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

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Theres a lot in the books to love, and I also listened to the audiobook version of TerrorTome, as read by Holness in character as Marenghi.

Roz, I need you to do this,’ I said, although I didn’t, in actual fact – that’s just a lazy phrase which helps steer a lost narrative back on course when readers are giving up in droves, and is, ironically, a major sign of bad writing. But I knew Roz would have encountered that a lot in her career as editor of books by authors other than me, and would no doubt have employed it herself to fix failing narratives in desperate situations, and thus I used it here to snap her attention back from her own internal abyss.
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Why not have Bluto as the slasher? Just have it start like a normal Popeye story with Popeye and Olive Oyl and Bluto show up to fuck shit up or whatever. Then you do the usual Bluto and Popeye fight, and Popeye kicks his ass after eating spinach. THEN have Bluto start to plot revenge and really try and kill Popeye. Like after the fight the movie does a 180 and it gets dark and Bluto turns Wimpy in to a burger meat, and just starts killing every one.
 
Vampirella said:
Why not
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That's the problem with all these lazy cash-ins on things hitting public domain is they don't even attempt to approach it in an interesting or creative way. It's all so lazy.

You could do a slasher movie with Popeye, winnie the pooh, peter pan, the grinch, steamboat willie, or whoever else but at least spend 30 minutes coming up with an interesting concept that takes advantage of the unique elements of the characters and world you are playing with.

They are more focused on trying to be the first one out and don't see to care about creating anything interesting beyond that.
 
urr13 account said:
That's the problem with all these lazy cash-ins on things hitting public domain is they don't even attempt to approach it in an interesting or creative way. It's all so lazy.

You could do a slasher movie with Popeye, winnie the pooh, peter pan, the grinch, steamboat willie, or whoever else but at least spend 30 minutes coming up with an interesting concept that takes advantage of the unique elements of the characters and world you are playing with.

They are more focused on trying to be the first one out and don't see to care about creating anything interesting beyond that.
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These movies feel like someone read all the shitty crappypastas about lost episodes and thought they were a good idea. They're just trying to make Suicide Mouse a real thing.
 
Vampirella said:
Why not have Bluto as the slasher? Just have it start like a normal Popeye story with Popeye and Olive Oyl and Bluto show up to fuck shit up or whatever. Then you do the usual Bluto and Popeye fight, and Popeye kicks his ass after eating spinach. THEN have Bluto start to plot revenge and really try and kill Popeye. Like after the fight the movie does a 180 and it gets dark and Bluto turns Wimpy in to a burger meat, and just starts killing every one.
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Just re-make Mandy, but with Popeye as Nic Cage and Bluto as the bad guy (and Olive as Mandy, of course). After his freakout, Popeye goes to his buddy Wimpy's trailer, but instead of the Celtic Frost Axe, he gets a can of spinach.

Maybe Olive is kept alive this time, since Bluto is just a brute and not some kind of drug crazed inter-dimensional cult leader, but then again, maybe he is.
 
I'm watching little Corey Gorey with my girlfriend tonight after explaining how batshit insane it is.
We watched ten minutes as a sorta preview and it's way better than I remembered.


There's certain levels of trashy movies that you expect off the color comments because the characters are so unlikable, but just dropping a hard R 5 minutes into your movie really just sets the tone.

Speaking of tone this level of white trash wouldn't be seen again at least until Rob zombie started making movies.

I'll be back with more tonight.
 
TV's Adam West said:
I'm watching little Corey Gorey with my girlfriend tonight after explaining how batshit insane it is.
We watched ten minutes as a sorta preview and it's way better than I remembered.


There's certain levels of trashy movies that you expect off the color comments because the characters are so unlikable, but just dropping a hard R 5 minutes into your movie really just sets the tone.

Speaking of tone this level of white trash wouldn't be seen again at least until Rob zombie started making movies.

I'll be back with more tonight.
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That one's a classic. It's like a dark version of the sitcom Married with Children.
 
