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2020 HORROR MOVIES


Dolfan in NYC

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On 10/9/2020 at 6:23 PM, FluffSnackwell said:

Looking at the artwork in the still image......I have no idea what the hell the cat is from in that logo but I definitely recognize some old friends on the left. I'm not completely sure but if the rodent is who (or what) I think it is, you'd have to have seen the batshit ending of a certain movie to recognize it.  I'm also kind of confused why the killer from Insidious seems to be on the right. Never mind that shit though, this one is going to heavily focus on Italian horror. Hopefully they'll cut back on Dead Meat dork's contributions to this one. 

I believe the Cat is a reference to GoodBadFlick's production company, Angry Orange Cat

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10 hours ago, jaedmc said:

Oh no I can't handle this kind of pressure.

Well actually my puppy was a handful last night, and so it took twice as long as it should to watch ONE CUT OF THE DEAD. So, no third film.

I want to check out Soavi’s STAGE FRIGHT, though. Good work, @Curt McGirt!

I just realized that I can watch a bunch of Full Moon movies on Prime, if I don’t mind sitting through some Elvira. They have Elvira’s 13 Days of Halloween. Finally see DOLLMAN  and TRANCERS.

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Caught From Beyond on one of Shudder's 24/7 streaming channels, and yeah, they wimped out on the eyeball scene too like the version on premium cable.  I had assumed it was going to be the fully, intact director's cut although there have been other movies that Joe Bob showed, which were missing certain scenes for whatever reason.  I'm good because I already have it on DVD and Blu-Ray, but that one scene must have been the entire reason for the movie's original x rating. I can't even think of the next most graphic thing in the movie that comes close to the scene

Spoiler

of brains being slurped through the eye socket, after the eyeball is detached via sucking/chomping and spit out on the floor.

Then again, all the Fulci eyeball trauma is shown fully intact on premium cable and Shudder. While the scene in From Beyond is grosser and looks slimier (therefore more organic and/or alive) than the effects in the Fulci fillms, the splinter scene in Zombie is still easily more painful looking. Maybe the effect being somewhat exposed by the tight pull-in and execution on the splinter scene from Zombie and maid scene in The Beyond makes them come across as less graphic or gross, but the way Joe The Plumber

Spoiler

gets his eyeball plucked out is every bit as sudden and graphic as Dr. Bloch's demise. 

 

Edited by FluffSnackwell
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I 'm not sure how much choice Shudder actually has in what version they get.

They talked about censored cuts with the Victor Crowley director on The Last Drive In. Joe Bob was pissed because it was missing some nudity, I think it was the dong shot in the library. The director said that when he was selling the movie for streaming(not to Shudder/AMC but whoever is above them. Comcast?) that he had two options. He could sell them either version of the movie(Dong or No Dong), but if he sold them the uncut version it would just be "released" and wouldn't be promoted in the New Releases/Recently Added folder. So basically like it never existed. So he chose to do the edited version just so it could at least be visible.

I don't know how all this streaming library stuff works. It's weird, and I kinda hate it.

 

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Yeah, what Jae said is probably the deal. I remembered hearing that same thing after posting the previous comment. Shudder only gets the rights to certain inferior or watered down versions due to rights issues that are out of their control. It was Victor Crowley I was thinking about from Joe Bob's show. I think Halloween IV may have also been missing cop's daughter's milkers. 

I was also going to comment how surreal it is that three of the big four Fulci movies are streaming on Encore/Showtime, but I'm pretty sure that a few of them were previously available on EPIX.  House By The Cemetery is the one I held out on buying a DVD/Blu-Ray of the longest. I finally purchased the recent Blue Underground Blu-Ray. Up until then, it was usually available on some streaming service and before that, I had a burnt disc of some crappy torrent.  I've always had some version of The Beyond or City of The Living Dead after discovering Fulci around 2007.  I thought about buying one of those new Zombie Blu-Rays with the holographic covers (probably would have purchased the splinter) but I had already brought the previous version less than a year before. Not enough of a reason to splurge again.

