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J.T.

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Finally watching Eli Roth's trailer for Green Inferno, I realize something: EVERY one of his movies has the EXACT same plot. "Attractive American twentysomethings travel to a faraway land. They have lots of trouble already with the "civilized" portions of these piece-of-shit backwaters, but the hidden corners of these places contain even worse secrets, things which even the "civilized" locals shudder to think about. Eventually, all most mostly-all of our attractive (albeit incredibly obnoxious and xenophobically offensive) heroes are brutally slaughtered by these primitive, untrustworthy barely-people. The moral of the story: "NEVER TRAVEL OUTSIDE OF AMERICA, AND NEVER LEAVE THE FLY-TO STATES!!!" And people expected this asshole to be The Savior Of Horror, a few years back? Congratulations, dick, your career-best accomplishment will always be a nearly-wordless acting role in another director's movie.

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I'm not a huge Roth fan, but I think the moral of those movies is the opposite; the characters are entitled idiots "collecting experiences" by taking advantage of the resources of a foreign place they don't really have any respect for. He's taking the piss out of horn dogs backpacking through Europe and activists with no skills who think a white kid's mere presence in a troubled locale will fix everything.

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Yeah, but the foreigners are presented even less sympathetically than the protagonists. They've got no depth, no familiarity, no redeeming features; they're seen as the Other, just as much as the rampaging black villains in Birth of a Nation. We're put into the uncomfortable position of having to share the POV of the entitled idiots, always looking in with an outsider's view on these "exotic" locations.

Maggie was a disappointment. Schwarzenegger is perfectly fine in a rare dramatic role and Abigail Breslin tries really hard, but neither of 'em can overcome the script's limitations. And I don't just mean the clunky dialogue or on-the-nose symbolism (although both are definitely present and accounted for.) We're watching A Father Waits For His Daughter To Die: The Motion Picture, and it feels more like some really grim indy movie about cancer than anything you might think of when you hear "Arnold finally tackles zombies". It's explicitly said right from the beginning that Breslin is inevitably a living dead girl after she's zombie-bitten, and that there's no cure and no hope; so, yeah, get ready for ninety minutes of people brooding silently in dark rooms. Fans of icky body-horror stuff will find a few bits that they might like, but for everyone else it's a one bummer of a death march. (And hey, what's with the people in these zombie movies who always try to protect their dead, dangerous ex-loved-ones? WHAT IS THEIR PLAN? What is their exit strategy for keeping a cannibalistic zombie just hanging around?)

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 (And hey, what's with the people in these zombie movies who always try to protect their dead, dangerous ex-loved-ones? WHAT IS THEIR PLAN? What is their exit strategy for keeping a cannibalistic zombie just hanging around?)

 

 

Humanity craves normalcy, to the point where we will stick our heads in the sand and hope that everything will just turn back to normal.  These characters are the personification of that, they need to deny the fact  that there's a zombie apocalypse and that everything has gone to shit in order to keep a grasp on their sanity.  And sure their loved one has been bitten by the zombies and will probably turn into one, but they're just sick right?  And when you're sick the people in charge have the cure right?  So let's just wait it out and eventually the cure will be found and then everything will be back to normal, right?

 

It's been around since NoTLD and is played out as hell, but that's how I always interpreted it.

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So The Gallows was massively disappointing and basically made every mostake I hate about modern horror. It could have been great with a few small tweaks but the mistakes compound in a way that ruins the whole. Avoid.

 

You review is nicer than mine.  I came here to say.....

 

If you were curious to know if The Gallows is a piece of shit.......well, yes, The Gallows is a piece of shit. 

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I mean, give it a better ending and remove the "Cut away for implicit horror only to then retell from different device to show what was implied" then I think it could have been okay. It would still have issues with building scares over more than two minutes but yeah.

The ending is one of the worst I can think of recently. At first it's just disappointing. Then the scene jump epilogue happens. Awful.

I can't express enough how improved it would be just by

Having the noose prop correctly this time, Charlie is satisfied with the redux and since neither directly offended him he lets them go and they do romance things. It would have fit the overall narrative fine and felt satisfying instead of that horrible 'clever' twist I saw coming and dreaded in the first act.

I don't even GET the trying-too-hard Paranormal Activity knockoff at the end. Like....are they shooting for sequel potential? Because that'd also work easier if the concept was played straight given they added the urban legend quality to his name.

I dunno. Like Chernobyl Diaries it's a movie I could see the potential of and enjoyed a lot of parts while feeling the whole was a messy turdburger. And like Chernobyl Diaries, a lot of that would be fixed with a better third act.

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So The Gallows was massively disappointing and basically made every mostake I hate about modern horror. It could have been great with a few small tweaks but the mistakes compound in a way that ruins the whole. Avoid.

 

This makes me sad.

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smh at anyone who thought Eli Routh could be the savior of horror. 

