/horror/ general megathread - Let's talk about movies and shit.

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Ged! said:
On the topic of school shooter movies, Duck! The Carbine High Massacre is an old favorite of mine. Not a found footage movie, but it's surprisingly well done for what is really just an exploitative attempt to cash in on the Columbine massacre.
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I had a school shooter double feature over the weekend after seeing Zero Day recommended here and finding Duck! after browsing Vinegar Syndrome. Duck! was a lot better than I expected for it being shot on video, felt like a Troma film in the best way and Zero Day felt real. Would recommend both
 
Saw Alien Romulus and it was just okay, which is a higher praise comparing it to the other 21st century Alien films.

Other than that I saw the Steamboat Willie movie, "The Mouse Trap", really needed background noise, but it is shit but surprisingly more fun to watch than the Pooh Horror movies. Helped this movie felt like a shitpost movie made for people to watch on Saturday night while getting high while the Pooh movies took themselves extremely seriously trying to set up lore and mysteries
 
Trap has a great premise but requires a better director M. Night. De Palma directed a similar film, the flawed but underrated Snake Eyes, and that is all I could think of whilst watching it. I knew Shyamalan was a Hitchcock fan and it shows here.

It falls apart once they leave the concert. There is Frenzy effect (that scene with the potatoes) in the movie where you end up rooting for the serial killer because there is an absence of a hero. We end up respecting the killer because he is skilled at what he is doing. That is something to be played with but it is all incidental because M Night is so cliched that he does all this unconsciously. Our murderer has mommy issues because well, you know, that's what you are supposed to do for a film like this. He has OCD because serial killers are methodical. The film ends about three or four times and with an unnecessary and uninteresting twist. Boiler plate stuff.

It reminded me of The Guest, especially the ending. Another film where the charisma and skills of its lead overrides how we should feel. That we do not see Harnett kill anyone helps. However, The Guest is a classic. It is not beholden to the past. It grows from its influences.

Harnett had some bad lines but he performed them well. He is not a bad actor, he was just shafted with some duds early on in his career.

This applies to Alien Romulus, too, but there is a line in Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols where he writes that we "are not free to be crabs". We cannot linger and wallow. We must move forward, for better or worse. This applies to life as it does to art. Trap and Alien Romulus were fine, unoffensive films but the aesthetics of the latter was just a poor imitation of what Alien had naturally, and the serial killer character of the latter was a rehashing of Hitchcock's predilections.

Then again, Trap could just be a product of nepotism to promote Saleka Shyamalan's music.
 
I tried Outwater and I couldn't finish it. One of the women is so fat it's distracting and a very boring film. A lot of modern found footage movies forget they need horror elements and some even have no ending.
 
I watched Longlegs tonight. Didn't really care for it. Just hinging everything on "it was the devil lmao" seems really lame and lazy for what is ostensibly a detective story.

The lead actress was great. Nic Cage was okay -- some scenes he was really good in, other scenes he seemed to just slip into his usual over-the-top goofy acting that he often does.
 
Knock-offs of the film Alien have been in the news a bit recently, what with Romulus playing in theaters, so why not watch some others, I thought. So I watched The Terror Within, a Roger Corman-produced movie from nineteen eighty-whatever. It's in some kind of underground base in the future and not in space, but it's kind of the same deal.

It features George Kennedy (top-billed, but definitely not in the lead role), some time after Cool Hand Luke but before the Naked Gun Trilogy. Man's gotta eat and he's neither the first nor the last actually good actor to end up in something like this, but compared to (for instance) Klaus Kinski or Donald Pleasence or whoever, he doesn't feel so at home in a horror movie. Although he was apparently in a few, so nevermind. Nice to see him anyway.

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Those of you who have a lot of Media Literacy or perhaps possess multiple PhDs in areas related to art interpretation might have noticed that Alien contains very subtle themes of sexual violence. Well, Roger Corman has no time for that kind of artsiness, so this is a film about rape monsters committing rapes. He did a number of those. The movies I mean, not rapes, afaik.

I slept through some of it but it seemed okay. Does not surpass the likes of Alien Contamination or Galaxy of Terror, though. There's a Terror Within 2 (featuring R. Lee Ermey) so I guess the paying public must have enjoyed it. Maybe I'll watch that one next.
 
Another Corman produced Alien ripoff I recommend is Forbidden World (1982). The monster is cheesy but has a certain charm to it. The tits and gore is fun. Plus they kill the beast by feeding it cancer.

Recently I watched Sputnick (2021) which was a pretty dull Russkie picture that had great cinematography and a Prometheus-inspired creature. But it was so slow and didn't have enough to keep it interesting.
 