House By The Cemetery also used to pop up in TCM Underground's rotation 3-4 times a year, being temporarily added to their digital library for a week afterwards, and that's when I usually got my fill of it.  I listened to the commentary on the new disc the weekend before last, although the most interesting details from that have already went one ear out the other. One of the people on the commentary mentioned something that I was already sure of but I hadn't heard pointed out in any Fulci career retrospectives.....that The Sentinel was an obvious inspiration for The Beyond.

Edited by FluffSnackwell
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1 hour ago, FluffSnackwell said:

I think Halloween IV may have also been missing cop's daughter's milkers. 

Sheeeeeeeeyit, I saw them bladders unedited on AMC a week ago! Those censors must not have been looking close enough. I know I was haha

Is The Sentinel any good? Never seen it. I think it's pretty obvious that The Shining was an inspiration for House by the Cemetery too. 

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Horror movies I’ve watched this month (asterisk if it’s a rewatch):

Trog

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death

Daughters of Darkness

Dracula A.D. 1972

Season of the Witch

Theater of Blood

The Crazies

It’s Alive

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre*

Deathdream

The Hills Have Eyes

Humanoids from the Deep

Wishmaster

One Cut of the Dead

Child’s Play*

Save the Green Planet
 

I’m probably missing one or two.

 

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On 10/15/2020 at 5:37 PM, Curt McGirt said:

Sheeeeeeeeyit, I saw them bladders unedited on AMC a week ago! Those censors must not have been looking close enough. I know I was haha

Is The Sentinel any good? Never seen it. I think it's pretty obvious that The Shining was an inspiration for House by the Cemetery too. 

I think The Shining has been brought up as an inspiration for The Beyond too. The Sentinel is a bit long and drags in places. There isn't really much gore or actual murder until the finale. Until then, it's carried by atmosphere and the fashion model's creepy weirdo neighbors.....in an apartment that the landlord swears is unoccupied besides the model herself.  When the denizens of hell show up for the cursed midnight hour, they turn out to be a line of actual circus performers, and I don't mean jugglers or clowns. Besides the general plots resembling one another and one key character trait providing the major characteristic of crossing over into the beyond, I found one more similarity. That is how the zombies (reanimated cadavers) just sort of shamble and stumble around very similarly to the way the denizens of hell in The Sentinel stumble around. It strikes me as one more odd similarity between the films, since by all accounts, the zombies (reanimated freshly deceased cadavers) in The Beyond were something the German film financiers mandated by tacked on. 

A bunch of future stars have bit parts.....Goldblum as a fashion photographer, Walken as a detective. The main character could pass for Leslie Bibb's mom.  Last but not least, the model's boyfriend is none other than Jerry Dandridge. 

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Yeah I read the Wiki; the cast lineup was ridiculously stacked. 

Spoiler

Chris Sarandon as Michael Lerman

Cristina Raines as Alison Parker

Martin Balsam as Prof. Ruzinsky

John Carradine as Fr. Francis Matthew Halliran

José Ferrer as Robed Figure

Ava Gardner as Miss Logan

Arthur Kennedy as Monsignor Franchino

Burgess Meredith as Charles Chazen

Sylvia Miles as Gerde Engstrom

Deborah Raffin as Jennifer

Eli Wallach as Det. Gatz

Christopher Walken as Det. Rizzo

Jerry Orbach as Film Director

Beverly D'Angelo as Sandra

Hank Garrett as James Brenner

Nana Visitor (billed as Nana Tucker) as Girl at End

Tom Berenger as Man at End

William Hickey as Perry

Jeff Goldblum as Jack

Jeeeeezus...

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It was raining yesterday, so we ended up watching a few flicks: LONG WEEKEND, HAZE (2005), and PHANTASM: RAVAGER.

RAVAGER was better than I feared it would be. I mean, it definitely feels more like a crowd-funded fan film than an actual episode in the series, and that's despite PHANTASM's notoriously low budgets. But the narrative device of having Reggie going senile, and not knowing fantasy from reality: that genuinely fit in with both the general themes of the movie and with the larger, metatextual element of the films spanning four decades and involving the same actors (almost) all the way through. And it led to some really neat editing work, like the wheels of the Charger transitioning to the wheels of Reggie's wheelchair, or Mike in the "real" world telling Reggie about his dream, his monologue become a voice over of the Phantasm-world action, and then "Phantasm" world Mike finishing the voiceover. But also, it felt long at 90 minutes. So ... yeah.

