dumbest motives to kill I've heard in a real long time. I bet I could pull a random drug addict off the street and ask for them to give me an excuse for why they might kill someone and get an answer that makes more sense than this movie.


Final Verdict:
[Weak]
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Radius
Sci-Fi Thriller / English / 2017

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Another IMDb thriller which promises a dude who discovers he radiates death.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
A variety of wildlife and livestock.

This movie is basically what I wanted The Happening to be. Out in the rural midwest a mysterious force is killing people, what could it be? A virus? A terrorist attack?

In this movie it's an Aura of Death which Main Guy discovers he has after a car crash. Main Girl eventually stumbles on him, another victim of the same crash, but with the power to negate Main Guy's aura while she's within it.

The negation part isn't communicated terribly clearly and Main Guy is way too assertive about the properties of his Aura. At first it just seemed plausible that it only works during the day time, or so long as you have direct line-of-sight, so I don't think he should have been all "trust me, you won't die" when he knows practically nothing about it.

I do appreciate that it doesn't take him forever to figure out the cause of death is him and it's not unbelievable that he'd figure it out as quickly as he does with the evidence presented.

So the movie starts out briskly and continues apace. Main Guy discovers the Aura, is horrified, then discovers it doesn't work around Main Girl and the inevitable tension results. Police start a manhunt for both of them and naturally they're not going to listen to Main Guy explain the means by which he kills people, because that would make too much sense. I also don't think he does a good job even trying to persuade the police that "hey, YOU WILL DIE unless you listen to me" which they should be all ears for because the cause of all the death is totally unknown.



Both characters have amnesia prior to the car crash and we get insubstantial glimpses that eventually culminate into a greater narrative predicating the events of the movie.

The main conclusion is that there was a cosmological event that struck the two and knocked them out, somehow giving them these strange properties. The big twist ending is that, and I predicted this: Main Guy is a serial killer.

Main Guy just picks up a grieving suicidal woman on a bridge and offers to take her to his secluded CABIN IN THE WOODS. Gosh, it'd be awfully thematic if it turns out the guy with the Aura of Death kills people normally... and that's exactly the case.

I'm disappointed that I predicted the ending, but I really can't be upset because that's the sort of twist I would have went with.

Thankfully, because he is presented to be a moral character (towards humans ONLY), he kills himself instead of continuing to spread death. Which... isn't exactly guaranteed to stop anything, for all he knows everyone in that hospital room drops dead regardless of whether he shoots himself in the head. It's a cosmological event that imbued your body with certain properties with no apparent regard for your mental faculties.

Anyway, the movie stayed interesting, did basically what I wanted it to do, but it didn't really go beyond that. Decent budget high-concept thriller.


Final Verdict:
[Good]
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I tried watching Death by Hanging per recommendation, and it was awful. I only got 30 minutes in before I skipped to the end for some sophomoric bullshit about nationalism and executioners being equally criminal.




Coma
Sci-Fi Fantasy / Russian / 2019

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Yet another IMDb result, this one is about a world only accessible by coma patients.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Weirdly, both this movie and Durak feature Russian protagonists with a background in building construction.

Though this movie did not exactly knock it out of the park, I think I can comfortably say that it is the most enjoyable Russian movie I've seen so far. At least it has by far the most potential as a new IP.

In this world, coma patients find themselves as amnesiacs in a shared mind space consisting of their past memories. This clash of different ideas creates a massive sprawling chaos-scape which honestly looks really cool. It's 100% the sort of movie that NEEDS CG, or at least some incredible matte painting, but also risks going overboard with it.

Fortunately, the CG doesn't come off as too gratuitous save at least one scene where the main character creates a small structure with his mind, another character reaches out to touch it, and it's clearly not a real prop. You couldn't hire like one guy to make a shitty white plaster prop for that shot? Come on.

I'm also not a fan of the "Reapers" which are the roving threats that exist in this world. They walk around like they're on three stilts and the constant liquid trailing effect they have looks tacky and cheap. There's exactly one scene in which the Reapers are explained and I still don't know what the hell they are. One character gets cut by one and turns into a Reaper by the end of the movie, yet somehow that simple concept was not communicated in the one scene whose job it was to communicate it.

Also, the characters are fully aware that this guy was injured, why are they not going full zombie panic mode and debating on whether to euthanize him?



Anyway the setting aside, the premise is Main Guy wakes up in the world of "Coma", and he meets up with a group of other coma patients who each have developed unique powers in this new world. Main Guy, being a former architect basically gets the power of pure creation, which I think is a shitty power because it's totally uninteresting.

Not to make constant references to byronic heroes, but think of Lelouch from Code Geass. He had the power to command somebody to do one thing once, and only once, and he had to secure line-of-sight to do it. There's SO MUCH you can accomplish with that power, but it's also incredibly restrictive. This is what provokes creative thinking and strategy and all the shit that makes these stories great.

But Main Guy in Coma can just build whatever he wants. That's pretty underwhelming. Everyone else gets niche utility powers too.

Anyway the group is lead by some dude who has "awoken" from Coma before, which is certainly a questionable statement we don't explore, and says he intends to find an "island" isolated from the Reapers for people to live on.

There are other characters, one is set up as a butthurt antagonist and another has a BRUTAL Overnight Romance with Main Guy. This is rationalized later by them actually having a relationship prior to the incident that put them both in comas, but it's still incredibly dumb in the moment. Main Guy is also unreasonably flippant about the dead woman in his dream car and this is only so the movie can have a reveal later that it is in fact this girl he instantly romanced.

Blahblahblah, Main Guy wakes up and, as it's been teased throughout the movie up to now, he was actually in an artificial coma as a result of the group leader who is actually "The Teacher", a cult leader using religion as a veil to collect guinea pigs to test out his new technology which allows people to voluntarily enter the coma world, and he wants Main Guy to build his island.

After this it ends exactly as you'd expect it too, the Reapers are only reincorporated so Butthurt Guy can be redeemed for killing Teacher in the end.

The whole movie basically meets the absolute minimum threshold of what qualifies for a passable sci-fi fantasy movie.

That said, I think the premise is FANTASTIC. The concept of a real world kool-aid drinking cult luring people into this coma hivemind universe where entirely separate lives are lived out is pretty cool. I can totally imagine a D&D campaign or something where it's revealed the characters are all secretly victims of the cult in the real world, and they're just playing out this little fantasy adventure in their head. That's just brilliant material and there's so much room to expand on this concept, like there could be different iterations of this world in different chapters of the cult around the globe and stuff...

