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Showing results for tags 'horror'.
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Boy people were just waiting for Mickey Mouse to enter public domain Mickey’s Mouse Trap Also announced was a different movie entitled Steamboat Willie - that one is being done by the same people who did the Grinch horror film The Mean One
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James Wan has confirmed that the Conjuring 4 is happening. He also noted that the 4th movie "may" wrap up the franchise
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I am looking for some horror books to scare the shit out of me.
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Because of the preferences of the folks around here - Horror pimping could single-handedly overwhelm a General thread (just look at the first thread for the start of it). So here is your very own thread. Some places you might want to start (or totally disagree with) Film School Rejects (Top 50) Bloody Disgusting (Top 25)
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SLENDER MAN Oh @J.T.
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Children of evil, sons of night, and daughters of darkness the evil is loose, the evil is loose!!!! Film: Popcorn Chosen by: Nate This is one of those film that tried to ride the "slasher with the scarred face" wave that was kicked off by the success of "Nightmare of Elm Street". Add to that one of my favorite conceits in genre film - the fake film within a film (and three of them, no less!)- and you've got the ingredients for one of my favorite early '90s horror films. Reviewed by: driver This little gem from 1991 stars Jill Schoelen as Maggie. At the time Schoelen was the go to actress for B horror. In this movie Schoelen has a look that reminds me of Winona Ryder in "Beetlejuice". Anyways back to the review. Maggie is a college student and the she has a nightmare to begin the film. A student in her film class states that "Police Academy 5 has more character development than anything Ingmar Bergmann ever did." Okay. Sure why not. Her class goes to a film theater that is soon to be shutdown and demolished. It was once a library. Seems that every building was something else when it was built. The class decides to put on an all night film festival in "Projectovision". Ray Walston turns up as a the owner of a shop that has all of the gimmicks needed to pull off the festival. There is a nice "training montage" of the class getting the theater into shape for their festival. A reggae tune called "Saturday Night At The Movies" plays during the montage. During the screening of a movie(Possessor) Maggie passes out. The professor tells the tale of how "Possessor" came to be and that the director filmed all of the scenes except for the final one, which he performed live on stage during the movie's premiere. Maggie goes to her motherDee Wallace Stone) and asks if she had ever heard of "Possessor", Lanyard Gates. Her mother begs her to drop out of the festival and that she will get tickets so that they can go away on a vacation instead. The mother, Suzanne, receives a phone call from a mysterious voice saying that they need to meet and talk. She goes to the Dreamland theater where bulbs burst on the marquee and the glass falls at her feet. As she walks into the theater she finds Lanyard Gates face on the screen. The screen goes blank and Stone is left wandering around in the dark with a revolver as strange sounds come at her from all sides. She is snatched and pulled off into the dark. Cut to the opening of the film festival where almost every customer is wearing a mask or in a complete costume. A longhaired man in a cowboy hat steps up to the window where Maggie is selling tickets and tosses some crumpled up bills on the counter. As she takes the money and he steps away she hears the voice from her nightmare and the same one from her mom's phone call. She immediately leaves the ticket booth and begins following him. The first film to be shown is "The Mosquito". Highlight of this black and white film-within-a-film is a car being attacked by the titular beast and a man getting a skeeter needle into the top of his head and having everything sucked from his dome until all that is left is an empty husk. Later as the mosquito is being attacked by the military a giant mosquito flies out from behind the screen and over the crowd, which freaks out. The scene ends with the student who had been controlling the skeeter getting impaled when some nefarious ne'er do well uses his own remote to gain control of the beast. The film is directed by Mark Herrier. He is probably best known for his role as Billy in "Porky's". This was his only feature directing job, other than directing a few shorts in the Otts, he