Anyway, PHANTASM has always been more cool than scary (IMO), but this was definitely the least horrifying of the bunch. But it's also, weirdly, the most ambitious. Watching it after HAZE was an interesting experience. HAZE is a claustrophobic, 49-minute Tsukamoto flick, wherein our Hero, Shinya himself, wakes up in a cramped maze with no memory of how he got there. In once scene, he has to squeeze down a hall so narrow that the only way to do so is open his both and run his teeth along a pipe, while stepping over spikes and shit. It's just grueling. It's not the greatest film, but it's well worth the 49 minutes, and it's pretty impressive to see what someone can do with 13 days of shooting and a shoestring budget. (Also, and apropos of nothing, it seems like all of Tsukamoto's 21st century output is focused on his fear of a war breaking out)

Anyway, the thing I was thinking--and I realize that this isn't original--is that horror seems to work best in confinement. And so we get haunted houses, or space ships, or people defending a mall from the undead, etc. It seems like it's a lot harder to keep the genre as horror the more wide-open the world is. I think that's partly why ALIEN is a horror and ALIENS is an action film. As the scale increases, it seems the tension necessarily decreases.

I'm sure there are horrors that prove exceptions, but honestly, I'm having trouble thinking of any. I think horror often depends on an inhibited agency in its heroes, and giving them too much space to roam free makes the horror soften.

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Trying to get caught up.

#8 We Summon the Darkness

Okay premise, but once the shit hits the fan it completely loses tension. The actors carry a lot of the weight in terms of keeping one engaged. Amy Forsyth is putting together a fun body of work in the horror genre. She was great in her season of Channel Zero. Somehow Johnny Knoxville improves the movie greatly when he enters the scene.

#9 Hell House LLC 2

There's one solid scene but, this felt like it had more of the director's bad writing habits than the original. Some really bad acting and dialogue in this one. The finale didn't really work for me either. Just a lot of talking and explaining WHY something is scary or important and not letting the audience make it scary or important.

#10 Anna and The Apocalypse.

Finally things kicked up a notch. Great flick that got comparisons to Shaun of the Dead. I think I might like it just as much. There's one song that is absolutely the theme song of 2020.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wg2Bt10uIxc

#11 Splice

Hooo boy. What a weird mess. First off Sarah Polley is an actress we need more of. But man what a Freudian Nightmare this is. It's kinda worth it for the "But whyyyy?" factor. But it's not particularly scary. I had a fun time.

#12 REDACTED

My movie for Halloween Havoc.

#13 The Changelling

First part of a double feature that my wife programmed. She hadn't seen either. I'm less impressed with it the second time. It just feels less than the some of its parts. A couple of great scenes tethered together by some weak side characters and a muddled mystery. What is the deal with the girl and coal cart?

#14 Masque of the Red Death

I think this is one of my favorite movies of the time, and probably my favorite Vincent Price performance. He has these incredible moments of uncertainty, that lets the audience know he's vulnerable to being wrong. But he uses that to make you hate him even more when he doubles down on his douchebaggery. Absolute classic and I'm glad my wife got to watch it with me, and that she loved it almost as much as I did.

 

#15 Hell House LLC 3

Goddamn this had some promise. Loved the premise, but it wasn't allowed to stand on its own. Had to keep showing how many callbacks were being made through out the movie. Had to have terrible expository dialogue so the plot would work. Couldn't have just had some interesting characters putting on a doomed play. One memorable creepy scene that leads to nothing. A frustrating series to say the least. Each movie has a great "Ohshit" moment and then a bunch of junk.

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Got some more Paul Naschy for y'all! 

Frankenstein's Bloody Terror (the first Waldemar Daninsky movie, renamed by Sam Sherman to fulfill a contract to present a Frankenstein film when the film has nothing to do with Frankenstein ?)

Assignment Terror aka Dracula vs. Frankenstein aka The Monsters of Terror aka Reincarnator aka Los Monstruos del Terror aks The Man Who Came From Ummo (aliens, vampires and monsters oh my!)

EDIT: Whoops, guess I already posted Assignment: Terror. Well I have no idea if these are foreign language or subtitled or have a different picture quality so I'll leave them both up. 

Edited by Curt McGirt
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