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

Well, as promised this is basically every horror movie I've watched since last Halloween. Hold your applause until the end.

(as usual, blue for first-time watches and red for re-watches).

Alone in the Dark (2005) - would be an interesting case study when trying to piece together an examination of when a film stops being horror and starts being action (or vice versa), but as it stands it's genuinely atrocious at doing either and doesn't even have any so-bad-it's-good charm to make up for it.
Black Christmas (2019) - I think this gets a bit too much of a bad rap just because it takes an indelible slasher classic with its own still-relevant social commentary and simplifies it - still not good exactly but I see this in IMDb's bottom 100 and I'm like "really?"
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - one of the classic silent horrors for a reason. Essential viewing for everyone.
Cat Sick Blues - local trash about a cat-themed serial killer, going for ugly edgelord nonsense under the guise of black comedy in the process.
Chopping Mall - never quite as fun as I want it to be, but not without a certain charm. Hot take perhaps, but this one could use a remake (too bad that shopping malls aren't as popular as they used to be so that kind of puts a stop to that).
Demons - this is definitely edging its way up my favourites horror list, just the kind of pure '80s funhouse ride that strangely gets neglected in retrospect. Motorcycle scene is poetic cinema.
The Faculty - so it's just Rodriguez doing a journeyman job that's basically Body Snatchers for the Scream generation, but I can't begrudge a Carpenter fanboy getting to do his own riff on The Thing.
Fantasy Island - definitely bad, but still too batsh*t to actually hate.
Final Destination - got the urge to go through this entire franchise that I'd only seen a couple of installments from. The first one is a passable enough novelty (and it's hard not to wonder if it might have worked better in its original form as an X-Files episode) but as its stands it has that kind of perfectly functional high concept that easily lends itself to sequel riffing.
Final Destination 2 - speaking of sequel riffing, this wastes no time in redoing the first film but bigger (that highway pile-up is an insane upgrade from the plane exploding in the original) and the kills get even crazier and more intense. Shame that the plot takes a turn for the worse, but at least it compensates, I guess.
Final Destination 3 - no major connection to the first two and arguably better for it, cementing it as a franchise that can deliver on the inevitable carnage without getting bogged down on lore. Maybe the best?
The Final Destination - Definitely the worst. Too much 3D gimmickry, feels the longest despite being the shortest, lacks good writing or setpieces...just one big waste of time, really.
Final Destination 5 - a real "shut up and play the hits" kind of deal to serve as the final chapter and make up for its predecessor, but sometimes that's all you can really ask of a franchise with such limited appeal in the first place.
The Frighteners - wonder if it's possible for Peter Jackson to go back to doing horror.
Gremlins 2: The New Batch - and people want to act like Crank: High Voltage was some unprecedented exercise in ratcheting up an already-ludicrous premise to an insanely brilliant level.
Hausu - Art.
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer - not quite as shocking as its highly controversial reputation suggests, but still a very rough watch.
The Howling - weirdly restrained by Joe Dante standards, enough so that it looks kinda dull next to its two immediate successors (albeit more technically competent)
I Know What You Did Last Summer - I guess they can't all be zingers, Kevin Williamson.
Jeepers Creepers - even if you separate the art from the artist (and given the subject matter here, I'm not sure that you can anyway), this just isn't good.
Maniac Cop - it's fine enough and hasn't aged poorly given its stance on the thin blue line, but it's arguably one of those horror films that could benefit from a remake.
Maniac Cop III: Badge of Silence - a considerable decline from the original, but worth it for the car chase where the Maniac Cop is driving a car while on fire.
Masters of Horror: Cigarette Burns - episodes of an anthology series technically count as movies, right? In any case, I'm thinking of running the whole series after catching this for the first time since it aired, but I feel like it won't get much better than Carpenter doing something that is less a love letter to horror movies than a Dear John.
Midsommar - having watched this and Hereditary multiple times now, I'm pretty sure I can't f*ck with Ari Aster. Even understanding the "true" meaning behind each film doesn't bring me any closer to liking them.
A Nightmare On Elm Street - I've noted before that Craven's never really been my bag, but after a few goes I've finally come around on this as just being a remarkable cinematic experience even if it's never capital-S Scared me like its slasher peers.
Paranormal Activity - so this is what the fuss is about? It's competent enough, I guess.
Pieces - whatever, I want better from these kinds of movies.
Planet of the Vampires - Bava goes to space and brings all the '60s sci-fi aesthetics with him to tell another decent horror story.
Poltergeist II: The Other Side - obviously your average horror movie will never need a sequel, but even by that standard Poltergeist really did not need one (even though it does result in the occasional striking image).
Poltergeist III - even less necessary than The Other Side, though there is a certain novelty to having it take place in a high-rise building instead of another house.
Possession - gets better with every viewing and I'm definitely ready to call it one of my favourite horrors now.
Saw III - screw it, Spiral made me want to go through the ones I haven't seen yet. It only took one to remind me why I hadn't bothered, but at the same time I'll see it I can push on.
Saw IV - I suppose there's something fascinating about seeing these movies build an elaborate lore full of flashbacks and twist reveals to pad out the time between gory traps, but that still doesn't seem like enough to make them good.
Saw V - still undecided as to whether or not the better Saw game is "strangers must work together" or "single person runs gauntlet", though this movie really doesn't make much of an argument for the former.
Saw VI - A relative highlight for the series mainly due to how it actually makes an effort to ground its usual mix of torture and whodunit in an idea (even if it is something as fundamentally basic as having an axe to grind with private health insurance).
Saw 3D - the alleged final chapter goes the "gauntlet" route and seems like it's also following its predecessor's lead in finding a specific issue to focus on (though self-help gurus don't make for as interesting a topic, especially not given this execution). Not surprised they tried to call it a day here.
Jigsaw - not sure a soft reboot really does this franchise any favours, though I guess it's worth it just to get rid of the increasingly convoluted mythology that had plagued the previous sequels.
[color=]Scream 4[/color] - my favourite of the Scream sequels and the only one that manages to come close to matching the original, probably because enough time has passed for new horror trends to develop and therefore be satirised (and its take on reboots has more depth to it than the other sequels' shots at sequels or *checks notes* Hollywood?).
The Shout - very British, very '70s horror. You'll believe a man can yell another man to death, but not in a way that looks ridiculous.
The Strangers - like I get that the prospect of mysterious strangers breaking into your house and trapping you there with the presumed intention of killing you is an inherently scary notion, but this film's just not good at conveying that on its own and just grows tedious after a while.
Tetsuo: The Iron Man - this movie f*cks. Excellent soundtrack.
Willy's Wonderland - novel enough to see a mute Nic Cage survive a night trapped in a building full of evil animatronics, too bad it's fairly dull and clumsy.