hasn't done much and his last acting credit was in '01. The second movie with in the movie is "The Attack of the Amazing Electrified Man", which has a gimmick known as "Shock-o-Scope"(which is a buzzer under a seat that shocks the seat's occupant when a button is pushed). Tina is the second to be done away with when she asks her professor for a quicky up in the catwalk. Maggie and her boyfriend run into dead Tina, but the killer disguises his voice and Tina's and moves her body around so that Maggie and her bf think Tina is still alive. The next person(the guy controlling the buzzers under the seats) is killed when "Tina" walks up behind him and binds him to his chair. As the Electrified Man kills people onscreen and people get shocked in their seats Buzzer Controller is electrocuted as he desperately tries to unplug wires from the console. After the second film ends a reggae band takes the stage and rocks the house so much the audience really gets into it. Okay they didn't rock the house, it just seemed like they did. As the reggae band is onstage Maggie runs into the killer who calls her "Sarah" and says it's time for her to rejoin her mother. Understandably Maggie takes off running and the killer lumbers after her. Cut to Maggie's nightmare replaying. Cut to Maggie running and bumping into another student(Toby) from her class. Cut to the reggae band on stage again. Volume cuts out. Found this on Youtube. At least this version isn't dubbed in Hungarian. And we have sound again. Maggie tells Toby that her name isn't Maggie, but Sarah Gates, and that Landon Gates is her father, and that Suzanne was really her aunt and not her mother. And Gates has come back to "finish the film" by killing her on stage. Reggae band IS STILL on stage and Gates has captured Maggie/Sarah. The reggae band is FINALLY done and the third movie with in a movie starts(this time the gimmick is AROM-A-RAMA!!!!). The killer reveals himself to be Toby or any other multitude of people due to his extensive collection of masks. Toby says that Gates really died during the original performance and that he had been sitting in the front row when Suzanne shot and killed Gates. His mother was a member of Lanyard's cult. Toby suffered extensive scarring from burns received in the fire and he demonstrates to Maggie/Sarah what he goes through on a daily basis to "look normal". Toby is waiting for midnight to "finish the film" and it is revealed that Suzanne is still alive. She is bound and strapped to a contraption directly across from Maggie/Sarah. Toby goes out into the crowd, next thing I know he's on stage with Maggie/Sarah preparing for "The Big Finale". As the original movie plays on the screen, Toby acts out it backstage perfectly mimmicking Lanyard Gates' movements. Cut to a scene of Mark climbing the marquee, the curtain opens and Maggie/Sarah asks for the crowd to save her because Toby is going to kill her. The crowd begins cheering because they think it is all a part of the show. The crowd begins to the countdown to midnight because that is when Toby is going to killer her. As the countdown reaches zero Mark slides down a wire and gets on stage and Toby starts whining "YOU'RE RUINING IT!" as he is impaled on the mosquito's suckers. Cut to a scene of a cheering crowd. Suzanne and Maggie/Sarah are reunited in front of the theater. Then Mark holds Maggie/Sarah as the end credits roll. Not a bad movie. It doesn't suck. That in and of itself is a good thing. There is no tension or suspense at all. I liked it and this was the first time I'd seen it since the early 90s.
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I don't do this very often, but once maybe twice in a generation an author comes along who is so different and so brilliant that I just have to say something. Keep in mind, I have a pretty damn high opinion of my own writing ability so when I say that an author easily young enough to be my daughter blows me out of the water, I ain't giving that shit up easily. Now here's the best part, you don't have to run to the library or buy an expensive book (I wish there was one to buy and I'd be all over it like ugly on an ape), but no, this won't cost you a thing but a few well-spent hours that you would likely otherwise waste on this here message board. Don't you just love how I can rattle on for a whole paragraph without telling you who the fuck I'm talking about? ;-) Okay, enough with the hype and bonus points to anyone that guessed that I'm talking about Alyssa Wong. Go to crashwong.net and click her bibliography, all but one story are linked for your reading pleasure. Start at the beginning, it's amazing to me just how good she was right out of the gate, continue on and if you're like me your mind will be blown at just how amazing this young lady is.