Alright, had a fortnight plus to detox after some pretty terrible zombie/"zombie"/nigga-theres-no-fucking-zombies-in-this movies and ready to start bringing the zombi "series" to its end.

Thus far the rankings of what I have watched are as follows, though these are subject to change given my tism

Zombi 5: Hell of the Living Dead
Zombi 5: Killing Birds
Zombi 6: Dawn of the Mummy
Zombi 4: After Death
Zombi 4: Panic
Zombi 6: Oasis of the Zombies

At the moment its a contest of pure gore/cheese/visuals, as the stories of all these movies so far have been laughably shit, the characters barely existent at best and actively insufferable at worst, nothing resembling actual spoopy shit, and generally just cruddy visuals/audio across the board. This may well change as we get closer to the end of the list, as I have fairly fond memories of the next entry.

Zombi 3: Nightmare City

Premise: An airplane flies in from a military base thats had some unspecified nuclear flavoured accident, unleashing oatmeal-monsters intelligent and extremely aggressive zombies onto an unsuspecting city while a local news reporter tries to find and rescue his wife

Execution: We start without much ceremony with birds eye shots of some euro city as some nice bread and butter italian horror music plays bouncily along. Not quite Frizzi quality but still better than what I have heard so far. To my surprise and mild delight I seem to have found a subbed copy of the movie and thus I dont need to cringe at shitty dubbing which is neat. TV anchor is reporting some radioactive spill happening which is being vaguely covered up. At Wop TV headquarters the hairy protagonist is ordered to interview some professor involved, setting of a random bout of bickering about "revealing the truth" before he heads off to the airport to meet the professor's plane coming in.

At said airport a mystery plane arrives. refusing all hails and appearing abandoned from the outside, prompting some rather understandable concern as they call the cops, a bunch of soldiers, and for some reason a fire crew to head over and cordon off the plane, and Hairy Reporter tags along after seeing shit being afoot. Random military officer orders everyone aboard to come out with their hands up, slightly inexplicably as he has no idea where the plane has come from either and it has thus far just landed on an empty airstrip. Eventually it opens up and out stumbles the professor guy who Hairy Reporter was supposed to be interviewing.

Looking pretty hungover he randomly pulls out a knife and shanks the military officer guy, and on cue the rest of the kinda-sorta-zombies on the plane swarm out with various knives, hatchets, chains, farming implements and in one instance a croquet mallet to kill the shit out of the surrounding cops and soldiers while Hairy Reporter films. Interestingly enough they also grab the guns of their victims and start mowing down the reinforcements arriving which is pretty interesting to see in a zombie movie this old. For some reason many/most of these zombies are dressed in overly formal jackets and sweaters, and have some rather infamously terrible facial makeup that makes them look like they had a pile of ground oreos slathered over their faces in what is supposed to be radiation burns. Really is a bit of a shame because if these guys had good makeup it would really do wonders for the movie as a whole.

Hairy reporter calmly films the massacre unfolding from like 2 feet away, and the fight seen kiiiinda starts to drag as we see the zombies start drinking at the stab/slash wounds they leave....yeah I know this makes them technically vampires but whatever i'm not switching from zombies just for this. Finally realising shits getting a touch risky he hightails it out of there with the camera man as the entire airport is turned into a charnel house.....AND CUT TO 80S STEPAEROBICS. We are back at the TV station where the movie's excuse for boobies is taking place, and the mildly peturbed Hairy Reporter walks in to the recording booth to demand that his footage of the airport massacre be aired instead, which the higher ups quickly intervene to stop due to orders from random General guy who orders a coverup for standard dumb coverup excuse reasons. Cue another burst of "BUT WE MUST BROADCAST THE TRUTH" bickering and he leaves the scene.

Hairy Reporter is fired on the spot, and goes to call his wife who has just left for work at the hospital, and we cut to middle aged soldier guy fondling some italian boobies before they get a call. He gets summoned to assist in coverup/quarantine shit, and she stays behind after they chat about her spoopy art and how it gives him visions of death and how she is driven to make it because of her visions. Kinda random but probably ties in to the ending in some way, also the sculpture they are talking about overtly looks like the oatmeal zombie heads so...whatever its italian zombie horror. Random psychics are just part of the scenery.

