beer_good_foamy

Rewatch: 10 Cloverfield Lane is still one of my favourite movies of recent years. There's a couple of reasons for this, and for why I think it's one of the most relevant horror movies recently, no less so after the discussions of the past few weeks, but since this is one of those movies where you really want to be unspoiled the first time I'm going to put it under a cut.

( Spoilers! )



I also watched the first two episodes of Slasher, which... nah. Nicely done and everything, but it feels way too much like a regular 96-minute slasher movie, albeit a good one, stretched to a whole television season. But it's impressive what the Canadians manage to get away with putting on television screens in terms of gore.

Sweet, Sweet Lonely Girl, whose name is Adele, moves to small town to help care for her agoraphobic aunt who won't leave her room, befriends and then falls for local girl Beth who suggests she shouldn't spend her life locked inside an old mansion taking care of a relative she doesn't even like, and so she starts to neglect her duties and skimp on the shopping and medicine for the ungrateful old bag...

Very short at 76 minutes, especially since the ending comes very abruptly and I'm not sure it works. But up until then it's got a really nice gothic mood, washed-out New England winter and smelly shuttered rooms, lots of little details that makes me want to rewatch and look for clues, and a growing sense of unease and unreliability that seems to be going somewhere really good until it... doesn't. A pity. 15 more minutes and this could have been really neat.

For some reason I felt like watching something about creepy young Austrians. So it was either this or re-watch Funny Games, and I'm not doing that to myself.

Goodnight Mommy has twin brothers, about 10 years old, living alone in a remote country house with a mother who's evidently had some sort of surgery to her face since her whole head is bandaged. Also, something is different about her since the surgery, at least that's what the boys tell each other. And who can you trust if not twins in a horror movie? They just want everything to go back to the way it was, after all.

Where is our real Mommy?

This is the sort of movie that spends a long time not letting you in on what's going on except that there's something very wrong. Against a mountain backdrop straight out of the Austrian Tourist Board the house has walls covered in blurry photos, skulls in the picturesque root cellar, and of course the cockroaches. It's a slow burn to a rather disturbing finale that's not necessarily for the weak-stomached, and there's one or two twists that are telegraphed way too early, but I like it. There's something dark at the heart of every pastoral scene of the gallant south.

About halfway, so maybe it's time to dig up some more indepth discussion.

Since watching It (2017) a few weeks ago, I've had this perhaps not entirely rational urge to rewatch It (1990) again. I remembered it as pretty goddamn awful, and even if I wasn't entirely blown away by the remake, surely it would look even worse now?

And you know, I'm not sure it does. ( Spoilers for both movies )

Look at the date. I couldn't not.

I'd never seen the Friday the 13th remake before, and probably for good reason. Not all remakes suck (The Thing, The Fly, 12 Monkeys...) but most modern remakes of 70s/80s horror movies do. But let's face it, the Friday the 13th movies were never all that good to begin with. Yeah, Jason Voorhees is an iconic movie monster with his hockey mask and machete, but the actual movies he starred in? Sadistic, by-the-numbers slashers nowhere near as scary as the first two Halloween, as fun as the first few Terror On Elm St, or as subversive as Sleepaway Camp. So a remake that straightens the whole mess out isn't necessarily a bad idea.

It's just a pity that Friday the 13th (2009) doesn't really try. Rather than turn it into an actual horror movie, they just condense the first three F13 movies into one with no added suspense or character or anything except an even more unstoppable Jason running around the woods in a hockey mask killing teenagers in various inventive (though not as inventive as in the original movies) ways, except now he's also occasionally kidnapping them and keeping them alive for... some reason. Having never watched Supernatural I don't know if Jared Padalecki has more acting range than he shows here, but I certainly hope so.

Pumpkinhead was recommended to me by killerweasel and I'm really grateful. They don't make 'em like this anymore. Based on the title and the opening scene I was expecting something a lot trashier, and if it'd been made in the early 80s instead of 1988 it might have been, but of course by now both Stan Winston and Lance Henriksen were fresh off The Terminator and Aliens (and Near Dark in Henriksen's case) and it shows. This movie may look kinda shlocky at first, but it means business when it takes the ol' obnoxious college kids vs vengeful rednecks plot to a place it doesn't usually go.

OK, so maybe creaturemaster Winston is a bit too fond of showing off his monster, and maybe most of the college kids don't get nearly the same character depth that Henriksen's character does, but this is still a very watchable movie from that brief period in the late 80s where horror was sort of trying to put on some muscles again before the 90s came along and, well, we know what happened then. Pumpkinhead. Salutations.

Killing Ground: An Australian couple goes out into the woods to camp out over New Year's Eve, and are dumb enough to take directions from a local redneck. Stop me if you've heard this one before.

Actually don't, because Killing Ground makes the most of a simple concept to take us somewhere rather nasty and disturbing. It soon becomes obvious that there are two different timelines here - something already happened just hours or days ago, and there's still fallout from it to come. Fair warning: this gets very violent, and not of the comic-book or hockey-mask slasher version. It's not miles from Eden Lake or The Strangers, though Eden Lake had something to say with it whereas this just seems to want to make the audience sick. I'm not sure I like this, it's thoroughly unpleasant, but there's something to be said for how unrelentingly bleak and matter-of-fact it is.

A Dark Song kept me absolutely transfixed for most of it. I love to see a modern horror movie that does entirely its own thing. A very simple story: A woman hires an expert in the occult to do a ritual to let her speak to her dead son. And when I say "occult", I don't mean a ouija board and holding hands around a table with cheap CGI: I mean locking themselves in a house in the middle of nowhere for months doing some serious metaphysical self-searching black magic OCCULT. At least that's what he tells her they're doing, but of course they may just be two not-entirely-stable people driving each other mad... Very simple, and very intense. The ending could probably have been better, but damn, the trip there is worth it.

The Lure. Now this was FUN. Imagine... um... either Splash as a horror musical, or Ginger Snaps with mermaids. In Polish. Except completely different. OK, the songs don't all quite work, but the whole thing - two mermaid sisters being put to work as singers in a sleazy Polish strip club and getting caught between the hunger for love, for fame, and for human flesh - is just so delightfully weird. Not your typical horror plot (if not for the gore, I'm not sure it would even qualify) but damn, I'm glad I watched that.

Little Evil, another recent Netflix original. Adam Scott of Parks & Rec and The Good Place plays a guy who's coming to realise that his brand-new stepson isn't just having issues with the new man in his mother's life, but is actually genuinely the Antichrist. So now he may have to kill a six-year-old to save the world, and explain it to his wife as well. Basically a comedy version of The Omen, school uniform and all.

This was certainly a lot more fun than yesterday's movie, and there are definitely things here that work. I just wish it had gone just a little more over the top; as it is it feels a bit too much like a 90s Steve Martin movie (as opposed to an 80s Steve Martin movie) with some added horror elements. And no Steve Martin, even if the cast isn't bad (Clancy Brown!). For all the hellfire in the plot, the whole thing is just a bit on the lukewarm side. But, y'know, entertaining and a good game of spot-the-movie-reference.

I really feel like a classic tomorrow, though.