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

Um, I'm doing my top 10 favorite moments from The Twilight Zone over in the TV forum (yes, there is a TV forum) if anyone is interested. Kind of disappointed that I missed the Twilight Zone Hall of Fame thread. Oh well.

https://www.movieforums.com/communit...or=1&p=2323440

Watched a couple horror films tonight.

Revealer - The set up is a stripper and a religious protester stuck together during an apocalypse in the 1980's. It's low budget so there really isn't much shown of the actual apocalypse going on just some ways that it interacts with the indoor locations our protagonists are in. Luckily the two leads are pretty solid and their interactions are what the film is really built on. It's far from perfect but solidly entertaining.

The Doghouse (2009) - This film feels like the films makers said what if Shaun of the Dead but with thoroughly unlikeable characters and misogyny throughout. A group of friends take a trip to small town to cheer up one of them who is recently divorced only for all the women in the town to have somehow been turned into cannibalistic zombie type creatures. It has the everyone is missing all the signs that something is wrong scene, some of the guys dress in drag to blend in with the female zombies to avoid detection all done with not one wit of the humor or heart that Shaun had.

Alone (2020) -

This is a decent yet generic as its title thriller about a woman who tries to evade a serial killer in the wilderness. In other words, it's pretty much the kind of movie you would expect to come up after filtering on the thriller genre on your favorite streaming app. The woman is Jessica (Jules Wilcox), a recent widow who packs her things and makes a long trek to start over again, which requires driving through woodsy small-town Oregon. During her trip, she frequently runs afoul of a bespectacled and mustachioed fellow (Marc Menchaca) who may not share his doppelganger Ned Flanders’ best intentions.

Movies in this genre live or die on the plausibility of their lucky breaks, red herrings, the sense that the hero's and villain’s decisions make, etc. Except for one glaring convenience, the movie respects the viewer's intelligence more than I thought it would. It also does a pretty good job at integrating smart phones into the story and the way it favors practical over CGI effects, especially during the likely Duel-inspired driving scenes, keeps things visceral. As for the villain, his smugness really got under my skin in a memorable way.

I know I’m not the only one who often just wants to turn on the TV and put something on that offers exactly what you expect it to, but I still can’t help but feel disappointed that it offers no more and no less than what its two-sentence description on Hulu promises. Also, as someone who loves everything about the woods from their photographic opportunities to hiking through them, I was disappointed by the relatively ordinary cinematography. With that said, it's far from the best thriller mostly set outdoors I've ever seen, but when it comes to streaming offerings in this genre, you could do far worse. Oh, and it has a pejorative containing the word "delicious" you're bound to add to your lexicon.

I'm reading slowly and very intermittently through the book, The Age of Cage, and have barely gotten to the part of his career when he's doing Moonstruck and Vampire's Kiss. I noticed but mostly avoided the Vampire's Kiss discussion a few page's back for various reasons, but getting a sense of too much spoilers. I haven't seen it yet, only the trailer. I didn't know the screenplay was from the same person as After Hours (Joseph Minion) and the summary in the book sounds like... American Psycho crossed with the idea of Martin (which a dark comedy meshes with it coming from a similar place as After Hours). This sounds like a very different movie than what the trailer would have me believe.

That's literally how I described it in my review, LOL. I really recommend watching it ASAP and trying not to learn anymore about it. I was really pleased that I didn't know what was up.

While I agree with you about it being kind of a straight-ahead version of the premise, I liked that the main character (for the most part) behaved in a realistic way. I LOVED the part where he tries to trap her by getting her to help him with his car, and then she just drives off. Social conditioning would have made most people get out of the car, and even though I knew he'd get her eventually somehow, I almost cheered to see her not fall for the more basic tricks.

Also, I think I'm maybe mixing this up with another movie, but is this the one where there's a whole bizarre sequence at a model home?

I liked The Burning.
Is it ok to like The Burning? I can never tell with you people

It is perfectly okay to like the Burning.


*renames the thread to the "No MKS club"*

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I liked it and reviewed it a little while ago.

