2022 HORROR THREAD

[J.T.]

We discuss all thing scary in 2022 here!

I figured Rippa had enough on his plate with the AEW - January 2022 thread turning into dumpster fire.

Edited January 2, 2022 by J.T.

[odessasteps]

1 minute ago, J.T. said:

We discuss all thing scary in 2022 here!

Except the pandemic and/or politics. 

[J.T.]

Politics is stupid, not scary.

[J.T.]

Paging Curt.

In Fabric will be on Sho /  BET tonight at 8PM EDT.

[Curt McGirt]

I got it recorded. It has joined the near endless pile of material for me to watch that I never get around to. Just had to nucleatize a whole swath of stuff. 

[J.T.]

Aaaaand we're off!

Scream:  January 14th

The Black Phone:  January 28th

Stil no trailers for Nope or Dark Harvest even though there are potential hard release dates.

They Hear It, Firestarter, and The Crooked Man (part of the Conjure-verse) are all TBD 2022

Halloween Ends has a hard release date of October 14th but no official trailer.

[Curt McGirt]

Did they double up and film Kills and Ends at the same time like they were Puppet Master movies? I'd be surprised if they had a trailer this soon. 

Edited January 3, 2022 by Curt McGirt

[BrianS81177]

Over the weekend I rented Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City and Escape Room: Tournament Of Champions. 

Resident Evil was.... ok? I mean they were super faithful to the look and feel of the games but I definitely had some complaints:

Spoiler

I HATED how they made Leon look like such a hapless idiot. Loved the casting of Donal Logue as Chief Irons but they did nothing with him. I also feel like Tom Hopper and Robbie Amell werr miscast. Hopper as Chris and Amell as Wesker would have been much better fits in my opinion. Throwing in Ada at the end for a sequel that's likely to never happen was dumb too

As for Escape Room 2: 

Spoiler

Wasn't as good as the first one, and they get a little too carried away with the rediculous "Rich evil mega corporation that has a beef with some random 25 year old" stuff. The traps weren't as clever as the first one either I thought. And of course we have to leave it open for yet another sequel...

Escape Room 2 is only 99 cents to rent on Amazon, so if you liked the first one it's worth a rent at that price. I wouldn't buy the bluray or anything though. 

[RIPPA]

All of Us Are Dead

Hits Netflix on Jan 28

I enjoy that it is technically labelled as a "coming of age thriller"

[J.T.]

Hey, new Yellowjackets episode:

Spoiler

HOLY FUCK, VAN DID NOT DIE IN THE WOLF ATTACK~!!!

Misty has good intentions but she really fucking scares me.  Misty's club footed intervention to keep Natalie from relapsing into drug use was fucking awesome.  Too bad she played her hand and now Natalie knows that Misty is spying on her.

Jackie is a real asshole.  She's angry about discovering that Shauna fucked her boyfriend so now she wants to wreck Natalie's thing with Travis.  I am now intrigued about the timing and manner of Jackie's demise.  

Jack is not showing the signs of a man cheating on his wife.  He shows the signs of a man trying to reconcile.  Too bad that his wife is fucking some other dude.  Speaking of Adam, who the fuck is he and why is he blackmailing the Yellowjackets?

Certainly Taissa's wife isn't dumb enough to believe that Taissa's sleep disorder is the reason she's being so weird.  And too bad because it looked like a breakthrough in their relationship when Taissa confessed. 

I laughed my ass off when the coach revealed that he is gay.  He totally lied to Misty about being attracted to her to boost her self esteem.

RIP Laura Lee.  Go with God.

 

Edited January 5, 2022 by J.T.

[(BP)]

I went on a tear over the holiday break and watched a bunch of stuff, mostly giallo. 

Opera: I haven’t seen Opera in about ten years. I remember not loving it at the time, but it’s always stuck with me, and most of Argento’s other work pales in comparison for me (I like Suspiria but it never hooked me like it seems to have for so many.) Argento movies function sort of like musicals (or porn) where there’s a series of set pieces strung together with a story solely designed to move us along. The nonstop camera movements and atmosphere here make for the best exposition scenes for me in any of his movies that I’ve seen, along with the kills being top notch.  What draws me to giallo movies are their dream-like magical realism quality, and this is fantastically haunting in the same way Fulci’s House By the Cemetery is for me.  It’s also very self effacing, with a major element of the story being about a self-indulgent horror filmmaker trying to achieve mainstream acclaim by making bold, exorbitant production choices. I’m always a sucker for a lurking killer in a theater (so much so that I watched another similar movie shortly after this.) It’s hard to believe after making the single best Phantom of the Opera takeoff that Argento made such an awful Phantom movie with Julian Sands a decade later. 

