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

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Immaculate, 2024 (B)


Syndey Sweeney plays a nun in a creepy convent in this generally by-the-book horror. Absolute 10/10 ending though. Absolutely worth the watch just for that.

By the way, I'm gonna go ahead and plug, pretty hard, for Strange Darling.


I didn't do a write-up because it's a movie that should be watched, as MKS pointed out, blind. Not because there's one Shyamalan-like twist or anything like that but because the movie is constantly twisting and turning in its way and even little giveaways could ruin some really nice and rewarding moments for the movie-goer.
That said, I also feel like this is a movie that will be very rewatchable. We enjoyed the hell out of it and I suspect I could get my friends to go see it in the theater again this week if I asked.
It's well-written, well-directed, well-acted (including fantastic turns by our co-leads), well-shot (Giovanni Rbisi), well-edited, it has good sound and good music, and it's thrilling and intense but also fun in its weird way.
I really recommend you see it in the theater if you can. Screw Marvel and Fast/Furious, nowadays I feel like those movies' CGI spectacles are so rote (unlike 10 years ago or so) that you can watch on the small screen and you really lose nothing but this looked great on the big one. And I really think we should start voting for good indies with our ticket-dollars again. I saw some data that indicated that Indie films are on the rise again in theaters, subtly, but it might be real. Let's vote for good films to get theatrical runs again.
Hell we might restore Cinema to the cinema!

Only three episodes into From but it’s very fun so far. Just some good horror camp. It’s got a real Stephen King vibe to it. I hope it can keep things going for the rest of the show.

If the second half is as good as the first half, I'm going to be on here in a few days badgering you all to watch The Deeper You Dig so we can talk about it.

I liked that one but it's been too long for me to remember specifics. I gave it 3-1/2 stars which tells me I didn't consider it a complete success

If you want some really dark, outrageous humor with your horror, you should check out The Front Room.

Caught up on a couple recent horror movies at my friends movie night tonight.


Maxxxine - Despite Mia Goth killing it, literally and figuratively, as the lead again and some really well done 80's aesthetic the final film in this trilogy doesn't fully stick the landing. I liked its set up playing on both the slasher and satanic panic elements of the time and it even had a bit of fun subversion of one of those in the end but that ending also felt so rushed. Just as I felt the film was starting to ramp up it ran head first into a kind of anti-climactic ending. I still liked it but it was definitely a bit of step down from the previous films. I think I'd rank Pearl first, then X and finally Maxxxine.


Longlegs - I quite enjoyed the slow creepy vibe of the first half of the film film but the second half started to show us more of Nicholas Cage's character and I found his performance more distracting than creepy. Then the film decided to do a full stop so it could explain to you exactly what was going on with an element of the story and I'm pretty sure my interest dropped off the face of the earth at that point.



So yeah the ending unfortunately, for me at least, is the sort of miss that undermines the good that came before it.

I agree. The movie tried to have things both ways, when it should have just stayed weird and abstract. It introduces just enough logic to get you to think things should "make sense", and that ends up detracting much more than it adds.

Thanks to a recommendation from my library's recommendation service, I'm currently reading the graphic novel My Favorite Thing is Monsters. A little girl who is obsessed with horror magazines and movies (and who wants to be a monster) decides to investigate a mysterious death in her building.

So far it's pretty great, and I really like the style of the artwork. I'd give it a recommendation, but I do have to say that it got a bit darker than I expected based on the first 50 pages or so.

If it turns into a bummer let me know, if not Ima buy it.

I'll update you when I finish it.

The protagonist is super lovable. A little girl named Karen who walks around imagining herself as a monster and wearing her brother's old hat and coat to pretend she's a detective.

Well. It's a little slow to get going but once the big fella takes to the skies, this shit is on. He'll flap his wings all over your shit!
Yeah, Rodan is alright in my book.

Tim Burton's Batman is obviously superior to Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight.

THAT'S my BOY! I LOVE Rodan.


If you can't get behind a nuclear-powered pterodactyl farting radiation all over the place I got no time for you.

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I remembered loving Rodan as a kid (he was my second-favorite, behind Godzilla obv, for some reason) so I just decided to give it a spin last night. I thought he acquitted himself nicely.
Hard to believe this was '56 too, I thought it looked a decade or so more modern than Godzilla.

Of course, Rodan has a competitor now that I've seen Ebirah: Horror Of The Deep.

I Saw the TV Glow -

Did you have a very personal connection to a TV show growing up? This delightfully atmospheric suburban horror probes such connections and how singular they are. It’s special to find a show you like enough to continue watching, but it's a far cry from the one that's so exclusive, it only seems to exist in your imagination. TV from the '90s had plenty of nooks and crannies like this - I remember thinking I was the only person who knew about The Legend of Prince Valiant, for instance - and this movie's Are You Afraid of the Dark-adjacent The Pink Opaque fits the mold of one.