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

Love The Faculty.

If you can stream them for free, I recommend checking out the other entries. Carpenter's is one of the better ones but there's some other gems in there as well. I like Argento's, which is an adaptation of an old Berni Wrightson story from Creepy Magazine.

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Captain's Log
My Collection

I've seen a handful of other episodes (eight in total that I can remember watching) and I found the whole series streaming on a local service - thinking I might hold out to October (though I suppose there's always the risk that they'll disappear off the service before then). Not sure which Argento one you mean since he did two episodes - I watched the one where Meat Loaf plays a fur trader, but not the other one.

I've actually never seen the second season. (I was given the first season as a gift years ago).

The Argento I was referring to was Jenifer, which did not star Meat Loaf.

Liked this a lot when I saw it at TIFF.*Between this, Symptoms and A Woman's Torment, Repulsion-influenced horrors seem to do the trick for me consistently.*

oooh I'm not familiar with Torment. This Larraz guy needs looking into it seems. How have I missed him all these years?

I'll post my review later when I'm off work. It's one of those.*.. not on Letterboxd films but there is a less explicit cut available (and is the director's preferred version , I believe).

A Quiet Place Part II Is a Super Solid, Edge-of-Your-Seat Sequel

I might get around to this eventually, but the first one, while slickly directed, did annoy me in how quickly it settled into a pattern of noisy objects making noise at obviously inconvenient times.

The movie opens with a fairly awkward sex scene while the ballgame is playing on TV. It looks a tad one-sided, to put it tactfully, something confirmed moments later when the woman corrects the man when he tries to cheer her up. They didn’t make love, she insists, “you just masturbated inside of me.” Ouch. The man and woman are husband and wife. The wife suspects the husband is having an affair. The husband, a psychiatrist, is eager to get to a party, the host of which is his close friend, whose wife with whom he is indeed having an affair. (Or was. “An affair is not like a marriage. It ends.” This is said moments after he calls her a “cock-stirring sight.”) This husband, on top of being a lousy friend and lousy husband, later wears a denim sportcoat, is audibly disgusted when crab meat and sour cream is served as hors d’oeuvres, announces that he’ll be delivering a lecture on breasts, and eventually declares himself as the world’s worst psychiatrist when he tells someone “Right now I think you need a man’s body next to you, more than all the therapy in the world.” Anyway, back at the party, his friend tries to talk him into offering his services to his wife’s stepsister, who’s been staying with them for weeks but hasn’t said a peep. This character, played by Tara Chung, is the main character.