Back at the studio and the stepaerobics are back on, only for one of the cameramen to discover a dancer's butchered body, signalling the zombies have found their way in. Cue overdressed zombies storming the set with kinda out of place slow-mo and we get some confused shots of the dancers being killed, sometimes with some pretty good gore, sometimes in ways that look like they are being raped, a cameraman randomly gets bonked on the head by a zombie wielding a two by four. Thankfully none of these zombies are fully oatmealified so shit actually works pretty well in a schlocky way. One chick gets her tit sliced off with a knife which i'm pretty sure was not in the version I last watched, not that i'm complaining.

Hairy reporter is trapped in the office by the zombies, but after throwing a speaker that randomly explodes like a fucking grenade he manages to escape through the chaos of the studio. At the hospital, Doctor Wife chats with her patients who also appear to be having some of those psychic death visions which she cheerfully dismisses. At a military HQ the General from earlier outlines how thus far the zombies are only attacking the outskirts of random unnamed city and speculates as to if there is some kind of plan in what the zombies are doing. The Middle Aged Soldier from earlier arrives and ushers in a corpse of one of the zombies for inspection. For some reason he goes out of his way to specify that its not an alien, and its stated that they are messed up by a fuckload of radiation, and that they can also infect others, but that they also need blood to function. Also that only a headshot can kill them.

After this exposition meeting, Middle Aged Soldier calls his mistress from earlier to warn about the whole "blood drinking radioactive zombies in sweatervests" thing and orders her to lock the doors, which she does after seeing the gardener has gone missing from the lawn, and his lawnmower is moving along by itself. Huh that may actually be the first halfway slightly creepy shot of this entire rundown thus far. It also establishes the zombies are there, which we see confirmed when she finds the sculpture from earlier stabbed through the eye with a bloody knife.

In another scenic italian villa, a vaguely younger couple are enjoying the sun while the zombies snoop at them from the shrubbery and we find the chick is the daughter of the General after a soldier comes to pick her up, and she tries to call him up, only for the zombies to cut the phone lines. Due to wacky shenanigans the couple flee in an RV, thinking the General is just being a killjoy, without noticing the zombies who have now slaughtered her escort. Hairy reporter arrives at the hospital to find Doctor Wife who is busy helping with a surgery, and we cut to a military checkpoint at a power station which gets ambushed by zombified soldiers who ruse the guards into letting them through before slaughtering them and knocking out the power for the city. The military is ordered to double down on the coverup and also told they are being cut off from further support by the government which seems dumb even by "retarded military coverup cliche" standards.

The hospital is now in darkness and Doctor Wife is sent out of surgery to pick up something, and we get some mildly spoopy shots of her making her way through the empty rooms with a flashlight as we see a mutilated corpse out of her line of sight on the floor, though the spoop factor is decreased by the soundtrack sounding in loud and proud. Eventually she runs in to a zombie and despite having no foreknowledge and the zombie in question just looking like an old lady with a bandage on her neck she freaks the fuck out and runs away in terror, only to stumble across some even hammier zombies and quickly finds her patients from earlier all dead as the hospital is now being fully overrun, before she finally finds Hairy Reporter. The surgery is interrupted by the zombies, and we get a hilarious shot of the head surgeon instantly throwing his scalpel like a shuriken right through a zombie's shoulder before the room is overrun.

More scenes of zombies killing shit happen, although sadly the meh cinematography and sound design remove any creep factor that should be pretty high in a scene like this, and the protagonist couple escapes in one of those old time mini ambulances. Next day the city is overrun...kinda. We can still see traffic going on as normal in the background but in the foreground we see zombies wandering and abandoned vehicles but I will forgive the movie for this. At Military HQ the government has apparently stopped bothering to reply to the General so he decides to end the dumb coverup himself and call in bombers to be on standby as he declares martial law. Protagonist couple engage in ROTOR tier philosophical musings about shit, and we cut to RV couple who are chilling barely twenty metres away from a bunch of corpses they have yet to notice. The guy hears about shit going down on the radio and points out to dumb wife how they have not seen anyone out in this allegedly bustling part of the italian boondocks, and as they stumble across one of the bodies they are ambushed by the friends they invited over who are also infected now and quickly killed.

