The third film is
The House by the Cemetery and it's only thematic trilogy. I think the third is the worst of the three and even the thematic connection is little loose there. Glad to see you liked
The Beyond
I've seen The House By The Cemetery (in the same month but i had abandoned the thread at the time) and didn't like it. Clearly the themes they had in common went over my head, i honestly barely remember either only that i liked The Beyond quite a bit.
This is what i posted, i'm sure it's terrible and nonsensical, i can't defend it like i said i barely remember it:
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The Beyond
This was completely nuts. The opening was incredible; very drab with a brown colour palette obviously supposed to denote that this was in the past, what it actually did was make everything seem really nasty and evil. A problem i've had with Giallo so far (to be fair i've seen like four) is that some times they are way too campy and ridiculous for me to get into, camp is not something i deal with well. Not that this film is without camp but that opening got me in the right sort of mood for this sort of thing.
Some of the acting wasn't good of course, more than anything i found character reactions really baffling. Like the redheaded girl who just stood for five minutes watching her mothers face disintigrating without screaming or running out of the room for help or trying to stop this from happening in any way; there was loads of that. There was also these weird lulls when there was an attempt to cobble together some sort of plot i really couldn't care less about. The horror parts were really great though, just tonnes of kinda dated messed up imagery with an excellent soundtrack; clearly the strength of these types of films.
The spiders scene was utterly horrifying, as i've said loads here i really hate spiders; just the noises in that scene alone won't leave my head. The face munching didn't actually bother me because the up close way it was shot meant you couldn't see them properly it was them slowly coming towards him or when they were crawling up him that was revolting to me. That was another weird reaction, one of the spiders was munching his eyeball and he was letting out these really mild yelps the kind you'd expect if you saw one in your bathroom, not one devouring your face.
One weird thing i really like is that i couldn't tell you what exactly happened here, there was some book and a blind witch like girl and people were horrifically dying then coming back as zombies or something...i dunno. Think it was a curse at the start or something, i really don't care. Oh yeah the hotel is one of the seven gateways of hell, that's it haha. It just looked and sounded great at times, that was enough. The last 20 or so minutes especially when it went full on insane, and i loved that it went with a pretty horrifying ending.
Really? I've always had the impression that Phenomena divides opinions a lot. At least I've read quite a few bad reviews. IMDb score is quite high for a horror film though. It's just weird mess in my opinion and the soundtrack is quite awful (I like metal but it doesn't fit there at all).
What Argento doesn't divide opinions? Feel like 52% of the
Suspiria opinions i've heard are it's glorious and 48% are it's a boring confusing mess. And that's only coz i speak to so many movie nerds online, if i went purely by public the latter would be closer to 90%. I have no idea if
Phenomena is good but it's at least liked by most horror dorks i know.