I really just want to see someone else take this concept and go further with it. For now though, it's an adequately engaging movie.


Final Verdict:
[Good]
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The Trial
Drama / English / 1962

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Orson Welles directed film adaptation of a Franz Kafka story, which he apparently considers his best movie. This was also recommended to me in that thread over there.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
There's a term called "kafkatrapping" I really like. It describes something pieces of shit like to do, which I for many years have lacked the vocabulary to name. Basically it's when somebody asserts something in such a way that any attempt to refute it can be construed as evidence of it being true.

For example:
"You're always negative."
"No I'm not."
"See, there you go again, being negative."

I don't know much about Kafka, but he has an encouraging reputation for considering conventional things in unconventional ways and expressing skepticism towards certain institutions we take for granted.

A movie like this, which explores these ideas sounds like it would be up my alley, especially if it's delves into the "coherent surrealism" I've sought after since Ink, Imaginaerum, and Paranoia Agent.

But this movie was actually kinda garbage.

Main Guy is awakened by spooks in his room and neighboring apartment just being spooky. He assumes they're police, which they never confirm or deny, and they casually begin kafkatrapping Main Guy into a narrative before stating that he's "under arrest" for a crime they never specify.

Main Guy asks an officer what he's charged with and he says only the Lead Investigator can say, so he asks the Lead Investigator who goes "so you're saying you're innocent?"

This entire scene goes nowhere and, stupifyingly, it concludes with the "police" leaving and Main Guy disappointingly resigned to the fact that he's "under arrest".

So here, "under arrest" doesn't even mean detained. It doesn't even mean the police will impede you in any way whatsoever. "Under arrest" literally means ACTUALLY NOTHING because it amounts to ACTUALLY NOTHING the entire ******* movie, and yet Main Guy dwells on this repeatedly, across multiple scenes, in which he's at work, or talking to a neighbor, or doing some other random shit which entirely begs the question what "under arrest" even means if he's free to do whatever the hell he wants.

I'm inclined to guess that this is some kind of sloppy metaphor I'm just not getting, but regardless of what that metaphor could be, you've literally turned the entire conflict of the movie into one person moping about a literal non-issue.

It's like if I pointed finger guns at a child and said, "pewpew, you're dead", and they burst into tears and spent the next 2 hours whinging about how I killed them and they're "dead now" or some equally retarded shit.

How does this not instantly trivialize your movie? How does this not reduce the conflict all the way down to the level of a Teletubbies episode? Teletubbies makes more sense than this bullshit movie.

So Main Guy goes tromping around whinging to different people about being under arrest and at least 3 different girls get in opportunities to snog him for absolutely no reason. The club dancer is actually the most believable of the 3 because she initially rebuffs his advances then orders him to leave her apartment when she hears the dreaded "I'm arrested" news.

Another girl who has less than a minute of screentime comes back and says:

Am I such a nothing in your eyes that you won’t stay a little while longer when I ask you?
BITCH, I DON'T KNOW YOU.

Then later she says:

I’ll go with you wherever you want and you can do with me whatever you like. What’s wrong, don’t you believe me?
That has got to be one of the fastest Overnight Romance speedruns in any movie I've ever seen. This character comes out of the ******* blue and acts like she's got every man's cock in her hand, what the ****??

There eventually IS a Trial, and it's literally one scene in the first third of the movie. Main Guy just gets directed to some random building where he gets shut into a room full of people. He jumps up to the podium and starts lecturing everyone in the room about how innocent he is and then he leaves. Some "Trial", it's like Welles has never even seen a courtroom before in his life.



For the rest of the movie he's just walking around and other people are commenting about his "case" which is somehow ongoing? Once again, there is no tangible consequences to him having "a case" or being "under arrest", it's just a meaningless concept.

And if it's not already clear, the dialog throughout this whole movie is godawful. It's like Welles (or Kafka?) has ADHD. Characters regularly talk over each other, get constantly sidetracked into brutally irrelevant conversation, and Main Guy just straight interrogates random people for no conceivable reason I can think of.

There's a lot of bizarre shit that never amounts to anything, like when Main Guy accuses officers of taking bribes at the trial he finds them being whipped in a broom closet for some reason, so he offers to bribe Whip Master who then says he doesn't accept bribes.

Okay, so that accomplished... nothing at all.

There's like 3 co-workers of his who showed up at the investigation at his home who just hover together in a couple shots and they accomplish nothing at all.

Main Guy repeatedly visits a bed-ridden attorney who despite being worshipped by his other clients also accomplishes nothing at all.

I was genuinely falling asleep halfway through this movie.

Finally, at some point near the end after Main Guy gets into a series of run-on arguments with various people and the sets become somewhat abstract and disconnected... two of the officers show up, grab Main Guy, drag him around the world in 80 days, find a randomass ditch and puts him in it.

They wait for him to yell at them then they enter the ditch with him, lay him down, then begin menacingly passing a knife back and forth over his body multiple times before leaving. He yells at them to kill him and they chuck dynamite at him.

BOOM, credits.

What in the actual bloody Christ did I watch?

One of the worst endings I've ever seen to any movie in my entire life was Out of the Blue, and this the closest any movie I've seen since has gotten to Out of the Blue.

I can't even really call it a nonsense movie because there's a roughly coherent narrative beneath all the dialog, but so much of it is unimportant sidetracking bullshit. I didn't even realize "The Advocate" was supposed to be an attorney, let alone Main Guy's attorney, he wasn't even at the ****ing Trial! Why did the Trial END before the halfway point of the movie called THE TRIAL???

In no other movie I've ever seen have I ever noticed a double continuity error, where they rapidly cuts between 3 shots and each one failed to face the character the right way around to match the previous shot.

What was the artistic vision there? Where did that factor into Roger Ebert's 4 out of 4 stars?

Kafka was a box office bomb and it's far more serviceable than this drek.


Final Verdict:
[Bad]
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I tried watching The Hourglass Sanitorium and got an hour in before skipping to the end. The set design was great, but it's another boring nonsense movie. If there was any substance beyond rambling about boring random shit I didn't see it. It's a shame because the concept and twist ending were cool.




The Discreet Charm of the Bourgoeisie
Drama / French / 1972

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
It was recommended as a surrealist movie. I was skeptical, but the Wikipedia summary seemed promising.
The film's world is not logical: the bizarre events are accepted by the characters, even if they are impossible or contradictory. Buñuel plays tricks on his characters, luring them toward fine dinners that they expect, and then repeatedly frustrating them in inventive ways.