Tenebrae: This was my favorite of the Argentos I watched for the first time. Beautiful, unseemly, absurd. Anthony Franciosa has that effete middle aged man swagger that made Elliot Gould and George Segal stars. He’s one of the most engaging leads in any of Argento’s movies; I’m sure it helps that he speaks English and doesn’t require the overdubbing. Plus, he has John Saxon as a scene partner (Saxon returns in another somehow more insane movie I watched later.) Daria Nicolodi is lovely and has a quality that grounds a lot of Argento’s work in something approaching reality. The scene where a woman is chased by a wild dog until she seeks shelter in the worst possible place is perfect. It has a really great ending punctuated by one of Goblin’s sickest scores.

Spoiler

 

Cat o’ Nine Tails: I think this is the earliest Argento I’ve seen. It plays a bit more like a 70s paranoid thriller whodunit than what would later be known as slashers. Karl Malden as the blind protagonist is the opposite of Franciosa in Tenebrae; I don’t know if it was the Tower of Babel shooting style throwing him or he was just trying to match energies with his costars, but he’s very odd. There are plenty of Argento staples here: 70s pseudoscience, child waif orphans in danger, amateur sleuth’s interfering with murder investigations, etc. Not bad by any means, but not my favorite.

Inferno: This was the weakest of the Argentos I watched. I love the idea of the Three Mothers and a trilogy about each of the coven headquarters, but in practice this one didn’t do much for me. I think I prefer his slashers that sometimes hint at the supernatural more than his witch movies (I haven’t seen Mother of Tears yet, but I doubt I’m missing much.) The performances here are more stilted than the eerie or funny ones in the other movies I watched, and even most of the kills don’t do much for me. Pretty underwhelming ending as well.

Lords of Salem: I was on enough of a witchcraft kick that I revisited this for the first time since seeing it in a theater and I liked it more this time. One reason is that I visited Salem on an awesome trip last year, and seeing the location shots of places I was familiar with was fun. It’s a mood piece more than a structured story, and Rob Zombie really goes for it with the atmospheric horror. My two biggest criticisms from initially seeing it stand: the little Devil guy needed a creepier character design, and it was a mistake to give the main character (a totally game Sheri Moon) almost no dialogue for the last the third of the movie.

Stage Fright: I’ve been circling this one since I saw the Blue Underground trailer a few years ago. The premise of a psycho imprinting himself on a ballet dancer because she sought treatment for a sprained ankle at an insane asylum is so funny. The birds head mask is cool, there are some great kills, and a pretty spectacular climax and closing scene. It’s campy and grotesque fun, which is all I can really ask for from this kind of picture. 

Nosferatu the Vampyre: I did not expect to see my favorite Dracula movie at this stage in my life, but here we are. Werner Herzog’s gorgeous and poetic remake of the Murnau silent classic gets to use the character names from the Stoker book as they’d recently entered the public domain. Herzog pays tribute to the Murnau film and the Dracula films that followed it while finding his own way to approach the material. The opening scenes are lovely and serene. The brilliant Bruno Ganz and the otherworldly Martje Grohmann are the best Harker and Mina. They’re more mature than in other versions, already married, and their love feels genuine. I love Ganz’s journey to the castle; the beauty of the natural world dissipates into a dour, hellish, nightmare. Klaus Kinksi’s Dracula isn’t a suave sexy aristocrat or a demonic harbinger of doom like Count Orlok. He’s a man trapped inside a rodent-like body who’s minimal supernatural powers hardly diminish his absolute misery and ennui. Even being able to control the minds of the Renfields of the world has become a burden and he greets his slave with bored contempt. The way the plague subplot is explored really hits different these days. The deviation from the source materials’ endings is a welcome bleak twist that I didn’t see coming. I’m not going to go overboard on the Kinski praise since it seems he was a real life monster. I am perversely curious about the awful looking unlicensed pseudo-sequel Vampire in Venice. It’s on Shudder so I’ll check it out eventually. 

Church: Another picture from Stage Fright director Michele Soavi. I was mostly intrigued by this one because it had begun production as Demons 3 before being reshaped into a new story. Everything feels ill defined, the movie can’t make up its mind about who’s the protagonist, and it feels like they struggled with practical effects budget. It has an early performance from Asia Argento shortly before she became a frequent collaborator with her father. one thing going for it is that it has an all timer priest kill, which covers a lot of ground in horror movies. 