Indeed, this character doesn’t say a word until around a third into the movie. After the party, she packs up and retreats to a beach house, where she spends the rest of the movie. She’s not the only one here. A repairman (Michael Gaunt) shows up, initially as a sympathetic presence, although things don’t pan out. A nosy neighbour drops by, alarmed that all the lights are on (”Haven’t you heard about the energy crisis?”), but her presence is not well received. A couple spots the house from a boat and thinks it would be a great location for a tryst ( “It looks like all the lights are on.” “No, no, that’s just an optical illusion.” “I’ve never made love in a deserted house before.” “It is rather kinky, isn’t it?”) and…let’s just say if I found strangers ****ing in my house, I’d be pretty pissed too. In between all of this, we cut back to the two couples, who drunkenly sing “Beer Barrel Polka”, fight, ****, and worry about the poor stepsister all alone in that beach house. Eventually, the psychiatrist decides to drop by to check in on her, and I won’t spoil what happens exactly, but let’s just say it involves an ashtray resting on one’s navel while wearing a speedo, as well as the marvelous advice I mentioned above.

A Woman’s Torment is a pretty strange movie. On one hand, it’s pretty obviously a pornographic take on Repulsion. On the other hand, it keeps cutting back to the domestic squabbles, which play like a sitcom about bad marriages or a parody of a soap opera. It’s an odd fit conceptually, and Roberta Findlay’s direction is not the smoothest, but the contrast between the film’s different textures makes it cinematically compelling. I was unimpressed by the one other film I’d seen by Findlay, The Oracle, but while this shares a similar artificiality in style and crude scenes of horror (candy red blood and disjointed editing figure in both), the notes of soap opera and pornographic content make this feel dynamic in ways that movie didn’t. This also has the benefit of an evocative location in the coastal beach house setting, which provides an eerily calm counterpoint to the violence, sex and melodramatics. It brings to mind the use of similar locations in such films as J.S. Cardone’s The Slayer and Agnes Varda’s Documenteur, and the three films might make an interesting triple feature.

The movie gets much of its power from Tara Chung’s performance. It’s not a good one, exactly, but her presence is ungainly and distinct enough to carry the movie. If it feels more like a disjointed collection of tics than a complete performance, that’s because Chung ran off with a gaffer in the middle the production, leaving Findlay to stitch together her character from the available footage and even stepping in to put on a dress and a wig and play the role during a murder scene. I don’t think the movie is worse off as a result, and Walter Sear’s soundtrack, full of distorted voices and dissonant sounds, also helps put us in her fraught, unstable headspace. There’s also some comic relief courtesy of Jake Teague as the psychiatrist and Marlene Willoughby as the neighbour, who go all in on the respective bozo and dowdy qualities of their characters. I’ve said enough about Teague’s character, but my favourite moment of Willoughby’s is when he takes off her shoes and dumps sand all over a table and then chastises the main character for being a poor housekeeper. (“You’re not very neat, are you, dear?”) This is after stealing a lightbulb.

The film exists in both softcore and hardcore versions. I suspect the former is Findlay’s preferred cut, as she notably found shooting hardcore sex scenes to be distasteful. (Her trick for getting through them? Grab a telephoto lens, find a halfway interesting angle and move the camera up and down until you’ve eaten enough runtime.) Some of the sex scenes here are indeed shot in a pretty perfunctory manner, and the softcore version also has the benefit of added story elements and dialogue scenes, the highlight of which in my opinion would be a moment where Robert Kerman discusses Fellini in a brief cameo. (I’m beginning to develop a similar affection for golden age hardcore that I have for Italian horror, where the mere presence of certain regulars brings me some joy. Kerman benefits doubly given his work in both industries.) Yet I can’t deny that the explicitness of the hardcore footage gives the themes of sexual repression a certain charge, and Chung’s scenes in particular carry a real tension thanks to the instability of her performance. The ideal version of this movie would keep her sex scenes in their full, explicit form and trim the others (and of course keep the Kerman dialogue). As is, either version is still well worth your time.

Did you ever watch Eyes of My Mother? I can't recall. It's my favorite Repulsion influenced horror of recent years.

I did, and I remember really liking it!


Repulsion influence: the gift that keeps on giving.

I like this one a lot. Somewhat British, by way of a Polish ex-pat concerning an Aussie supernatural vibe. I don't really consider it "horror" but it is sensually unsettling. Makes a good double feature with the other Susannah York psych-thriller Images. Some overlapping themes as well.

Horror movie friend and I are watching Alice Sweet Alice and I had forgotten about the multi-faced babydoll!

And about how the man who does the polygraph says, in reference to the CHILD, "Did you see her t*ts?". Like, WHAT WAS WRONG WITH PEOPLE IN THE 70s?!?!?!?!

Clearing out some old files just now and I came across the previously-unreleased Round 10 of my Horror Quiz from last year. There are no prizes for correct answers, but I thought some of you might enjoy a diversion.
Actually, I lied. Whoever guesses #87 wins the prize of being my best friend.

Somehow reminds me of The City of the Dead, but not sure.

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Well,



EDIT Done!