They bristle, and politely express their outrage, but they never stop trying; they relentlessly expect and pursue all that they desire, as though it were their natural right to have others serve and pamper them. He exposes their sense of entitlement, their hypocrisy, and their corruption.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Not even gonna bother with the list of animals they butchered and exploited for this movie.

This movie sucked, and what pisses me off most about it is A.) the claim that it is a "surrealist" movie, and B.) that any of the above Wikipedia quote is anything short of pretentious butt-huffing bullshit puffing up this vacuous ****ing movie.

The basic premise of "rich people go to dinner, dinner is ruined, go to next dinner, repeat ad nauseum" is exactly as promised, but at no point does this movie spin this theme in creative or funny ways. This seems like a goldmine foundation for a comedy, but this movie isn't a comedy whatsoever. What's FUNNY is it's frustrating insistence on inserting shots of the cast walking down a rural road for literally no reason and random military or law-enforcement people interrupting dinner with entire flashback sequences to some ****off dream they had, or some department legend about a sergeant who electrocuted people with a piano.

There is actual dialog in this movie that goes:

“My own childhood was tragic. Shall I tell you about it?"

NO. In almost any context imaginable, if a character in a movie suddenly introduces themselves and says this phrase, my answer is NO. But sure enough, here, some random soldier invites himself to the Rich People Table and describes how he poisoned his father's milk, presumably killing him and then leaves. That's all that happens. The subplot is never reintroduced into the story.

Some messenger delivers news to a cavalry regiment that interrupts one of the dinners and they go "Oh no! The Green Army is attacking! But before that, the messenger had a dream last night, let us all listen."

And queue instant flashback to a visibly budget dream sequence with some of the worst delivered dialog in the whole movie.

With a movie about "Bourgoeisie" and a plot about rich people struggling to have dinner, I 100% expected by the end of the movie people just to bust through the door and gun them all down, and that's EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENS but they don't even have the BALLS the stick with it because it's just a ****ing dream sequence!

The end of the movie is just one of several dream-within-a-dream sequences all presented as though this were some foreign language Inception-inspired bootleg of the movie Clue, except they had no idea it was a comedy.

This movie goes a entire ******* HOUR before there is any hint whatsoever that the events we are seeing aren't real, and that just so happens to be when this movie shifts from insufferably boring to mildly interesting!

Dinner gets interrupted by the walls falling away revealing the cast on a theater stage, WHOOPS can't be doing anything surreal in this movie, *poof!* it was all just a dream.

Dinner gets interrupted by one of the characters killing the host out of anger, WHOOPS can't be having any consequences can we? *poof!* it was all just a dream.

Dinner gets interrupted by the main cast getting arrested for drug trafficking! Wow, actual reincorporation! WHOOPS that was an old draft of the script, how do we fix that? *poof!* it was all just a dream.



So much shit happens in this movie that amounts to absolutely nothing.

The cast hires a priest as a gardener, who's called away to a man who he learns murdered his parents and he shoots him. Doesn't matter.

Wife #2 is secretly cheating on her husband with Cocaine-Smuggling Ambassador Guy. Doesn't matter.

The Cocaine-Smuggling subplot doesn't even matter either because everyone gets released from jail both in-dream and real life.

The "terrorist" subplot that also disproportionately fixates on the Ambassador character doesn't matter either.

I'm trying to make sense of this bullshit summary of the movie and it's just not working out.

The film's world is not logical:
FALSE! The world is perfectly logical, all of the events, even those that interrupt the dinners are entirely explicable by in-universe logic. Every single moment that drifts away from logic is immediately revealed to be a dream!

they relentlessly expect and pursue all that they desire, as though it were their natural right to have others serve and pamper them.
The characters passively say some awful things on occasion through the movie, but if this movie's point was to present the cast as irredeemably evil they ****ing failed. And if the movie's point was to deliver some satisfaction to the audience by inconveniencing these irredeemably evil people they ****ing failed.

I can easily see this movie done again in the style of Death at a Funeral or Waking Ned Devine, where the purpose of the script is to present the cast as being actual bastards and ****ing with them actually being entertaining, but this is not that movie.

He exposes their sense of entitlement, their hypocrisy, and their corruption.
I want to slap the person who wrote this across the mouth because it's some of the most insultingly pretentious apologism for a movie (that does NONE OF THAT) I've read since Eraserhead. I should have taken the hyperlink to the Wikipedia page on LOGIC as a glaring red flag.

This movie does nothing to "expose their sense of entitlement", let alone anything else. There's one scene near the end of the movie where one of the women get up from the table, goes to the kitchen, appraises the chicken, hands it to the maid who's already preparing it, and then the maid brings it to the table. WHY COULDN'T YOU WALK IT TO THE TABLE YOURSELF?

The movie doesn't even draw attention to this, nothing so subtle as a side look by the maid, an emphasis of the camera, a line of dialog, nothing! Just me sitting there thinking why this is even a scene, because it adds nothing! The only thing I got out of it was what appears to be a flaw with the script because her doing what should be the maids job invalidates the purpose of the maid! What are you paying her for!?

Are you even paying her enough!?

There are so many opportunities this movie could have taken to be this this clever class commentary you wanted it to be, but it ISN'T because it's DIDN'T so it's NOT.

It's just a boring slog of a movie.

I'm sure there's some sort of brainless dipshit out there who read "bourgoeisie" and immediately all blood rushed to their cock and they were sitting at the edge of their seats waiting for that scene where they all get shot to death, but even that person would realistically be disappointed because guess what? *poof!* It was just a dream.


And you know what? Now that I have the opportunity, can I kindly ask what the actual **** is wrong with French people? Movies popular in France are some of the most dreadful pseudo-intellectual bullshit ever to hit the silver screen and their movie posters ****ing SUCK.


Final Verdict:
[Weak]
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Paperhouse
Fantasy/ English / 1988

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Came up in Bestsimilar.com search results when I entered Ink. Never heard of it.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
It is immediately apparent to me, after watching The Trial and The Discreet Charm how much an actual soundtrack elevates my viewing experience.

I was immediately engaged by this movie's broody whimsical score and I was carried from beginning to end by an appreciably brisk plot, which is always a plus in my book.

Paperhouse doesn't waste any time setting up the central conceit of the movie: A schoolgirl doodles a house in class and shortly after succumbs to a series of fainting episodes attributed to "glandular fever". When she sleeps or falls unconscious she wakes up in the world of her Paperhouse and discovering this she begins drawing new things to introduce into the world including a sad boy at the window who we discover to be an analog to a real boy named Mark we never see.