Meanwhile Artist lady from earlier seems to have shrugged off the whole "someone broke into my home and left a bloody knife sticking out of my sculpture" thing and has finished fixing said sculpture, only for her terrified neighbour to knock on the door. Inviting her in for drinks the two realise she forgot to seal off the "coal hole" in the cellar which I guess is a thing in these villas. Stuff happens, Artist lady goes upstairs to get a gun, zombie hiding in cellar gouges out neighbour's eye and starts stabbing her in the tits, and incidentally these guys like ripping chicks shirts off so we get plenty of tiddy shots during the runtime, albeit usually said tiddys are very quickly perforated, we get more rapey looking shots as he and another zombie start to drink her blood as we cut to next day.

Protagonist couple are still trundling along in their ambulance and stop at a gas station due to running low on fuel. Hairy Reporter heads inside, and is decidedly unconcerned about the blood drenched axe he sees and after giving the place the barest of eyeballing decides it safe and brings in Doctor Wife for instant coffee and more pointless musings about modern technology and advancement and about the flaws in human nature. Doctor wife starts sounding straight up Kaczynski tier which is kinda amusing but this is getting old fast, thankfully though the movie has gone by nice and quickly and Hairy Reporter turns on the radio to hear that shit is fucked in the city. Zombies finally attack and the couple quickly prep a Molotov to blow up their vehicle and the zombies surrounding it before hightailing it out of there.

Doctor Wife begins dooming hard, and has to get the dumb woman backhanded out of her by Hairy Reporter before the two set off across the countryside. Middle Aged Soldier is watching shit unfold in a helicopter, and we get some shots of the zombies swarming beneath. Seems that they are going with the "bomb the shit out of everything" plan at military HQ which is pretty understandable at this point. Protagonist couple stumble accross what seems to be a church, albeit one with a hideous modern architecture, and after finding a dead soldier hanging from the bell rope Hairy Reporter wants to leave only for Doctor Wife to randomly start babbling about how "vampires cant enter the house of god" and drag him inside the main building. Turns out that was a fucking stupid idea as the priest has been turned and starts beating up Hairy Reporter with a giant candle before having his head smashed in with a candlestick.

Middle Aged Soldier discovers the airbase housing the bombers has been overrun and the pilots all killed, meaning military HQ now shifts to "fuck we screwed" plans, allowing Middle Aged Soldier to fly back home to rescue Artist lady, only to find her infected. We get a weirdly edited shot of him shooting her so hard it blows her had off, only for the next cut to show just a simple hole in her still very much attached head. Back with protagonist couple they find an amusment park full of corpses, which naturally means they walk in without a care in the world and are promptly ambushed by another swarm of zombies.

Fleeing to the top of a roller coaster as they use discarded guns and grenades to hold back the swarm with some surprisingly well done headshots, the plot threads finally intersect in the last 5 minutes of the movie as the Middle Aged Soldier notices them from his helicopter and flies in to try and rescue them by throwing out a rope. Naturally Doctor Wife decides to continue being useless and lets go, causing a rather comical moment of her dummy bonking hard against the support beams of the roller coaster as it falls.....and Hairy Reporter wakes up in bed next to Doctor Wife having dreamed the whole movie. Fucking lol.

Except....he has to get out of bed because he needs to get to the airport to interview Professor guy. Cut back to the first scenes of the movie, the plane lands again and as it opens up the movie ends with "THE NIGHTMARE BECOMES REALITY" in wopspeak and the credits roll. Technically we didnt see any zombies this time round so maybe he can finally get that interview this time round.