OK, I just found your review and you said some stuff that I was gonna bring up. I thought that the boys' behavior was sufficiently treated as gross. Multiple boys, that is. The girls' frustration with the constant horniness hit the right note for me. I didn't feel like it was being condoned. But I also agree that the boob shots undermine that small victory. And did the braless girl running for first base have to be filmed in Slo-Mo?

This might be due to my Seinfeld bias, but although Jason A's character appears in literally every slasher in one form or another, I thought he was one of the more amusing examples of the cliche. Totally missed Holly Hunter until the credits and had to rewind to find her.

Me, reading the opening credits:
Rick Wakeman - "cool"
Tom Savini - "sweet!"
Weinstein Brothers - "dangit!"

I'm always going to have a problem pulling for camp counselors who decide to do the deed while some of their campers are unaccounted for, but I've learned to ignore such things. For the most part everyone was relatable.

And finally this reinforces my view that rural slashers are better than urban slashers (in general).

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I thought that a) it was good to like The Burning and b) that I was the last person who hadn't seen The Burning.
And I guess now I am.

It's been over a decade since I've seen The Burning, I think it was an alternate cut of it though.


I remember enjoying it, but it's been so long I remember very little of it. It seemed like a Friday the 13th movie, but for someone who needed something other than Friday the 13th.

LOL, agreed.

Though I have more of a problem with scenes that go:
"Hey, I haven't seen Erica since last night. Isn't she with you?"
"Nah, she got upset and ran off."
"OMG, we need to find her! She's missing!"
"Naw, she's probably just off somewhere."

Like, sir, SIR! You think that upset teenage girls are just . . . hiding somewhere in the woods? Alone?

I generally agree. There's something about the wilderness and the way that woods/deserts/mountains can be their own kind of antagonist that adds a bit of grit to what happens on screen.

Mad God, 2021

In this stop-motion sci-fi horror, a gas-mask wearing man is sent into some sort of underground in an attempt to deliver a bomb. On his mission, he passes through many strange locations and encounters a host of deformed, other-worldly creatures.

I do quite like stop-motion as a medium for horror, as it allows for some imagery and sequences that might not be pulled off quite right in a live action film.

The creativity on display here is very cool, and I really enjoyed the way that the film mixed different styles of animation, with stop-motion being the main one.

I did start to lose steam with the story around the hour mark. I'm also not into watching torture on scene, so those sequences were a bit overlong for me.

Probably a great film to see on the big screen or late at night.

Wasn't the movie only a little over an hour?
Maybe you meant the 45 minute mark.

ETA: scratch that. I was wrong. 1h 23m

Yeah, it's about 80 minutes long, and at the moment I got a bit restless and paused it to see how much longer it had to go, I was at like 58 minutes.

I remember finding the final 20 minutes of Mad God weaker than what came before. While I was content with feeling the creativity of the first hour without having to worry about analyzing every scene, I felt the ending called for analysis more than the first hour did, resulting in some internal logic details with the character motivations (i.e., Who was trying to stop the assassin?/Who was trying to help the assassin?) that I'm not sure how to piece together. Also, the shifting perspectives kind of wore me down.

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That scene made my heart race as well. It's probably the most expectations-defying moment in the movie, not to mention an inspired nod to a similar scene in The Silence of the Lambs. Apparently, this is something the real serial killer Ted Bundy did to his victims.
That must be a different movie. The only scene that takes place in a house is at the killer's cabin.
If you can remember what movie it is, please share. Halloween is coming and my Horrorthon watchlist is much too short!

Exactly. It's basically a trope at this point, and in a movie that feels a little by-the-numbers, you'd expect it to work. So when she drives off, it's like "Whoa!". My only criticism of her actions was that I felt like she should have called the police, but I also recognize that (1) she was traveling, meaning there wasn't a specific group of police to be in touch with, (2) she was very emotional and going through a stressful time and (3) sometimes you call police with vague stuff like that ("There's a guy I think might be following me") and they're just like "Well, what do you want us to do?"


Oh gosh . . . hmmmm.

I know MKS has seen it. There's a guy chasing a woman. I know that the woman ends up also antagonizing a police officer or security guard who like pepper sprays her? They end up at a model home. I want to say there were paintball guns involved?

Okay, the movie with the model home is Hunted (2020)

Cool, I will check it out. I'm interested in any movie that has a Braveheart fanatic.