A scary thing happened on the way to the Movie Forums - Horrorcrammers

Tools    





Kingdom of the Spiders, and I wish I had heeded the warning, there’s a ****load of cruelty toward spiders. It upset me quite a bit even if they are just tarantulas.

I was trying to figure out if "graphic tarantula violence," was for wanting to avoid the unsimulated cruelty to animals or the arachnophobic wanting to avoid simulated cruelty by animals (or really, from what I've gathered, the arachnophobic have a hard time with spiders in movies in general).


I keep meaning to catch up with Kingdom of the Spiders.



Kingdom of the Spiders, and I wish I had heeded the warning, there’s a ****load of cruelty toward spiders. It upset me quite a bit even if they are just tarantulas.
Booooo! Haven't seen it since childhood, but if they're killing spiders on screen that would bother me.

Having a pet Chilean Rose that lived to be eleven years old (RIP) sort of ruined the tarantula's role in horror movies for me. Granted, no one wants an uninvited tarantula crawling on their face, so that's creepy. And if you suffer from arachnophobia, I get it. But they're one of the least threatening of nature's citizens. They generally do not want to be bothered by humans and only bite after you've antagonized them past a reasonable point, and their venom is basically useless against us. Plus they're slow and easy to step on. I always chuckle when a distressed damsel is making her way through Vincent Price's dungeon and shrieks when she sees a tarantula on the wall. It's like, "Yeah, you can just walk away, it's fine. It's not going to chase you, let alone catch you. Chill."
__________________
Captain's Log
My Collection



Not that it's relevant to the movie mentioned here, but cruelty against animals makes the Italian horror world such an absolute minefield to navigate. Don't know what was wrong with them in particular.



Victim of The Night
Booooo! Haven't seen it since childhood, but if they're killing spiders on screen that would bother me.

Having a pet Chilean Rose that lived to be eleven years old (RIP) sort of ruined the tarantula's role in horror movies for me. Granted, no one wants an uninvited tarantula crawling on their face, so that's creepy. And if you suffer from arachnophobia, I get it. But they're one of the least threatening of nature's citizens. They generally do not want to be bothered by humans and only bite after you've antagonized them past a reasonable point, and their venom is basically useless against us. Plus they're slow and easy to step on. I always chuckle when a distressed damsel is making her way through Vincent Price's dungeon and shrieks when she sees a tarantula on the wall. It's like, "Yeah, you can just walk away, it's fine. It's not going to chase you, let alone catch you. Chill."
You and I both know that, next to fog, there is nothing better you can put in a Horror movie to improve the mood than a tarantula.
If possible, several tarantulas.




Victim of The Night
Not that it's relevant to the movie mentioned here, but cruelty against animals makes the Italian horror world such an absolute minefield to navigate. Don't know what was wrong with them in particular.
True.



You and I both know that, next to fog, there is nothing better you can put in a Horror movie to improve the mood than a tarantula.
If possible, several tarantulas.

Well, that's why I got 'er in the first place, if we're being honest.



I totally thought the content warning meant spiders would be eating people, not spiders getting got.





Arrebato, 1979

Jose (Eusebio Poncela) is a frustrated horror movie director in an incredibly unhealthy relationship with actress Ana (Cecilia Roth). One day he receives a strange package from a man he's met only twice, Pedro (Will More). Via an audio recording of his voice and footage of home video shot by Pedro, Jose is drawn into Pedro's strange experiments with a time lapse camera and strange dream states.

Yeah, this is how you do it.

Films about films can be overly precious and self-important, but this one just straight up rocks. Prominently placed behind the main character in several scenes is the famous painting "Escaping Criticism," and the film seems to take an indifferent attitude toward the perils of being a movie about movies.


It's almost hard to know where to start, but imagery is probably as good a place as any. The film roils with great images, veering from the comic to the sexual to the frightening often within the same minute. In maybe a peak example of this dynamic, we get a montage where a penis becomes erect, transforms into a time-lapse cigarette ashing at the same angle, which then becomes a needle injecting an arm with heroin, "finishing" with a drop of blood from the injection site. It's funny and upsetting all at the same time, and the whole movie is loaded with sequences like it.

In the beginning of the film, Jose and his coworker look at some footage, complaining that the actress is looking into the camera. Jose quips "I don't love cinema, cinema loves me!" as he leaves the editing room. But looking into the camera (and looking at the camera looking at someone) becomes a central theme of the film. Pedro, in a search for the "rhythms" around him, becomes fascinated with taking time lapse footage of the things around him. When he unintentionally films himself sleeping, he becomes obsessed with what the camera has captured.