Analysis: A surprisingly ok piece of 80s italian zombie schlock though sadly one too ambitious for its own good.
  • Cinematography: Pretty disappointing, as shots are held for too long and the zombie scenes are filmed pretty terribly in a way that manages to drag on and feel like just random movie fight scenes and not "people being slaughtered by walking corpses" and it feels like a fucktunne of opportunities for good shots/moments are wasted due to the pedestrian camera work and directing
  • Soundtrack: Pretty good albeit overused in moments that would have been better quiet IMO, enough to inspire me to take a look at the soundtrack guy who was downright prolific
  • Effects: It really is a shame the best movie on the list thus far has arguably the worst looking zombies. Gore is generally ok but nothing especially impressive despite attempts at eye gouge/tit slice moments
  • Acting: Main protagonist couple are meh, and no dubbing to make shit worse. Zombies are overly hammy at times as well as inconsistent as hell in how they act/react to shit.
  • Story: Simple but effective enough, despite the overdesigned explanations/excuses for the zombies.
  • Characters: Nothing much of note but also nothing especially annoying or obnoxious.
  • Innovation: Actually a surprising amount. The zombies run and use weapons/vehicles (albeit inconsistently) and are smart enough to pose as normal people, cut phone lines, and sabotage power plants to make shit easier for them. Given this came out years before Return of the Living Dead this may have been partially inspired by the likes of The Crazies especially given the military angle but nevertheless its pretty neat
  • Scares/Kills: For the first time in this list a movie that has some vaguely creepy seeming shit. A couple of moments in the hospital after the power is cut when Doctor Wife is unwittingly walking into the middle of feeding zombies, and
Conclusion: Honestly I unironically kinda enjoyed this one. While the execution was crude and muddled the general concept of "straight up smart zombies capable of using guns and vehicles and acting strategic to get more victims" is done with surprising competence given the date the movie was made and how few movies before or after have used this angle on the zombie outbreak scenario. I would qualify this as one of those "imperfect first attempt that unironically deserve a well done remake to fully flesh out the concept" movies. That being said, the unabomber/ethical journalism musings got a little annoying and the zombie makeup was just plain terrible, and honestly the excuses for tiddy shots were getting downright silly by the end. Speaking of the ending, that was so fucking hilariously trash I cant even pretend to be mad.
 

Osgood Perkins, doing a Stephen King short story, produced by James Wan. This will probably be utter shit, but, honestly, the trailer looks kind of fun (I'm not familiar with the short story, but hopefully Perkins only takes the key parts/concept, because King is 99% complete garbage). Looks like Perkins going off in a different direction than normal, so, could be interesting.


Steven Soderbergh makes his first true horror movie. Could be a shitty modernization of The Others, or it could be something good. Soderbergh doesn't do a lot of mid movies, they're usually either really enjoyable or unwatchable. Don't really care for Lucy Liu, but I'll give this one a chance...on streaming/high seas.
 
Your Starter for 10 said:
(I'm not familiar with the short story, but hopefully Perkins only takes the key parts/concept, because King is 99% complete garbage)
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The basic plot is that the main character finds a toy monkey in an antique chest owned by his father that brings death to anyone close to him when its cymbals clap together. Instead of cymbals, this monkey looks to have drums based on the trailer.
 
I just finished I Saw the TV Glow, knowing almost nothing about it other than what was written in the Prime blurb. If the blurb had told me TV stood for transvestite, I could have saved myself almost two hours.

The sad part is, and I don't know what this says about me, I was really kind of enjoying it until I realized the whole thing was about a man wanting to be a teenage girl from a TV show he watched in junior high. But some of the themes sparked my interest: the way media was consumed and shared among loners in the 90s, fantasy as an escape, how our youthful fascinations look different in adulthood, how time seems to pass faster as you get older, Maddy's batshit insanity, and finally the possibility that she was telling the truth.

The movie's greatest sin is its lack of resolution. What does Owen do now? Does he bury himself alive? Does he drop dead from asthma? Did Isabelle run out of oxygen in the real/TV world? (This should have happened during the birthday party, when all the NPCs shut down and the candles stopped burning.) Finally, what happened to Maddy? I guess ciswomen don't matter in trans narratives. Every single one is dead or disappeared.
 
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