I was on a found footage kick a while back and thought I'd share my thoughts on the ones I watched:

Hell House LLC- This was great. Easily one of the best found footage horror movies I've seen. Grade A atmosphere, scares, and set design. Which I think comes from the fact they actually filmed in a haunted house. The cast was pretty good too, although I think at one point I saw the female actress corpsing in a scene. But still, our initial male protagonist is actually really likable, starts as kind of an annoying doofus but once the crazy stuff starts to happen he takes it super seriously and starts acting like a normal person, it makes him relatable. The move still suffers from the "Why not just leave?" problem but it's a little better justified here. I also really appreciate what the third move does, it's an incredibly cheesy film but it does something you usually don't see in found footage horror.

Horror in the High Desert/ Horror in the High Desert 2- These were just okay but too slow and the second one was insanely anti-climactic. There was some good build up in the first one and the climax is pretty great but overall it's more like watching a true crime documentary and it's just a little bit boring for a long portion of the movie. Both still have some good scares but they could've been better.

Gonjiam Haunted Asylum- It was good but overrated in my opinion. I had heard that this was one of the better found footage horror movies out there and while it had a lot of good moments in it it still didn't scare me like Hell House LLC and some others. Nothing to really complain about though.

The Den- Stupidly mediocre. Everyone's an idiot and computers are treated like magic.

The Tunnel- Pretty good but also a bit slow and feels like it's building up to more than what we get in the end. There are a lot of good scares in this one but it could've been better.

Butterfly Kisses- I guess this one is kind of clever and I appreciate the meta take on it but it's not scary or particularly that interesting.

Crowsnest- Mediocre. Just a found footage version of Wrong Turn.

The Houses that October Built- Loved this one and it was almost perfect. It's not a scary movie but it's interesting, I think I had the most fun in the early parts when they're just traveling to and experiencing the various haunted houses and you get the faux interviews with the people running them. Overall the movie had a really good idea and if there was just an extra five minutes at the end it would've been literally perfect and there would've been no reason for the sequel to exist.

Savageland- It was okay, pretty interesting way of doing things with the photographs, had a good atmosphere and build up to learning what happened.
 

Looks good. It looks like the shower scene is in response to the lack of sex in the 2nd movie, especially regarding the sawed in half scene.
 
The Burrowers seemed like a subversion of the Western genre especially with the anticlimactic ending. It could be a part of a Western horror double feature with Bone Tomahawk or Tremors 4.
 
BrunoMattei said:
Looks good. It looks like the shower scene is in response to the lack of sex in the 2nd movie, especially regarding the sawed in half scene.
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Does look good. I hope they don't pussy out on the kids with the mall Santa. Or with the black cop trope, which could go either way. Also the blonde chick is horrible, will be nice to see Art take care of her.

Glad to see it's keeping up the Art unmasking stuff, for whatever reason I find that hilarious. Like he's covered in blood and has an axe or a chainsaw and has literally just killed someone, and then takes off a mask or hood or something and is like "It's MEEEEE, ART!!! HAHA GOTCHA," I mean we knew it was you Art, you are literally carrying a bloody axe. Makes me laugh every time.
 
Your Starter for 10 said:
Glad to see it's keeping up the Art unmasking stuff, for whatever reason I find that hilarious. Like he's covered in blood and has an axe or a chainsaw and has literally just killed someone, and then takes off a mask or hood or something and is like "It's MEEEEE, ART!!! HAHA GOTCHA," I mean we knew it was you Art, you are literally carrying a bloody axe. Makes me laugh every time.
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Art is like a dad joke on steroids. He finds it all hilarious and that's all that matters.
 
Iron Father said:
Art is like a dad joke on steroids. He finds it all hilarious and that's all that matters.
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Art is the most fun I've had watching a Slasher in a long time. It's good that they made him his own thing and didn't try to just do another masked killer.
 
Found in the depths of Tubi, a direct-to-video pic from 1991, The Boneyard. It starts off with a couple of detectives dragging a reluctant, traumatized psychic into a case involving what appears to the remains of three children. For this, they have to visit the titular mortuary, where you might get a comedy vibe since the front desk is being manned by Mrs. Poopinplatz, played by Phyllis Diller who is sans her usual wig for this role, and also features a ponytailed mortician played by Norman Fell, but once the "children" are revealed to not be children at all, well.

I mean just look at these. I know it's cliche to make a big to-do in public about preferring practical effects to CGI but what direct-to-video, indifferently shot on a smartphone type of DTV film like you often find on Tubi and Hulu has creatures like these.

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