From Halloween to Ginger Snaps, there is no shortage of scary movies proving that the suburbs are hardly safe havens. This one nails the horror inherent in not meeting their conformity standards, not being of the majority gender or sexual orientation in particular, and from which fixations on The Pink Opaques of TV are born. Justice Smith is excellent as student and family fun center employee Owen for how he conveys such a crisis and the frustrations of having a family who cannot help him. If it's not mom's strict bedtime forcing him to watch the show covertly, it's his distant and conservative father figure. Just as memorable is Brigette Lundy-Paine's Maddy, Owen's only friend whose similar crisis we do not see, but it must be worse since she is on the verge of fleeing town. From the analog filter to the trippy animation, the look and feel of The Pink Opaque is a sight to behold, especially for the way it captures how an impressionable teenage mind would interpret it. Also, as much as I enjoy family fun centers, it's hard to think of a better metaphor for the impulse teenagers like Owen have to pretend that they're happy.

Adolescence is inherently difficult, but it's much harder when you must fight its battles on your own. Connecting to fantasy worlds like The Pink Opaque helps with some of them, but as the way the movie dispels nostalgia and takes a jab at our streaming era indicates, they do not help with all of them. Whether or not you have walked in Owen or Maddie's shoes, this is a creepy and unsettling journey worth taking that might help if you are fighting a similar war, but it will absolutely make you empathize with those who are. As much as I appreciate how available media from my youth is these days, there's also the movie’s love letter to an era where you could easily do something that will unfortunately become more difficult: happen upon a piece of entertainment that is just for you, and I don't mean because of an algorithm.

The Crazies, 1973 (B)

Townsfolk go crazy as the military moves in to investigate. Good in a sort of procedural horror kind of way. Like a chaotic CSI. Romero is very good at directing chaos and disparity. The way every character in every arguing scene feels organic and natural in a way you don't see that often.

The Children, 1980 (D)

A group of children turn murderous and get black nail polish because of some chemical, I guess.
This one is just a very dull affair. Another one of those 50's creature features where the majority of the runtime is nothing and all the action and violence are suggested. Even the implied and comically shows child dismemberment doesn't move the needle.

Stigmata, 1999 (C-)

A hairdresser in America gets the stigmata of JJ. The Vatican investigates.

Nothing much to be said on what happens in this movie, it's not interesting, but it needs to be noted that the whole thing turns out to be an ad for a gospel that was discovered in a cave 1945. No joke, that is the entire point of the movie. They even break the fourth wall at the end with the text to really drive it home.

Ghosts of Chernobyl (D+)

Terrible characters and unconvincing found footage of some, you guessed it, ghosts in Chernobyl. Bleh.

The Whisperer in Darkness (B)

A cute adaptation of Lovecraft's story. This one doesn't work as well with the whole appearing like an old movie thing compared to Call of Cthulhu, who chose to go full silent. The movie is obviously a full HD digital camera with a black and white filter. A bit long, the climax is bad, and the CGI could have been replaced with the effects you would expect from the time this was made.

Final Prayer (B)

A priest and a man with cameras investigate some happenings in a church in England. Found footage.

This isn't at all the worst found footage, but the camera guy is quite grating. The developments are interesting, however, and the reveal is something I haven't seen in other found footage movies. And I've seen quite a few.

Night of the Missing (A,A-,B+,D,B+)

A weird horror anthology, which is supposed to be a Christmas thing? Even though only the ending has anything to do with that? And it's not clear why it has anything to do with that? Anyway. The stories are about a murderous ice cream truck, a phone sex girl alone at home with a weird guy on the phone, a girl in a miniature town and a drug deal gone bad. The story is framed by a woman in a police station telling a police lady about these missing people and how they went missing.

Perfectly recommendable movie, and it's not too long either!

Forbidden World (D)

A movie that answers the question we all had: What if Alien was cheap, bad, kind of horny and tried to give you a seizure. Honestly some of the worst, most puzzling editing I've ever seen in a movie. Especially the hallway scene where you get subliminal images of the voyeur sex scene that came right before. I just don't get it.

Last night I watched The Demon Disorder on Shudder. While I think that the story itself landed a bit thin (it's yet another variation on "Does this old person have dementia or are they possessed?"), it was fun seeing John Noble.

Also, the movie really exists as a practical effects showcase, and on that front it delivers in spades. If you're at all a fan of old-school effects, I highly recommend this movie.

Finally, I don't want to tread into spoilers, but there was a character in this film who I felt might just be used for something gross/cruel, but the movie ended up surprising me on this front and that was nice.

I'm also going to give a general recommendation to Advent Calendar.

Here's my full review of it.