Despite an off line about not playing with boys, Anna begins an in-dream relationship with Mark and as her health and relationship with her parents deteriorates, Anna experiments with adding different things to the drawing including her dad, but upset with how the drawing is turning out she scribbles out their faces and crumples it up to disastrous consequences.

Mark's real world equivalent is revealed to suddenly be dying of a chest infection and Anna's dream father is turned into a blind malevolent force which she struggles to awaken from.

This culminates in her dream father destroying their means of escape and beating her chest in what is predictably revealed to be life-saving chest compressions.

At this point we hit a crossroads where Anna is distanced from her now-introduced real world father while Mark is believed to be dying, kept alive only by what Anna can draw for him.



It's not a happy ending that comes next, but I will admit that this movie started getting to me near the end. I was fondly reminded of King of Thorn, which I would love to see more stories done in the style of.

And having said that, I literally just learned that King of Thorn got an MOVIE! Holy shit, I had no idea, I gotta see that.

Anyway, I thought this was a really solid movie. Anna is presented as pretty bratty at the start of the movie, which is somewhat acceptable considering her age and it makes sense that a kid who wants to go outside and play doesn't want to admit they're sick. The shitty attitude doesn't carry throughout the entire movie thankfully.

That said, Anna's actress is not exactly stellar. She does a passable job, but she really doesn't emote enough in my opinion. I think I'd say that's probably my biggest complaint, if she had turned in a really good performance that would definitely have raised this movie just a little bit more.

It's never explained why drawing Mark standing doesn't allow him to walk, we never see what she does draw that allows him to walk.

Honestly, there's not a whole lot else to criticize. I think Mom's a bit of a **** for smoking in the car with her kid and littering out the window, but this is also an 80s movie and I'm kinda nitpicking at that point.

In terms of whether this movie hit the style I was looking for: Sort of?

Dreams in and of themselves are functionally throwaway plots in movies like The Discreet Charm where they don't impact the real world or have to share logic with it. But the dreams in this movie reflect the events of the real world and even influence it in small ways.

I feel like the main difference is that the events at the Paperhouse are just direct Stranger Than Fiction-style fantasy consequences of choices made in the real world, which isn't quite the level of visual metaphor I'm looking for.

Even Ink plays with dreams, but things like the clock rumbling on the wall aren't simply an earthquake happening in real life, it's symbolic of the time John has remaining to before he either attends the big meeting or saves his daughter. I want stuff like that.


Final Verdict:
[Great]
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Downfall
Historical War Drama / German / 2004

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Working on a WW2 project and this was one of the bigger war movie recommendations I've seen. Only aware of the memes.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I was fully prepared for this to be a boring movie, and at 2-and-a-half hours, it really wasn't enticing to sit through that much just to see the ending that's already been mocked and parodied up and down the internet.

But surprisingly, that scene actually takes place in the first third of the movie, and as a glimpse into the Fuhrerbunker in the final days of Nazi Germany, this movie was actually really interesting.

There's no overt score, there's little you could call character development, and it's not as though a cast of Nazis is especially endearing to begin with, so I can really only credit my engagement to the quality of the acting, which is not a topic I tend to critique too closely.

It's typical of Hollywood and video games to paint the Nazis as 2-dimensional cartoons to be shot at, but even moreso than Das Boot, another German WW2 Nazi "slice of life" movie, here we see some genuine humanity among our Schutzstaffel cast.

Maybe it's just my exposure to the telephone game of time and pop culture that has lowered my standards for historically accurate representation, but I am once again thankful that somebody took an effort to get some things right.

Hitler's an obvious stand-out with the actor using a lot of body language to present Mein Fuhrer as the ailing, increasingly unreasonable dictator directing a war of fantasy from his concrete prison.

That said, for all of the horrible things Hitler says, and all of the insanity his subordinates ascribe to him behind his back, and even the dormant supervillain of Goebbels or his wife who lies to and poisons all of their kids because she's an abominably callous ****ing monster... Eva Braun is the scariest character in this whole movie.


She just has this totally psychotic wide-eyed half-smile at all times, just blissfully unconcerned with anything that could damper the mood, like a real life yandere character. She freaked me the **** out with her performance. Like, even if hypothetically you agreed with the National Socialist ideal, it's hard not to imagine any of these inner circle guys looking at Eva Braun and getting some SERIOUS ****ing doubts about their line of work.

I'm not sure how accurate that was to her real life personality of course, but in terms of how deranged someone would have to be to marry Hitler 2 days before they kill themselves, she certainly fits the bill.

Everyone else smiles like they're trying to make the best of a bad situation.

Eva Braun smiles like she keeps a dead dismembered Jewish child in a suitcase to pleasure herself with offscreen.

I also appreciate the gradation of reasonableness among the Nazi staff members. Some are hopeless and realistic, others are hopelessly unrealistic, and some are weirdly in the middle, agreeable in some respects and disagreeable in others. And they argue with each other, as they would, because they're all trapped on a sinking ship with a gun to the back of the first person who jumps.

Thoughout this movie I found myself repeatedly pausing it to look up various details about the different characters and the things they did. Like, I didn't know Hitler's body was set on fire, let alone outside the Fuhererbunker.

But consistently each time I looked up a detail, it appeared to be corroborated in some way by witness accounts of the events. And each of the characters in the movie genuinely LOOK like the people did in real life. This is also a German movie, so I didn't have to concern myself with bigwig Hollywood inserts like Liam Neeson putting on a shitty accent.

Beyond the acting, I think the biggest point in favor of this movie is that it really is presented, not as any sort of hero narrative or other typical plot writers like to wring out of history, but as a narrow sequence of events at one period in time that's genuinely just fascinating in it's own right. This movie really seems like it was made by people who just thought this moment in history was really interesting and would make a good movie.

And I think those are the best events to adapt to screen. If you're going the route of non-fiction, pick some non-fiction that's already a good story, not one you have to shuffle around and diminish or embellish to fit a conventional narrative format.

If you entirely ripped out the historical context and all of the names and places were fictional instead, this would still be a neat movie.


That said, while this was definitely engaging, and I think the actors were great, and yadayadayada... this really isn't my preferred flavor of movie anyway.

I liked it, and really do struggle to fault it with much, but it's also not the sort of experience that I can see myself eager to rewatch.


Final Verdict:
[Good]
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Gremlins
Christmas Horror Comedy / English / 1984

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
It's the "family friendly" horror comedy that teaches us that Santa isn't real and to exterminate the ugly.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Dogs, Cats, Chicken.

This movie may have one of the most earwormy theme songs of any movie from the 80s and the movie's pretty memorable as well.