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The darkness envelops the night, the wind howls, the demons lurk... Oh yes, it is that dark and evil week my children, step right into the mouth of madness, into the land of sin, into HALLOWEEN HAVOC 2015. Up first, a recent chiller to tingle your spines You're Next Chosen by The Unholy Dragon (who didn't send an explanation, tsk tsk) Reviewed by that Havoc veteran Jingus YOU'RE NEXT (directed by Adam Windgard): 5/10 "Really? You HAD to do that RIGHT in front of me?!" Why are there so damn many home-invasion films being made nowadays? And unlike most horror flicks, many of them actually get picked up for wide theatrical releases. Why? What about this appeals so strongly to our subconscious, in today's current society? Certainly a lot of our culture does seem to have a "hunker in the bunker" mentality (for example, the insane-but-widely-held notion that everyone needs more guns... in what's already the most-gun-owning country in the world, at a time when our overall crime rates are at a forty-year record low). But, seriously, the past dozen years have seen a seemingly endless stream of movies which are basically R-rated versions of Home Alone. There's been so damn many, we're even remaking the home-invasion films of previous decades and from different countries: Straw Dogs, The Last House on the Left, I Spit On Your Grave, Black Christmas, Funny Games... jeez, enough already. You're Next at least tries to be a little different from the pack. The movie starts with a fairly well-done sequence of two random people being stalked and slaughtered by unknown assailants, just to let us know what we're in for. Meanwhile, just up the road, the main plot centers around a family reunion, being held at a big-ass vacation mansion in the middle of the woods. Wealthy retiree Paul (Rob Moran, falling far behind the rest of the cast with a terrible performance) and his mildly disturbed wife Aubrey (80s scream queen Barbara Crampton, aka "the poor chick who got head from a head in Re-Animator") are hosting a rare get-together with their four children and their significant others. The protagonists-by-default wind up being the oldest son, a wimpy professor named Crispian (current horror mainstay AJ Bowen) and his new girlfriend Erin (Australian should-be-a-star-in-a-fair-world Sharni Vinson). There's already some unpleasantness in the house, with old grudges and family dysfunction threatening to bubble over; but all that's put on hold when arrows start blasting through the windows and shooting people dead. The fact that the entire main cast of ten meatbags is made of a family and some of their lovers gives a slightly different feeling to this movie than most body-count flicks. Slashers and their sister subgenres often tend to be incredibly callous towards the emotional trauma that the survivors should be feeling over the deaths of their loved ones. I wonder if this is why so many massacre-style pictures tend to involve emotionally unbalanced teenagers who forget their late childhood friends seemingly minutes after their bloody demises, or are collections of people who mostly don't know each other all that well; it saves the filmmakers from having to DEAL with the aftereffects of all that gee-whiz gory violence. You're Next is better than average, by horror standards, at looking raw psychological vulnerability in the face. Don't get me wrong, it ain't exactly an Atom Egoyan film when it comes to closely studying the effects of trauma upon the human psyche; but at least it TRIES to make some moves in that direction, and for this I am thankful. The problem is, however... okay, how do I talk about this... let's just say, without spoiling anything, that something extra is happening. This isn't just a re-do of The Strangers with psychos killing because psychos kill; there's other shit going on that we don't know about up front. (It even explains a few things which, at first, seem to be glaring plot holes.) But... well, I hate to blame one movie for not being as good as another movie. Sadly, there is absolutely no getting around the fact that You're Next has the GREAT misfortune to be released in the same generation of horror films as The Cabin in the Woods. And comparing the two is like comparing Friday the 13th to Twitch of the Death Nerve: they're basically doing the same thing, but one of them is working at SUCH a higher and more complex level than the other. On the craftsmanship side of things, I have to give the filmmakers props; this is a well-made flick. The audio mix is especially noteworthy, with the sound effects sounding awesome and there's an unusually ambitious amount of fading back and forth between different soundscapes. An unusual score also helps, mixing 80s-John-Carpenter-style synthetic riffs with some 70s-Tobe-Hooper style atonal anti-music. The movie looks nice too, with excellent lighting and framing, leaving us with a bunch of pretty pictures (of oft-horrifying content) that have a neat warm candlelit-ish glow around them. The final touch is a cast of people who, by "most of these people are dead men walking" slasher standards, are fairly real-feeling and relatable human beings. They're not NICE people, most of them are actually right bastards to one degree or another; but they're the sort of bastards that we know from real life, and much less Phony Movie People than is norm for lower-budget flicks in this genre. But... back to that plot. It keeps spinning, with at least one or two more twists than the movie really needed. I might've given this an overall positive score with a 6/10, if the film didn't first get repetitive and then damn'd contrived and silly in the final scenes. "Someone sneaks through a window. This person gets stabbed/beaten to death. Then someone else sneaks through a window. Then that person gets stabbed/beaten to death. Then someone ELSE sneaks through a window. Then THAT person gets stabbed/beaten to death." I'm not even exaggerating, it actually goes on longer than I'm making it sound. And those last sixty seconds, pee-you! Who the hell thought THAT was a fitting ending to the puzzle-box they'd set up here? It's as if they were trying to set up a cross between Vacancy and Die Hard for the overall film, but then went with the finish from a Final Destination movie.
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Let's get a fresh thread started for this most wonderful time of the year. Off with all your heads!
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- A bit of a slow burn to start this season but they had to introduce all the characters. - I like how the witches abilities are full force rather than trying to water them down to blend into the real world. Instead of just blowing books off a shelf, the telekinetics can actually move objects larger than themselves. - Jessica Lange had a nice dig at Madame LaLaurie calling her "Mary Todd Lincoln". - Even though she's only showed two abilities so far, I'm going to say Zoe is the Supreme of her generation. - I'm looking forward to see what Lily Rabe's character will be like.
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I managed to hold tight until September came in before starting this thread. Figured we could use it to discuss our October viewing plans and give recommendations on what to watch this year.