The two main relationships in the film are between Jose and Ana and Jose and Pedro. As the film goes on, there's some dark humor that emerges from the fact that Jose is cultivating more intimacy with Pedro, a man who he's only met twice, than with Ana who, at certain points, is literally draped over his body. (There's a scene that again veers between the dark and the comedic when a high Jose gets into bed with a very high and very unresponsive/unconscious Ana and begins to undress her. It's only after a few uncomfortable moments that we realize he's simply stealing the robe from her.) There's also something very funny about the idea that Jose is being essentially seduced by what looks like very pretentious cinematic affectations. Pedro initially tries to woo him with time lapse footage of clouds.

Under the explicit (not explicit, but rather surface level) sexuality and sensuality of the film is this factor of alienation that the character seem to have both for each other and their own bodies. For Ana, that disconnect comes because she'd rather be high than anything else. For Pedro, it's chasing the "rapture" that he experiences using his time lapse. And for Jose, it's the dissatisfaction with his own life and the trapped feeling he can't escape. It's an interesting example of nudity being really effective because of the lack of sexual charge and the disregard the characters have for their bodies not because they are liberated or unembarrassed, but because at some level they don't really live in their own bodies. There's a definite spark between Jose and Pedro (and at one point, um, much more than a spark), but it sits in this strange place between being queer and feeling actually disconnected from sexual desire despite the sexual context of their act.

But there's something other than just the weird imagery and more literal horror developments of the last act that make this one pretty chilling. The entire portrayal of the character of Jose is kind of existentially horrifying. He's unsatisfied creatively. He keeps getting pulled back into drug use, which kills his sex drive. There's a restlessness inside of him that is hard to watch, and that you know will lead him to taking risks with his own safety and the safety of the people around him. In the end, this is not someone who will be trapped. This is someone who will choose. And in some ways, that makes it all the more tragic. (Also layered in there is the fact that this film was made by someone deep in the throes of drug addiction, something that maybe kept him from other creative outputs.)

Really excellent, deeply funny, and haunting.




The trick is not minding
I need to see Arrebato soon. Mr Minio brought that to my attention a year ago.

So far, I’ve seen two probably masterpieces this week from this past year: Crimes of the Future, and Skinamarink. If this sight is still around when we do a 2020 countdown, they may both appear.



Nice.


I was trying to remember the name of that one the other day and didn't feel like going through Karloff's IMDb listings to find out (though I knew it was one of his last ones).



And I saw Arrebato about 10 years ago. I didn't really take to it. On paper it seemed like something I should have liked, but didn't. I mostly remember finding the narrator's raspy voice a little too raspy to the point of grating on my ears.


I saw that it was going through the repertory circuit again this past year and then showed up on criterion. I was at least half-tempted to revisit to see if I'd warm up to it, but then my recollection of how it landed last time made my interest more tepid and then decided to keep working on my lengthy queue for the year.


Maybe at some point, I'll rewatch. Give me an alert if it's leaving criterion. That'll probably be the month it happens.



"Tell Me. Do You Bleed? You Will."


So I just got done reading reviews for House of Darkness and I can't believe what I'm reading! Yeah, this is a talky movie that goes nowhere, but what's wrong with that? I was thoroughly engrossed in these conversations, and extremely entertained by these performances! Very beautiful, and very atmospheric. Have any of you seen it?





So I just got done reading reviews for House of Darkness and I can't believe what I'm reading! Yeah, this is a talky movie that goes nowhere, but what's wrong with that? I was thoroughly engrossed in these conversations, and extremely entertained by these performances! Very beautiful, and very atmospheric. Have any of you seen it?

I have not (not heard of it).
But if it makes you feel a little less flummoxed (or less alone), the first review that I saw come up when looking for it was a generally positive review at rogerebert


https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/h...ie-review-2022



"Tell Me. Do You Bleed? You Will."
I have not (not heard of it).
But if it makes you feel a little less flummoxed (or less alone), the first review that I saw come up when looking for it was a generally positive review at rogerebert


https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/h...ie-review-2022
Oh wow. I'm gonna have to bookmark them. Thank you.





So I just got done reading reviews for House of Darkness and I can't believe what I'm reading! Yeah, this is a talky movie that goes nowhere, but what's wrong with that? I was thoroughly engrossed in these conversations, and extremely entertained by these performances! Very beautiful, and very atmospheric. Have any of you seen it?
I've recommended it quite a few times as a Justin Long horror double feature. It could've used a stronger final act but as a bottle horror that feels like a Tales from the Crypt episode, it's solid entertainment



"Tell Me. Do You Bleed? You Will."
I've recommended it quite a few times as a Justin Long horror double feature. It could've used a stronger final act but as a bottle horror that feels like a Tales from the Crypt episode, it's solid entertainment
Yes! I totally agree. It feels like an anthology entry.