Some inventor with no substantial relevance to the story buys his son a "Mogwai" as an exotic gift from a half-blind mystical salesman in Chinatown (as you do). The Mogwai is basically a furry baby Yoda, but it comes with the caveats to keep him away from bright light (sunlight can kill him), don't get him wet (water causes him to multiply), and don't feed them after midnight (this begins a metamorphosis that changes the mogwai into a gremlin).

I've always questioned the rule about feeding after midnight. The "evil" mogwai that spawn from Gizmo (the original mogwai) are shown to scheme amongst each other, enough to deliberately sabotage a clock so Billy is fooled into believing it's before midnight when he feeds them. If they're intelligent enough to do that, why even go through the trouble? Can't they just legitimately ask for food, keep some of it around until Billy goes to sleep (as he does anyway), and eat it after midnight?

I suppose there's no reveal showing how intelligent they can be in that case, but it seems like a plothole.

Billy's mom also whips out the knives and starts stabbing awfully fast once she sees what the gremlins look like. She kills 3 of them in a row and the most they've done is eat cookie batter and throw a couple plates? Evil Makes You Ugly is played awfully straight here.



Before long gremlins are rampaging the town and we see them doing all sorts of absurd and dangerous things, from smoking and shooting guns, to 80s workout routines and crossdressing. There are a lot of cartoon stock sound effects which I don't think are necessary to soften their antics and the visual gags don't really make me laugh or anything. They would eventually go overboard with this is Gremlins 2.

Ultimately this movie excels in it's creature effects. The mogwai are presented to be cute like Furbys, but their transformation process shows little furballs growing and pulsating before turning into big slimy green cocoons that put the Alien facehugger eggs to shame.

The end result are bigger, creepier, cackling little monsters that cannot help but **** with every electronic that they can stick their claws in. It's all practical effects and puppetry from beginning to end and it's incredibly impressive, even today, despite the occasional bad shot where you can see Stripe on a skateboard or something.

After the initial fight at home, the escape to the YMCA where the lead gremlin Stripe jumps in he swimming pool, and a montage of the resulting gremlin invasion taking over the town, we have a scene where the protagonists blow up most of the gremlins in a movie theater then track down Stripe to a department store.

The department store fight is the most memorable to me, mainly because this where the creature effects become the most horrific and the creatures themselves are shown to be the most violent. Stripe throws a saw blade, shoots Billy with a mini crossbow, shoots at him with a gun, and even runs out of nowhere with a revving chainsaw, cutting almost entirely through a baseball bat to get to him.

That's some scary shit where you're a kid.

But it's also a fun watch, and even though the plot beats seem too-brief as I describe them, the whole movie is paced really well. Introducing Gizmo, showing the consequences of not following the rules, and even the subplot about the Gremlin who escapes the science lab at school (which I don't think is ever resolved) ties the whole experience together in a coherent developing narrative which peaks with some of the most gruesome practical effects and violence.

I consider it a classic, albeit not a favorite. Very good movie.


Final Verdict:
[Pretty Good]
gizmo .



Halloween
Horror Slasher / English / 1978

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
It's October, I've been playing Dead by Daylight against my better judgment, and I've never seen the granddaddy of slasher movies. Might as well. All I know is Michael Myers is a slow-moving stabby killer with an obsession with Laurie Strode for some reason.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
It was the bogeyman.

There seem to be two types of John Carpenter movies; the first type are campy fun (The Thing, In The Mouth of Madness), and the second type are astonishingly bad (Dark Star, Big Trouble in Little China). Halloween is the latter of those two types of movies.

For movie that is often credited as pioneering the modern horror genre, I suppose I really shouldn't be too surprised it's awful, but I expected a bit more than this!

Right away Halloween makes a disasterously awful first impression with it's opening """scare""", wherein we see a young Austin Powers dress up as a clown, grab a knife, put on a mask, and stab his mom in a fashion so insultingly unrealistic that it screams parody.

The camera is from his perspective, and when he puts the mask on we can only see through the eyeholes, we can see the knife never goes near his mom, his arm just smoothly waves back and forth completely betraying any "stabbing" going on, and to make it extra hilariously stupid, in case you were a rational human being and didn't quite get what this awful effect was trying to accomplish, Michael even turns his gaze up and to the right so that the motion of his hand with the knife going up and down is clearly in shot.

Cause you know, Michael's a special little boy, sometimes he forgets where he is and needs to look at what his body is doing sometimes to figure it out. OH I'M STABBING SOMEBODY, WOW OKAY, I THOUGHT SOMETHING WAS KINDA WEIRD. WELP, MIGHT AS WELL GO WITH THE FLOW, SORRY MOM!

Fastforward 15 years as Michael is presumed to be in a "high-security" mental hospital which he casually escapes from because the staff apparently let the patients out into the rain at night with only chest-high fences to keep them on the property. Michael magics himself onto the hood of a car in a feat of athleticism that will not be demonstrated at any other point in the movie.

Dagnabbit! Michael Myers is free! Someone stop that definitely psychotic child we didn't develop any character for!

Michael goes home, and Laurie Strode wanders up to the house because of some plot point we'll never revisit and BOOM, Shrek is obsessed. He then proceeds to stalk Laurie well beyond the point she should be contacting the police, but of course she never does cause she's a dumb**** kid and definitely not an adult Jamie Lee Curtis failing to pull off looking and acting younger than she actually is.

Over half the movie passes and all of **** all happens. Michael persistently stalks Laurie until he randomly takes offense to one of the lamest "jokes" ever to be referred to as a "joke" in a movie and starts stalking Laurie's friend.

He dickteases this kill across multiple scenes until finally Laurie's friend hooks up with a guy and naturally because this is a slasher movie, they have to have sex, so that the liberals in the audience can see **** and the conservatives in the audience can have the satisfaction of seeing liberals die.

The sex is incredibly fake too, there isn't even any thrusting, just two people squirming on each other until the dude rolls over revealing there was a healthy amount of bedsheet between them the whole time.

Dude walks away, is lured to an open door, pokes around and gets jumped by Myers who chokes him, lifts him into the air, and stabs him in the stomach.

...then the camera switches to a wide shot and I lost my shit because he's apparently suspended in the air by a butcher knife that plainly cannot pass through his entire body, let alone enough to pierce the closet behind him and suspend his entire body weight.

Myers strangles the girlfriend, and at about this time, the Doctor, whose car Myers stole, realizes his car has been sitting across the street from him for what seems like several hours he's been standing outside Myers' home.

