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2020 HORROR MOVIES


Dolfan in NYC

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I still love both Jason X AND Freddy vs. Jason. I must've see the latter at least three times at the theater. 

Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter has been on Comet recently and I caught the swordfight finale. It was awesome. 

There is one more thing I could bring up but will have to wait...

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On 10/29/2020 at 8:55 PM, AxB said:

Read this article:

 

I love both movies for completely different reasons, but if I had to chose which movie was better overall, I'd have to choose the original J-Horror classic.   Verbinski's effort has a lot of elements I admire, but it falls apart in the home stretch.

1. Thematically, I prefer the slow build of Ring to the jump scare punctuated pacing of The Ring.  If you are constantly being placed on the edge of your seat, there's no depth to plunge into when the final blow strikes.  By contrast, Ring builds on its inevitable dread frame by frame, slacks up to build a false sense of security, and then hits you like a ton of bricks.   The fragile hope you've been given when you THINK the curse has been lifted, is suddenly snatched away when Sadako comes creeping through the television set and makes her slow and deliberate march to claim Ryuji's soul.

You know in your gut that there is no escape for the poor bastard.   The visuals are absolutely terrifying.

By the time Samara arrives to snatch the light out of poor Noah, your nerves are already jangled.  Noah's death is academic and (worse) anticlimactic.  The nature of Samara's manifestation IMO further dilutes the suspense.  I am sure that someone thought it would be clever if Samara spirit resembled a faulty electrical signal since she crawled out of a television set and all, but the optics IMO are a bit silly.  Samara arrives on a garbled wavelength to keep her appointment with death while Sadako tears a hole in reality itself to meet her murderous deadline. 

Sadako's come a long way from her humble origins from the novel where she's a sentient strain of smallpox. (Read the books.  They are fucking awesome!)

2. Want to know why the ghosts in almost every ghost movie since 1998 resemble yurei / onryo?  Because Sadako is fucking scary, that's why.  Sadako's only identifiable features are her signature mane of long black hair thorough which peeks a single inhuman looking eye.  Less is more, folks.  I applaud The Ring for giving Samara a waterlogged appearance to further punctuate the disturbing nature of her death by starvation / drowning in the depths of that horrible well, but they never should have shown her face.

3. On the subject of waterlogged appearances, advantage goes to the US version in the presentation of the dearly departed.  Sadako's victims all have the same silly grimace on their faces.  Death by fear induced heart attack.  Not scary.  On the other hand, when I watched the scene where we got to see the state of poor Katie Embry's corpse, it scared the living shit out of me.  Katie and Noah's decrepit condition conveyed the idea that Samara kills by somehow forcing you to relive her agonizing death and experience the totality of her suffering all in one moment.

That is a horrible fucking way to go. 

You can see the "this curse will tear your shit to pieces so take it seriously" influence from The Ring in films like It Follows, Relic, Host (the Zoom conference demon movie that has to be seen to be believed!  Billion Million Stars!) and other films.  It is totally badass.  A near omnipresent supernatural force that is so powerful that it can physically mangle the bodies of the living is nothing to be toyed with.

This is not the Evil As Wile E Coyote super contrived modus operandi of Death in the Final Destination joints or Satan in the Omen franchise.

Your death is not made to look like an accident.  The nature of your demise is unmistakable and deliberate.  Something bad from somewhere worse came to collect its due.

4. The one thing that the US version gets right in the pacing is the skepticism.  No one in their right mind believes in curses even if they have a reasonable respect for the unknown.  You can't fault Rachel for not really giving a shit about the curse until the 11th hour when there is overwhelming evidence of the supernatural at work.  This is the "death clock" mechanism by which the US version uses to effectively builds tension.  Meanwhile for reasons which appear cultural in nature, Reiko automatically believes she is going to be the next victim of the curse from the get go.  It doesn't take much prodding.  Is Reiko just dumb or do all Japanese people have one foot in the present while the other is lodged in the folklore of the Sengoku period?

To be fair, the same thing happens to Koji Suzuki's male antagonist in the novel, but the "belief" in the curse is a by-product of the psychic imprint that the cursed videotape leaves on whomever watches it.   A pseudo-scientific explanation to be sure, but it is not a huge ask for an author to request that you buy into the mythology he's creating for you.  Ring the movie offers no such explanation for Reiko's unwavering (and correct) assumption that she will be the curse's next victim if she doesn't do something.  Most people incorrectly assume that this is some sort of cultural dealie when it is just Hideo Nakata leaving an element from the novel out of his movie. 