 

He can gross people out, sure. But can he terrify anyone? I've never been convinced. 

 

There's something missing with him, IMO. He has no real sense of dread or pacing.

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Whoa. I love me some 30s horror, but I wasn't expecting Mad Love to be the creepy crack-smoking uncle of the genre. This movie is sick, going deeper into Freudian stranger-danger territory than any other film at the time (except maybe the 1932 version of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde). The whole "I have regrettably lost at least one (possibly more) body part to a dreadful accident; oh, there just so happens to be a brilliant-but-deranged surgeon who can transplant some body parts from a crazed murderer, how wonderful!" gimmick is just PART of what's going on here, with a post-Code film that got away with a hell of a lot more than I thought it would. And Peter Lorre does the impossible, and actually gives another performance as an impulsive psychopath which is completely different yet barely inferior to his genre-defining portrayal of such in M.

In the end, with these old studio pictures, it's tough to know who exactly to credit for the creative decisions. Who made this movie into so many scenes that are so very short? Was it scripted that way, or did the director make the choice (Karl motherfucking Freund, working with no less than Gregg Tolland aka "only the guy who lensed Citizen Kane" as his cameraman), or was it done by the editors, or even the producers or studio heads? It gave the picture a peculiar feeling of urgency that basically the exact same crew didn't manage to inspire in Dracula or The Mummy.

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I watched Creep last night, which is a horror/suspense movie from Mark Duplass. Duplass is most well known for being in a lot of the well known mumblecore comedy pieces from a few years ago. He's also Pete from The League, if you've ever watched that. Anyway, the movie is....fine? I wouldn't really call it good or great. Duplass is very good and genuinely unsettling as a mentally disturbed person. I guess I'll try and stay spoiler free, but I would say that the first half of the movie is very strong, and pretty tight. The tension increases steadily. I was actually surprised because I thought the movie was over and had just watched a short, but it turns out there was another half hour. That half hour feels tacked on and not nearly as good. The reason that so many horror movies take place in one locale is because when you leave said locale, the stakes are automatically lowered. They try and address why the cops weren't brought in and things like that, but it just falls really flat. I wish they had just sort of fattened up the first two acts a bit and left the ending ambiguous. I think that would have probably made for a stronger overall film. 

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smh at anyone who thought Eli Routh could be the savior of horror. 

 

He can gross people out, sure. But can he terrify anyone? I've never been convinced. 

 

There's something missing with him, IMO. He has no real sense of dread or pacing.

 

He lacks emotion.  Roth is just grossing us out for the sake of it, not because that's how a situation could possibly progress if all hell breaks loose.  And that's OK at times.  But not the way Roth tends to bludgeon you with it.  It's all bite without the bark.

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Hopefully Unholy Dragon will join me over here. I did not like the Friday the 13th remake at all.  I'll give it some credit. It had a couple neat throwback kills and they went to town with the blood/nudity but it was the worst cast and the worst Jason. Forget the cast, my main issue is Jason.  I didn't like the way he looked and I hated how he moved. He was running around the woods like an Olympian which some might find to be scarier but to me it's more daunting when the guy is walking and you're running and running and he's still walking but you can't get away. I didn't like that they delved a bit into how he's living. He was some kind of survivalist I guess.  I'd rather Jason be stripped of human elements and just be like a force of nature.  

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I thought from an acting standpoint, it was pretty easily the best cast of a F13 movie by far.

It's some times a bit too slick and polished, but it's secondly one of the best entries in the franchise.

The Nightmare remake was god awful.

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Well yeah, I'll always maintain that Freddy versus Jason was objectively the very best movie in BOTH franchises.

But I still don't understand the complaints about the portrayal of Jason in the remake. The survivalist stuff was all there in the very first time we saw the character in Friday the 13th part 2. And the whole "Jason never runs" thing is false and always has been. Most of the movies, especially the older pre-zombie ones, featured some moments where Jason actually shifts out of first gear and moves quickly.

And why would you want him to be more of an inexplicable force of nature? We've already got that. It's called Halloween. Jason is not Michael Myers, and one of the differences is that Jason has a much more physical and aggressive body language. Michael is Clint Eastwood, but Jason is Sylvester Stallone. Michael is supposed to be so mysterious and inhuman that he practically becomes a ghost at times; Jason isn't that. Jason's a big dumb hillbilly, presumably born with severe birth defects and raised by a crazy woman acting as a single mother. (Tell me y'all wouldn't want to see an F13 prequel involving psychotic young hot milf Pam Voorhees raising lil' fucked-up Jason, trying to shield him from the cruelness of the world and failing, maybe teaching him how to HUNT...) His act may copy Michael's shtick at times; but before he was resurrected from the grave, Jason was much more of a spiritual descendent of Leatherface, albeit a Leatherface whose family has been obliterated and is now all alone in this confusing grown-up world that he was never taught how to properly understand or deal with.

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