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2020 HORROR MOVIES


Dolfan in NYC

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I watched the recent The Grudge reboot on Starz while doing laundry yesterday.  It is not entirely horrible but doesn't bring anything terribly original to the franchise.

I did kinda like the way this version connects the various non-sequitur stories about the spreading of the curse in an almost police procedural manner.

Spoiler

The audience gets to see what happens to the victims of the curse as the main detective character reads the case file about the deaths in the orbit of the cursed house as she links the case files and police reports.

The one thing I did not particularly care for was the lack of skepticism and there were a few more bits that I found to be disconcerting.

Spoiler

In the remake of The Ring, the main character imperils herself because she doesn't really believe in the cursed videotape until it is almost too late and I'd expect that level of disbelief from the cultural standpoint of an American character.  In this Grudge reboot, there is a character that is tormented by the curse (and is naturally batshit crazy) who almost automatically deduces that there is a curse even before the curse begins to affect him.

The movie also makes the unforgivable sin of actually using the word "Ju-On" to refer to the Grudge curse.  The whole point of the original Ju-On was that the characters were oblivious to the nature of the curse.  The ghost story was played up as an actual ghost story.  No character should have intimate knowledge of the mechanics of the curse.

It also annoyed me that all of the Grudge ghosts made Kayoko's death rattle.  The other major change from the original movie is that the character of "Toshio" is a little girl and she doesn't have a cat.

I did mark out at the beginning of the movie because they used the house set piece from the original as the backdrop.  In the remake, the curse is brought to America by a realtor that goes to Japan to try to sell the house where the curse originates.

It's worth a watch if you're doing killing time while laundry and happen to have Starz, but it's not a movie I would seek out to watch.

Edited by J.T.
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Has anybody watched and of the latest wave of stuff to hit streaming?  I've been holding off on You Should Have Left and In the Tall Grass but might check them out soon.  We watched Relic over the weekend and liked it but what's up with Australian horror films pulling some trojan horse Big Issue deal?  I mean I really liked Babadook but can see how some would be put off by coming in to see a horror film and getting a rumination on mourning and guilt, and Relic was really just about Alzheimer's.  I mean it looked nice and had great atmosphere but the ending was very WTF until you figure out the metaphor.

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Finally got ahold of The Color Out of Space and it was pretty damn good. Stanley certainly did his job. "Colour" was one of my top three, if not favorite Lovecraft stories, but I haven't read it since I was in high school so I can't do a solid comparison. But whatever Stanley did was great work. He especially deserves credit for doing the one thing that would piss Lovecraft off worst which is put a black man in a lead role. (Interestingly, Mayhem and, yes, Burzum are on the soundtrack... somewhere. I didn't catch them and I heard "Feeble Screams from Forests Unknown" a thousand times when I was also in high school, and not since. Just like Lovecraft!)

Still, I liked The Beach House better. My friend asked me "what about Mandy" and all I could come up with was both of them let Cage "Cage" a lot. The Void might be a better film to do an apples to apples comparison? 

EDIT: I've also got to say that no matter how similar or not the story is to the original, the script Stanley and his co-author crafted is incredibly emotional as well as disturbing and disgusting as hell. That damn family so don't deserve what happens to them...

Edited by Curt McGirt
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On ‎8‎/‎11‎/‎2020 at 7:45 AM, Technico Support said:

Has anybody watched and of the latest wave of stuff to hit streaming?  I've been holding off on You Should Have Left and In the Tall Grass but might check them out soon.  We watched Relic over the weekend and liked it but what's up with Australian horror films pulling some trojan horse Big Issue deal?  I mean I really liked Babadook but can see how some would be put off by coming in to see a horror film and getting a rumination on mourning and guilt, and Relic was really just about Alzheimer's.  I mean it looked nice and had great atmosphere but the ending was very WTF until you figure out the metaphor.

You Should Have Left was kinda dumb, but In The Tall Grass was fairly decent.

If you want to watch a fairly cool horror movie with Alzheimer's as the premise, check out The Taking of Jennifer Logan.  It's a found footage joint that does a lot of things well, but nothing terribly original for the genre.

 

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The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Probably my favourite horror film ever. Contenders: Psycho (1960), Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Halloween (1978), Shawn of the Dead (2004) and Let the Right One In (2008).

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Lovecraft Country is fucking awesome.  The sweet irony of African-American protagonists in a story with Gothic / Chthonic horror themes.

Edited by J.T.
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7 minutes ago, J.T. said:

Lovecraft Country is fucking awesome.  The sweet irony of African-American protagonists in a story with Gothic / Chthonic horror themes.

Yes, yes it is.

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9 minutes ago, OSJ said:

Yes, yes it is.

What makes it even better is the knowledge that the racist old bastard is spinning in his grave over the protags.

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One of them named Atticus Freeman, no less.

The intro of Episode 1 was tremendous.  Atticus daydreams of everything from Jackie Robinson smashing Cthulu into green goo with a baseball bat to embracing his Vietnamese former lover who has somehow taken the form of Dejah Thoris, Princess of Mars.

Edited by J.T.
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On 8/23/2020 at 8:07 AM, J.T. said:

You Should Have Left was kinda dumb, but In The Tall Grass was fairly decent.

If you want to watch a fairly cool horror movie with Alzheimer's as the premise, check out The Taking of Jennifer Logan.  It's a found footage joint that does a lot of things well, but nothing terribly original for the genre.

 

Thanks for the recommendation!

You Should Have Left was decent if you go in not expecting much.  Felt like a feature length Twilight Zone episode.  I read that Nick Cage was originally cast in the Kevin Bacon role.  That would have been fucking horrible.

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6 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:

I am happy that Fangoria will survive as a brand and be used to launch new talent. 

For a while there, all we had was Bloody Disgusting's distribution deal with AMC to count on.

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After sitting on the shelves for a bit, Come Play has been greenlit for a Halloween release.

Come_Play_poster.jpg

Hopefully this movie and Candyman won't be theaters only releases so that I can give Xfinity all of my monies on Halloween day and program a proper marathon..  Not being in a theater and risking COVID infection will be an added bonus.   

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Had the day off, decided to catch first three episodes of Lovecraft Country. 

That opening sequence in the first episode! GODDAMN throw that on the big screen with a silly ginormous budget and practical fx and I'm good ❤

Just wrapped E1 and I'm hooked! Got popcorn and soda and I'm off to E2 ?

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So, Mom and Dad (2017) starring Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair. It's sort of like The Crazies, only rather than people going spontaneously insane and trying to kill everyone around them, they're all perfectly calm and rational except when they can see their own children, at which point they become murderously enraged and determined to obliterate their offspring. It's a bit of a slow burn first half, setting up who is who and that, but then when it goes crazy, it goes Nicolas Cage crazy. It's really perfect for him. Anyone else in the role, it wouldn't be half as good. My only caveats would be that, much like The first Purge (The first Purge movie, not the movie The First Purge) it sets up a large scale whole world event and then tells us the domestic story of one house, and that it's really short. Like seventy five minutes or something. Feels like a TV double episode, not a feature. Still, definitely worth a watch. And I even posted this in the Horror thread so @J.T. doesn't have to shout at me this time.

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I'll put this here because it's in a horror film, but I just caught after the thousandth time of watching it that when the Final Girl on the bale of hay that gets pulled up by her boyfriend to the second story of the barn in Friday the 13th III, when he drops her and they cut to her landing, THERE'S NO BALE OF HAY ?

I'd wonder how they could make that mistake but it's a Jason movie, of course it happened.

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