All the while this guy is apparently just standing out on the street, Laurie crosses the street, apparently never even crossing paths with him, and investigates her friend's house. She also never turns on any lights. Multiple characters conveniently ignore the lightswitches on the walls in multiple scenes.



Eventually she finds the bodies of her friends, gets jumped by Myers and runs out of the house, finally aware she's in danger... and proceeds to run to the house immediately next door.

When they don't open, she runs back across the street, notices she somehow lost her keys, and decides to shriek at the kid she's babysitting to come downstairs and unlock the door... as Myers is casually pacing toward her.

Laurie has an awful lot more time in these scenes to do what she does than would realistically have if Myers didn't stand around and take his sweet-ass time getting everywhere.

He chases her up to the kid's room where Laurie proceeds to run into the closet and bind close the door, rather than do literally anything to the BEDROOM DOOR WHICH ALSO CONTAINS THE KIDS. How do you **** up that bad?

Of course, Michael can break through that shit, so he does, Laurie pokes him in the eye with a hangar, he drops one of several knives he pulls out of his ass offscreen and she stabs him in the chest.

GOOD, he's dead. Or is he? We've seen him get up after being knocked down before. Oh well, Laurie, why don't you just throw that knife on the ground within arm's reach of him and turn your back? You weren't a dumb enough character already.

Of course he gets back up, the Doctor conveniently shows up last second with barely any justification, shoots him several times and he's dead.

O R I S H E ? ? ?

Disappears offscreen for sequelbait and Laurie breaks character to utter the most embarrassing line in the script: "It was the bogeyman."

What an awful movie. Nothing supernatural is ever established in this movie, so we're supposed to believe that Michael took a large knitting needle to the neck, hangar wire to the eyes, a butcher knife to the chest, 3 gunshots center-mass, AND fell off two-story balcony and still manage to run away when his average top speed is walking pace.

I simply cannot watch this movie as anything but a movie because everything from Curtis looking too old, to the kills looking faker than the stupid shit I put in my high school video editing projects totally divorces me from any immersion.

It's also just not scary, if you care about that sort of thing. Which I don't.

But apparently someone did because this became a massive movie franchise for no conceivable reason I can think of. Nothing this movie did was innovative or interesting other than presenting the killer as something other than a monster-of-the-week, which isn't exactly new. Is it cause it's set in the suburbs?? Were moviegoers so sheltered that that's what pushed it over the edge? Home invasion??

Wikipedia says this movie was inspired by Psycho. What exactly did Psycho do that persuaded John Carpenter to make this? Ambiguously wave a butcher knife at a naked lady until they """die"""?

Reading Roger Ebert's review of this movie is utterly baffling with the benefit of 40 years of hindsight.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/halloween-1979

This movie was obviously bad, but it wasn't really funny bad or even frustratingly bad, just boring bad. The only good thing about it is it's theme which quickly becomes repetitive, albeit not to the same extreme as Platoon, which is an infinitely scarier prospect than anything in this movie.


Final Verdict:
[Just... Bad]
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It: Chapter II
Fantasy Horror / English / 2019

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
While my review for It (2017) wasn't stellar, I did consider the remake of It to be on the better side of horror movies, so I might as well see the sequel.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Just trying to add some levity to this shit. I’ll go **** myself.

Without reading through my review of the first movie and without trying to be too consistent with my judgment of it, my memory of the first movie (which I apparently saw in 2019) was that it was an adequately creepy movie, which some pretty cool effects, a couple funny moments, and an especially charismatic clown antagonist.

Seeing Pennywise chew more scenery seemed like a good enough reason to see this one, but it was not the reason I enjoyed it.

Again, going off of memory, I feel like the previous movie was overtly preoccupied with setting up the characters, building up the friend group, and ****in' about with Stephen King tropes, like Main Girl's alcoholic abusive dad.

This movie, by contrast, seems eager to jump us right back into the hallucinatory terrain that comprises the creepy setpieces, but it also has to juggle this with the bold task of reintroducing the cast in the form of different actors, while also making their individual personalities and mannerisms natural and distinct enough for us to go, "OH, THAT'S THAT KID BUT 27 YEARS OLDER, WHOA".

I'd LIKE to say that it succeeded because by the end of the movie it was clear to me who was trying to be who, and each version of the characters share enough of the other's personality and look that the new casting seems pretty solid. This of course is helped by an abundance of seamless flashbacks to scenes of the original child actors between the events of the previous movie and this one, but I would be lying if I wasn't pretty confused out of the gate by who was supposed to be who.

It would probably help if I had watched both movies back to back, but I didn't.

I feel like it's enough to say that each of the characters had distinguishing personalities since that's a pretty tall order normally for horror movies, but they were pretty likable too. If the previous movie's humor has carried by the comedy relief character, it feels much more organic here, where it's more about the character's personalities bouncing off each other, as any good ensemble cast should.

It also helps that the writers are clearly self-aware since they went so far as to squeeze a "HEEERE'S JOHNNEY!" meme in the middle of things. I appreciate it, but it really did feel like the plot took a couple trips and falls around the middle bit.

In particular, once the characters are prescribed the contrived solution to their clown problem of collecting a "token" for each of them, a requirement that came with virtually no rationalization, it seemed like we'd get to see each of the characters experience their own little unique trial tailored to their character.

That would be cool and that seemed like the direction they were going before they bailed out of that idea super hard. Main Girl digs out a postcard that was meaningful to her from the wall of her old home only to have the current resident creepily veer into a Monster Boob Lady...

That set the bar pretty high. The tone, the thoughtfulness, the slow burn into the freaky shit, it works.

But then Comedy Relief gets his scene which involves remembering he used to play Street Fighter, buying an arcade token, and then flashing back to getting chased by a giant woodsman mascot before fast forwarding to a much better less stupid scene where Pennywise just taunts him about "knowing his secret", which doesn't seem to be anything the movie ever reveals.

Main Girl's token was so personal, and the setting was important to the previous movie. Comedy Relief just has a stupid coin because "bro, video games".

This tonal inconsistency continues long enough for me to wonder whether everyone just forgot they were supposed to collect a token each to begin with.

When they finally decide to go have their showdown, they have their epic "let's go kill his ****ing clown" moment, but then bring FEWER weapons than they did 27 years previously.

AND they split up exactly as they did before and get jumpscared by fridge again, only this time it's the spider thing from The Thing inside, and not a cool body contortion effect on Pennywise.

Finally they're like "everyone present your tokens" and Hypochondriac Guy tosses in his inhaler. Yeah, okay, we're not even trying here. They even toss in a shower cap for the one character that killed themselves in a flashback to a throwaway joke that wasn't even in the original movie.