Hellmaster: I may have seen this twenty years ago or I’ve just seen a ton of clips of it over the years. This is a bewildering movie that can’t make up its mind about whether it’s a slasher, sci-fi horror, or religious allegory. It takes place on a sparsely populated college campus where everyone is a philosophy major (I think.) We get brutally performed poorly written dialogue involving some philosophical  concepts (although the way the objectivist bully eats it after discovering maybe survival of the fittest isn’t where it’s at is pretty good.) John Saxon is the villain, although his government experiment mutant hellspawn are the primary antagonists. The mutant from the vhs cover is about as close to both Freddy and Pinhead as they could’ve gotten without getting sued. Saxon seems to have filmed nearly all of his scenes in the same room in one day by himself. It hardly ever looks like he’s actually sharing space with the other actors. Dawn of the Dead’s David Emge plays a reporter (I thought he was a professor but Wikipedia says otherwise) out for revenge against Saxon. Wikipedia also says one of the protagonists had psychic powers and I have no recollection of that. Yikes. There’s an insanely abelist character on forearm crutches that has a self pitying breakdown and yells at a woman who just watched her boyfriend get murdered because she won’t date him. Not worth really delving into more, it’s just bad. 

Audition: I haven’t watched this in about 15 years. Still holds up. I wouldn’t say I didn’t “get it” when I saw it in my early twenties, (I understood it as a relationship movie using a horror framework) but I don’t think I realized the double meaning of the title. Asami passes Aoyama’s audition but he doesn’t pass hers. There’s a lot about the male gaze and its affects on relationship dynamics, especially during Aoyama’s unconscious vision at the end featuring all of the women in his life. 

I also just started Yellowjackets, so I’m looking forward to reading @J.T.’s posts when I’m caught up. 

Edited February 7, 2022 by (BP)

[J.T.]

On 1/3/2022 at 5:42 PM, BrianS81177 said:

Over the weekend I rented Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City and Escape Room: Tournament Of Champions. 

Resident Evil was.... ok? I mean they were super faithful to the look and feel of the games but I definitely had some complaints:

  Reveal hidden contents

I HATED how they made Leon look like such a hapless idiot. Loved the casting of Donal Logue as Chief Irons but they did nothing with him. I also feel like Tom Hopper and Robbie Amell werr miscast. Hopper as Chris and Amell as Wesker would have been much better fits in my opinion. Throwing in Ada at the end for a sequel that's likely to never happen was dumb too

As for Escape Room 2: 

  Reveal hidden contents

Wasn't as good as the first one, and they get a little too carried away with the rediculous "Rich evil mega corporation that has a beef with some random 25 year old" stuff. The traps weren't as clever as the first one either I thought. And of course we have to leave it open for yet another sequel...

Escape Room 2 is only 99 cents to rent on Amazon, so if you liked the first one it's worth a rent at that price. I wouldn't buy the bluray or anything though. 

My daughter and I did not like Escape Room 2 for similar reasons.

We both enjoyed RE: Welcome to Raccoon City though.  It is nearly note perfect to the game to the point where it leaves you totally in the dark as to what is really going on.  It is as close to a true adaptation as we have gotten so far.  I didn't really mind the other issues you brought up.  The reviews that criticize this movie for being more faithful to the game than it is to the original franchise are stupid.  This is a fairly decent reboot heading in the right direction.  Too bad that there probably won't be a sequel.

[BrianS81177]

Apparently it's doing decently on the premium rental front, so who knows there may be just enough to warrant a sequel after all? 

And to be clear I'm not criticizing it at all for faithfulness to the game. That part I liked a lot actually. Mainly just the stuff I mentioned in the spoiler box. 

Edited January 6, 2022 by BrianS81177

[J.T.]

24 minutes ago, BrianS81177 said:

Apparently it's doing decently on the premium rental front, so who knows there may be just enough to warrant a sequel after all? 

And to be clear I'm not criticizing it at all for faithfulness to the game. That part I liked a lot actually. Mainly just the stuff I mentioned in the spoiler box. 

Oh, I understood where you were coming from.  A lot of the negative reviews I've seen have dinged it for diverging too much from the movie franchise, when the whole point of this reboot is to diverge from the movie franchise and get more in synch with the games.

I lost my shit when Birkin transformed into a G-Adult and marked even more when Chris began shooting the eyes on its shoulder (ie. STRIKE THE WEAK POINT FOR EXTRA DAMAGE~!).

[J.T.]