It is debatable whether or not this plot element is better off left in or out of the film.  One person's "human with grudging acknowledgement of the paranormal" is another person's "gullible superstitious moron," so IMO it might be best not to allow Reiko to be the spokesperson that helps foreign viewers of the Ring to paint the Japanese as a nation of civilized poseur dipshits that actually believe in ghosts.

Or maybe we're the ones being stupid by virtue of our general disbelief?  Who knows?

4. The ending of The Ring sucks.  There, I said it.  Aiden point blank asks is mom if she knows what will happen when they show someone his copy of the cursed video tape.  Rachel's answer is, "I don't know."  What the fuck do you mean, "I don't know?"  Of course you know.   Someone is going to die horribly.   That's what's going to fucking happen.  How pretentious can you get?   Here is one of the best examples of a nearly perfectly fine film ruined by a shitty ending.

Then you have the final moments of Ring where Reiko is driving to her father's house to show him the cursed videotape so that he can die instead of her son.  She understands the nature of the curse and accepts the fact that someone has to take her kid's place on Sadako's preternatural hit list, so better an old man in the winter of his existence than her son whose life has barely started, right?  This is the kind of parent that smuggles a gun into a courtroom with the hope that they will get the chance to pop a cap into the offender that is on trial for harming their child.   Reiko Asakawa is the 1998 Mother of the Fucking Year, hands down.  If only every child were lucky enough to have a parent like that.  The ending of this movie fucking rules.

That about sums up my feelings about both films.  A tad incoherent maybe, but that's what Killean's Red will do to you.

Edited by J.T.
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10 minutes ago, Execproducer said:

Nice way to casually drop back in. ? Too bad you missed HH.

Hope all is well with you.

Everything is everything.  Not great, but not bad either.  Lots of real life adult shit demanding my time and effort right now.

Ring vs. The Ring debates are a berserk button of mine, so I felt compelled to chime in.

I am bummed about missing HH, but my attention was focused where it needed to be.  I will try to participate elsewhere as often as I can.

Edited by J.T.
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Well, I might as well be thorough and talk about Sadako / Samara.

I hate the character of Samara.  She's a sadist and a petulant little asshole.  She uses her powers to hurt people just because she can and then has the nerve to be pissed off when her mom snuffs her by tossing her headfirst into the well.  Granted, no child deserves to die like that and we can give the movie something of a pass because Samara's true nature isn't revealed until the very end.  We are unaware of Samara's evil until it is too late.

Sadako from the movie is very interesting.  She ultimately wants justice for the way that Japanese society has treated her and her mother.  The tapes are the means by which she spreads her tale of woe and if a few people die, then so be it since Sadako believes that society at large is complicit in her family's suffering.

Ultimately, both fall short of the complexity of the character from the novel.  Koji Suzuki bravely uses his novel as a platform to draw attention to taijin kyōfushō.  To say that the Japanese have body issues is an understatement.  Taijin Kyōfushō is the uniquely Japanese fear of offending someone because your body features or your appearance are not in line with what is considered to be "normal."  One need not look further than the tragic events of Hana Kimura to see a brutal example of this.

Book Sadako not only has a social strike against her because she is a psychic.  She is also intersex and was born with internal testes instead of ovaries.  Yes.  Book Sadako is LGTBQ.

In the movie, Sadako's father, a noted ESP researcher named Dr. Ikuma, bludgeons her and pushes Sadako into the well because he fears her powers.   In the novel, Sadako is sexually assaulted by a man named Dr. Jotaro, a physician at a mental institution near the hospital where Sadako's father was being treated for tuberculosis.  Suzuki heavily implies that Jotaro murders Sadako by tossing her down the well not only to cover up his crime, but he also doesn't want it getting out that his victim was an intersex woman.  Dr. Jotaro fears the social stigma of having intercourse with an intersex woman more than he fears going to prison.

It is nothing for Jotaro to justify the escalation of the level of violence against book Sadako if it will keep his name clean and his gender unquestioned.  Would Jotaro had murdered Sadako if she weren't intersex?  The mind boggles.

Anyway, book Sadako contracts smallpox from Jotaro during the rape and the videotape is the means by which Sadako "infects" anyone who watches the videotape with the sentient virus that she hopes will result in her rebirth. 

The unfortunate victims of the "cursed videotape" are collateral damage on Sadako's path of reincarnation.   Sinister?  Yes.  Scathing social commentary?  Very much, but not quite as blood chilling as movie Sadako or Samara's deliberate body count.  The videotape that book Sadako creates actually implicates Jotaro in his crime, but the purpose of the videotape is not to bring Jotaro to justice.  The function of the videotape is to build the bridge that will allow book Sadako to transcend death.

It is also interesting to note that the other installations of the sad US Ring franchise make extensive use of book Sadako's resurrection plot device while the other films in the Japanese Ring franchise still cling to movie Sadako's never ending quest of social justice at the possible expense of every living soul on the planet.