There are a few funny moments throughout, but I think the best bit is the moment when Comedy Relief gets insta-hypnotized by "The Deadlights" mid-monologue during the final showdown.

The final showdown overall is honestly underwhelming. Pennywise finally takes the "true spider form" as represented in the original miniseries, but it feels like it takes forever for the characters to remember he feeds off of fear and that he's completely powerless if you just bully him. Killing him when he's deflated like a balloon is appropriately thematic, but it's also anti-climactic.

The movie after being far too unsubtle about wanting a stupid romantic subplot between Main Girl and Formerly Fat Kid gives them their underwater kiss scene that was so necessary for no reason, we get a fluffy monologue about nothing and the movie ends.


Overall, I'd say the strongest part of this entire movie, surprisingly, are the transitions. CGI occasionally fluctuates from very good to noticeable, therefor bad, but there's also a decent amount of practical effects... which only seem to show up on the tertiary monsters.

What the hell is a mummy doing in this movie anyway?

But no, the transitions are frequent, creative, and not obnoxious. For instance, there's a pan up to the sky, which zooms into stars which are revealed to be the underside of a puzzle being completed, that's pretty cool. I've definitely never seen any movie do that before.

Just for the sheer abundance of quality scene transitions, I would recommend this movie alongside Cloud Atlas because it does one moviemaking job really well. But otherwise don't watch Cloud Atlas.

It: Chapter II on the other hand pretty good at the best of times. It's spooky, but also intermittently funny, has some neat special effects, and the cast is actually a genuinely good likable cast, which you almost never get in horror movies.

I do think overall the setpieces revolving around Pennywise are weaker than in the first movie though. He's given less time to monologue and serve up the creep and these scenes will not be as memorable as those in the first movie.

My BIGGEST qualm with the whole movie, is the opening kill.

For literally no reason at all, the writers of this movie decided to that Pennywise's big "I'm Back" moment would be taking a bite out of a flamboyant gay guy.

Which doesn't seem so bad, I wish all horror movie victims were flamboyant gay guys because those people are so unbelievably ****ing annoying. But no, the reason why Pennywise kills the gay guy is because he's spotted kissing his boyfriend by Stephen King-style tryhard bullies who are momentarily distracted from posting alt-right memes on /pol/ long enough to Brokeback Mountain his ass until they run out of blood squibs and attempt to murder him by dumping his body off a bridge.

And these characters (and themes) are never reincorporated back into the story in any way whatsoever.

Compare this to Georgie's death scene, that was the impetus for the entire plot of the first movie. But here they're just like "we need Pennywise to kill someone, but as long as we're killing someone, let's cram in a little elbowing about how gay people are such an oppressed minority that intolerant dudebros will kill them in the streets". As though they didn't push the setting of this movie up to the year 2016, the year progressives where so unbelievably out of touch with reality that they inadvertently got Donald Trump elected.

If this released in 2020 you can bet it'd be another token black character getting beasted by evil police officers for crime of existing.

Ironically, Token Black Guy seems to have received the least character development of anybody in the main cast. They constantly refer to some subplot about him being accused of arson from the first movie, but I don't remember that ever being resolved in the first movie either. Didn't they casually insinuate that his family were drug dealers, presumably because he's the token black character from the token black family?

Also isn't Main Girl fresh out of an abusive relationship with her dad and now suddenly in an abusive relationship with a spouse she only just decided to leave because she got a letter about some bullshit in Maine? Everyone else received an equitable amount of bullying, but she's privileged with having both a traumatic backstory and frontstory. And it's really just a coin-toss in the end that she ends up with the Fat Kid and not McStuttersalot.

Stephen King cameos in this movie, so I assume his seal of approval is on this, but if so, what is the value in dramatizing the struggles of token women, black, and gay characters if you're really not going to do anything meaningful with them? Just sounds like you needed a plot device and decided you could virtue signal at the same time.


Final Verdict:
[Good]
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Ring
Horror / Japanese / 1998

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Same reason as Halloween. In Dead by Daylight, Sadako is one of the cooler killers with an interesting aesthetic and game mechanic of "spreading her message" and using TVs to teleport. The closest to anything I've seen of Ring was The Grudge, which is awful and I hate it, and Scary Movie 3, which is awful and I hate it for different reasons.

I'm hoping Ring is able to deliver on it's high concept as a slow-burn thriller, rather than as a conventional horror movie.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
So to summarize the whole backstory and conceit of this movie very briefly:

People are found dead of heart attacks with terrified expressions on their faces and it rumored that they died after watching a strange VHS tape. After watching the tape, the viewer receives a phone call of someone saying they'll die in 7 days (which never actually happens in this movie), and they do. The whole climax of this event is a ghost named Sadako Yamamura appearing in the video to climb out of a well and out of the television to attack the viewer.

Sadako was the daughter of a renowned psychic who was assassinated by the media along with the doctor who risked his career to prove her abilities were real. Somewhere along the way, Sadako's mom throws herself into a volcano and the doctor (who's maybe her father?) chucks Sadako down a well, the shape of the well being the eponymous "ring" from which she emerges to kill viewers on tape.

The movie NEVER rationalizes why Sadako might be possessing VHS tapes, especially well after a period of time where they more than likely did not exist, so we're just supposed take that little leap for granted.

The characters, who are roped into investigating this narrative after seeing the tape themselves (and proving it's veracity by the apparent tendency that victims appear smeared in photographs) speculate about the relationship between Sadako's mom and the Doctor, but both of these characters appear only very briefly in phantasmal flashbacks the victims experience for some reason and don't ultimately matter.

All that matters is Sadako's upset because you didn't respect the "be kind, rewind" policy.

It's unfortunate because so much of this movie is dwelling on these possibilities, whereas in conventionally shitty horror movies like The Grudge, there's at least a haunting going on. Only rarely do the characters experience weird phenomenon over the course of the 7 days.

On one hand, that means it's not a constant jumpscare ****fest, but on the other the movie is mostly without a backing score.


When the movie deigns to turn up the creep there's some neat feedback-style production sounds they use to make things seem ominous and impending, but when they DO decide to do something sudden that's meant to be scary, like revealing a dead body, they orchestral string section goes completely nuts.

The volume level of these strings is WAY above appropriate because the rest of the movie is so quiet otherwise, even ordinary dialog, while fine on it's own, sets an expected volume level that these orchestral stings violently defenestrate. It's not exactly scary because the scares are kinda predictable, so the audio choice just sounds jarring and takes me out of the moment.