A21 Horror on SHO OnDemand alert.   They added Midsommar today. 

Edited January 6, 2022 by J.T.

[Curt McGirt]

Holy shit! I've seen Friday the 13th 3D about a thousand times and until reading the subtitles just now never realized the bikers were gonna SET THE BARN ON FIRE. Jason could have stood back and watched acres filled with wildlife and humans perish. Maybe he's a secret conservationist? 

[J.T.]

7 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:

Holy shit! I've seen Friday the 13th 3D about a thousand times and until reading the subtitles just now never realized the bikers were gonna SET THE BARN ON FIRE. Jason could have stood back and watched acres filled with wildlife and humans perish. Maybe he's a secret conservationist? 

I suppose that makes sense.  If there were no forest, there'd be no vacation spots where horny college kids could congregate and wait to be slaughtered.

It is also not lost on me that the biker gang was made up of two black people and one white guy.  Friday the 13th 3D found a way to uphold the horror trope of a black person being the first victim despite the main pool of victims being white.  

I will not lie.  I was happy when Jason killed Shelly.  He was a jerkass and he had it coming.

Edited January 7, 2022 by J.T.

[The Natural]

My Sister was open to the suggestion seeing Scream (2022) with me at the cinema. My Sister hasn't gone to the cinema since a kid. It's a rare series where I'd rank them from best to worst by their actual release date:

1. Scream (1996).

2. Scream 2 (1997).

3. Scream 3 (2000).

4. Scream 4 (2011).

[Curt McGirt]

3 hours ago, J.T. said:

I will not lie.  I was happy when Jason killed Shelly.  He was a jerkass and he had it coming.

Dude Shelly had it in the bag but he just couldn't help himself from ruining it. Then he goes into passive aggressive self-defense mode. Methinks in this day and age he would be known as an incel. 

Fox and Ali weren't the first to die BTW, it was the couple running the local corner store. 

[J.T.]

7 minutes ago, Curt McGirt said:

Fox and Ali weren't the first to die BTW, it was the couple running the local corner store. 

I totally forgot the order the of the murders.  You are absolutely correct.

Edited January 7, 2022 by J.T.

[J.T.]

Speaking of black people dying (not) first in horror movies, I was totally bummed when Jason thwacked Sissy in Jason Lives.  I had a HUGE celebrity crush on Renée Jones.

NOOOOOOOOOOO~!!!!!!

Edited January 7, 2022 by J.T.

[J.T.]

Yellowjackets!  Oh shit, son!

Spoiler

Shauna fucking killed Adam or whoever he was for no reason.  It turns out that her husband was the blackmailer trying to bilk Taissa for money and Shauna just happened to be involved. It turns out that Jeff wasn't cheating on Shauna after all.  The woman Shauna saw him with was the girlfriend of the loan sharks, so Shauna's revenge affair was for naught.  It isn't terribly surprising how this duplicity might make Jeff and Shauna's marriage stronger.

Now the grown up Yellowjackets need Misty's help to dispose of fake Adam's body.  Wow.

Well, the girls finally went batshit.  They held a Doomcoming party to celebrate the homecoming they will miss as well as their impending death by starvation.  Fucking Young Misty's shrooms ended up in the stew the girls prepared for dinner and all hell broke loose.  At first they were just trippin', but then Jackie snuck off with Travis to spite Natalie.  At first it looked like the rest of the Yellowjackets were going to gangbang Travis after catching him and Jackie post coitus, but then Lottie and crew went nuts and the girls tried to eat the poor bastard instead.  Natalie was there to make the save but there is no coming back from this moment.

The Lord of the Flies thing has finally begun.  Now I am curious as to what happened to Jackie and Lottie since it looks like neither of them survived.  Who will eat and who will be eaten?

Edited January 11, 2022 by J.T.

[driver]

Excellent episode.

[Neil Koch]

On 1/7/2022 at 8:00 AM, J.T. said:

I suppose that makes sense.  If there were no forest, there'd be no vacation spots where horny college kids could congregate and wait to be slaughtered.

It is also not lost on me that the biker gang was made up of two black people and one white guy.  Friday the 13th 3D found a way to uphold the horror trope of a black person being the first victim despite the main pool of victims being white.  

I will not lie.  I was happy when Jason killed Shelly.  He was a jerkass and he had it coming.

I saw Part 3 in the theatre and the whole place cheered when he died.

[Curt McGirt]

Dream double bill for me: Part 3 in 3D and A New Beginning. SLEAZE ME UP, DADDY~!