Thank God there was no YouTube, social media, smart phones, or other portable devices back then, amirite?

I sometimes wonder if HIdeo Nakata chose to go with a more supernatural take on Sadako because he was too chicken to embrace book Sadako's LGTBQ origins and create a movie out of a book designed to shame Japanese notions of body awareness or if he felt that the complexity of the pseudo-science in the novel (Ring has more in common with medical thrillers like Robin Cook's Coma than it does with traditional horror novels from authors like Barker or King) was simply something that the average Japanese movie attendee would find too droll to be entertaining?  That is probably the basis for a whole different debate.

The final proof is in the scare.  To her credit, little Daveigh Chase knocks the role of Samara out of the park.  The stomach punch you experience once you figure out just how psychotic Samara really is knocks you flat on your ass.  Normally that would be great, but the character of Sadako exudes a million times more menace WITHOUT UTTERING A SINGLE WORD~!  The image of Sadako's crazed eye alone is enough nightmare fuel to last a lifetime.  Once again, less is more, folks.

Edited by J.T.
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If you missed my blurb,  Host (currently a Shudder exclusive) is fucking awesome!  It does in just under an hour what most horror films cannot do with twice the runtime.

Edited by J.T.
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So this is possibly a hot take, but... I think Hellraiser 5 and 6 are actually pretty decent, and quite a bit better than 3 and 4.

They don't actually play out in a manner that follows the rules setup in the earlier entries, and Pinhead is little more than a cameo, but taken as what they are, they are both pretty fun little Jacob's Ladder knock offs (the latter also has a fair amount of Memento to it) that I dug. Plus, limited screen time or not, Pinhead is just more interesting as a cold, dispassionate, almost natural consequence than he is as a straight up villain. 6 does fall down a lot on the "kinky but terrifying" and the gross gorey elements it should really have, but I'd rather have "mediocre to decent as a movie, bad as a Hellraiser movie" than "good representation of the Hellraiser mythos, bad movie."

The impression I get is this direction doesn't last long (actually, I saw parts of 8 years and years ago, and I'm pretty sure it didn't fit this at all, no clue about 7) but it made the last couple entries fairly pleasant, especially 5, as I continue this marathon.

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On 11/5/2020 at 3:21 PM, Curt McGirt said:

In case you ever wondered, Scream and Scream Again is horrible, don't bother watching. I just scraped that from my DVR. Price, Cushing, and Lee are all in it but couldn't save a mess like that if they tried. 

I found it to be entertaining, but a total bait and switch.  You think you're getting a horror movie with three of the all time greats, but you get a very different movie with some brief appearances.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Thinking of Ari Aster and Hereditary has reminded me that there are a lot of A24 movies slowly showing up on the Showtime Network.   The Witch, Under The Skin, and Ex Machina are all on light rotation and available on demand and Green Room was just added to SHO On Demand after debuting over the weekend.

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15 hours ago, J.T. said:

Thinking of Ari Aster and Hereditary has reminded me that there are a lot of A24 movies slowly showing up on the Showtime Network.   The Witch, Under The Skin, and Ex Machina are all on light rotation and available on demand and Green Room was just added to SHO On Demand after debuting over the weekend.

How did I see Ex Machine but miss all the rest of those? I think I did see Green Room was on and mistook it for Green Book. 

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On ‎11‎/‎24‎/‎2020 at 11:02 AM, Curt McGirt said:

How did I see Ex Machine but miss all the rest of those? I think I did see Green Room was on and mistook it for Green Book. 

I think all of the movies should still be in the SHO On Demand queue, but I have noticed that Under The Skin is transitioning to rotation on The Movie Channel.

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I am assuming that is a recent rights change because I watched Ex Machina less than 2 months ago on Amazon Prime but when I just checked it was gone from there but showing the Showtime listing

EDIT - yeah Midsommar is still on Amazon Prime so now I see why JT said slowly

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On ‎11‎/‎27‎/‎2020 at 8:06 AM, RIPPA said:

I am assuming that is a recent rights change because I watched Ex Machina less than 2 months ago on Amazon Prime but when I just checked it was gone from there but showing the Showtime listing

EDIT - yeah Midsommar is still on Amazon Prime so now I see why JT said slowly

I also think that there is a recent rights change, but only for the older A24 titles.  Tusk (yes.  shitty Tusk is an A24 release..) and the others I've mentioned are on SHO On Demand, but Netflix and Amazon still have the rights to the more recent A24 releases.  I think it will be a bit before we see Hereditary, Midsommar, or In Fabric show up on normal premium cable.

Edited by J.T.
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