Speaking of audio choices taking me out of the moment, by far the worst part of this """serious horror movie""" was the part where I burst out laughing at Sadako's "death scene".

Basically, Sadako's not even lured to the well or anything, she's just derping around the lip when the Doctor guy comes out of nowhere *BONK*s her on the head with a hilariously stock punching sound effect.

All of the other audio effects in this movie sound original which makes me wonder whether this sound is originally from Ring, which makes me question whether I only find it funny because the sound is so overused.

But then if you really try to listen to it in context, it just sounds like Master Chief punching a Grunt.

The actors were passable at a minimum, with the exception of Main Girl's son who unpleasantly reminded me of the boy in The Grudge. Whether intentionally so or not, they both have this uncanny wooden performance that makes them seem unnecessarily creepy, but more than likely is simply the result of a stupid kid with zero acting experience being pushed in front of a camera and fed lines which they can't deliver with even an ounce of emotion.

I think the one thing I didn't know about this movie and liked was the ending, where even after trying to find Sadako's body at the bottom of the well and thinking all's well and good, Sadako kills Main Guy anyway because Main Girl copied the tape and showed it to him. So her solution to saving her son who also watched the tape is to curse even more people.

This justifies the mechanism of Sadako wanting people to spread her "message", which is a similar sort of supernatural infection to that of It Follows. But that movie makes a little bit more sense because it's a quasi-parody wherein the monster is a manifested STD.

Still, I really like the concept of this movie, but it really didn't deliver it in a satisfying way to me, despite, like Halloween, spawning a huge franchise and movie trend.

Will look into it's remakes.


Final Verdict:
[Meh...]
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The Ring
Horror / English / 2002

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Maybe an American remake can do a foreign language film justice.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
"What is it with reporters? You take one person's tragedy and force the world to experience it … spread it like sickness."

I'm pretty mixed on this one. It's apparent that this is the movie that popularized the version of Sadako that appears in media like Dead By Daylight, being what seems to be the first movie to heavily associate Sadako with water and to demonstrate her ability to teleport in the form of video skips.

However she's also not "Sadako", she's "Samara Morgan", and she doesn't even have black hair as is insinuated by the movie.

It'd be easier to tell that if the whole movie wasn't tinted blue for some reason, but that just seems to be an unfortunate fad among early 2000s Hollywood movies.

Let's start off with what I appreciated:

I like that Main Girl goes to see the the hospital patient who survived "The Ring Tape", this was a plotbeat that was mentioned once and immediately forgotten in the original, which for as far as the characters went to investigate the whole thing, for some reason didn't do that.

I like that Main Guy is more incredulous towards the idea of The Ring Tape and is eventually persuaded by seeing his face distorted in live video. The original 1998 character didn't confirm this aspect of the curse at all and instead put all the weight on the existence or non-existence of a subsequent phone call.

I like that the phone call at least said "7 days", the original didn't even bother with that.

I like that the 7 days thing is rationalized as being how long American Sadako was alive at the bottom of the well.

I also like the cabin setting where the well is located. The original just looked like a beautiful public mountain lodge, but this place looks exactly as ****ing cursed as it is.

I like that The Ring Tape showed more things, in particular things that were yet to happen, further lending credence to the curse being true.

Finally, I like that this movie had a bigger budget, it was thoroughly scored throughout as opposed to sparingly, which helped maintain tension, it featured some more intimate camera shots of things, and it even had a cool scene of nails slowly lifting themselves out of the floorboards, causing the television to fall and throw Main Girl down the well.

The characterization was noticeably different. There was more humanity in each of the characters' performances which was good, but the wooden child acting continued to be an issue and in this movie they were given much more dialog wherein they hold borderline unrealistic conversations.



I do have issues with this movie too.

Horses, and horseback riding, definitely did not need to be a plotpoint (or in this movie). They took Sadako's mom character, turned her into Sadako's killer, and insinuated that this was all because Sadako was somehow scaring horses into drowning themselves in the ocean.

This conflicts with the leftovers of the doctor plot which we are also presented parts of, in which Sadako is experimented on for upsetting her mom. This part of the story is relatively unexplored, yet it seemed central to the concerns of the characters in the original movie.

Sadako was the daughter of a psychic who inherited a power which she would demonstrably use when she became angry.

Now, "Samara" is the daughter of a horse breeder who is infusing her rage at her own death into video tapes, AGAIN, something we do not justify in this movie. That is so much dumber than it was.

To make matters worse, this movie reveals Sadako's face, which you never see in the original movie. The classic shot is of her hair parting and revealing her looking down and killing her victim with her gaze. But this movie shows us what she looks like before her death and even gives us an ugly full face shot after the fact too.

I would appreciate knowing why the technology of VHS is so integral to this stupid curse, but I have to admit there are aspects of this movie that would be better left ambiguous, including Sadako's face.

This movie even pulls The Grudge thing, where Main Girl just starts pulling Sadako's hair out of her mouth. That's not scary, that's just gross and stupid. The Grudge is basically personified by being the stereotypical Japanese ghost girl shrouded in black hair, but Sadako's got so much more going for her.

It also sucks that when Main Girl finally discovers Main Guy is dead, they chose to use a take where her crying looked bogus as hell.

There's a line in this movie where one of the characters analogize journalists (which Main Girl is) to spreading tragedy "like a sickness", which is EXCELLENT symbolism for what Sadako does and perfect foreshadowing for what Main Girl ultimately decides to do at the end of the movie.

But they spoil this great line of dialog by repeating it at the movie's finale, just in case you missed it!

They also take the effort to spell it out for you that Main Girl intends on showing the video to more people, rather than that being the obvious implication of learning that making copies is what spared her life.

This is a great example of why "show, don't tell" is a thing. It's also another scene in which the kid is unnecessarily inserted so that he can have a bizarrely adult conversation with his mom about the two of them going out to curse people.

And my last bit of grief: The sound design of the original, as I said, was generally too quiet, the stings were too loud, and Sadako's death was unintentionally hilarious. That said, I really did like the particular ambience they added with certain tones and feedback noise to make scenes eerie.

They changed that in this movie to oscillate between just shitty white noise and a new sound loop they created just for any time the tape is being played. I appreciate the addition of a full score, but I am otherwise displeased with the sound design stylings they went with.

They pushed the concept farther, which I like, but they also took creative liberties I didn't like, like blue-toning scenes with a small brunette child named "Samara Morgan", randomly kicking her down a well, and then pretending that this otherwise emotionless kid is suddenly the enraged black-haired spirit of Sadako Yamamura!


Final Verdict:
[Meh...]
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