Marathon of Madness

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Tonight is Cabin Fever. I've updated the OP with movies I've liked, didn't like, whats next etc. A lot more informal.

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Cabin Fever


Eli Roth gets close to making a strange, entertaining and gory horror movie but it falls flat around a little over the half way point into a form of parody and needless weird. A group of college students rent a cabin in the middle of the backwoods in order to "party man". Soon after they get lodged into their new cabin a hermit with a disgusting flesh eating disease shows up and the students scare him away and violently burn him, and the virus starts wreaking havoc on them.

Its a bit like The Thing in the woods or maybe more comparable to... hmm, not many virus based horror movies are there? Basically as each student gets infected nobody knows who to trust and they wind up reacting in admittedly realistic ways. One guy bails eventually, one works to quarantine everyone, two are affectionate and try to fix the problem, etc. The characters are pretty dynamic and it was where most of my enjoyment of this movie came from. I know what its like--Splinter. Except without the gigantic monster. I wish more about the virus would have been explained and many the scope increased a little. The latter is hinted at during the doom and gloom ending, but no information about the disease or its origins are hinted at beyond the box and a "curse".

The movie starts to decline into weirdness once the cop shows up and his only concern is partying but it does give a very solid sense of being completely, totally hopeless in... a town with a secret. We'll never find out whats in the box, but its more than likely supposed to be a cure. This, the bunny suit, the actual "party" and the ending are needless backwoods 'horror' that really dragged down an otherwise acceptable pacing and atmosphere. Eli Roth surprised me with this one when I first watched it. It was creepy at times, and also more gory than I imagined. A rather aimless but smart gore horror in the woods is a good summarization. Roth took his career into a level of parody after this however, and never made anything close to this movie.

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Don't Look Now

Alongside Rosemary's baby this is one of my favorite 'surreal' horror movies of this style. Heavily symbolic, oddly dream like, with strong characters and an ever impending sense of doom. Don't Look Now does the latter perfectly. After the introduction you are never at ease. Everyone you meet on screen seems strange, not to be trusted, and you're watching a magnificant spiral into insecurity and terror. There's a lot going for this movie. For its time it was incredibly ground breaking killing women, children and showing full frontal nudity and also a lot of blood. The dialog is oddly written and a little thin and could be labeled as the worst part of the movie but you can pass it off. The true horror and immersion comes from the wonderful set pieces, images, acting and over symbolism on some objects or areas.


The finale was something no one saw coming. Its a little bizarre but it makes sense after the montage explaining the twist. A trick which every single twist ending film has used following it, from Saw to Usual Suspects. Its a creepy and gruesome movies and one of my favorites.

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Videodrome

A compellingly weird Cronenberg film that first got me into his odd, body horror style and his incredibly weird writing. Though I must also say it was put on this list by mistake. Its not horror in the slightest so I can't really do it much justice by reviewing it though. Still a solid movie, but not horror.

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May

This movie had me interested for a good half hour or so. The character was really interesting, the dialog was solid, and it was relatively creepy and got me sucked in. It was just "odd" so to speak. I could tell things were going down hill for the movie at some really cliche moments. Introducing the lesbian, and biting the guy's lip, set it up to be an all too predictable gore masher and that's what it turned into. What started off as a compelling and mildly creepy character study turned into your basic revenge plot with no real substance or charisma. They just started introducing random characters just so they could die when it previously spent 45 minutes just building up the main three, then killing all them too.

Had possibility but fell short at the half way point.

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Silence of the Lambs

A really complex, intense movie with some of my favorite characters on film. The dialog is gripping and really keeps you interested and Hannibal Lector is one of the smartest, most sinister villains on screen that I have seen. To be fair this isn't a horror movie and to go into raving detail would be unfair. My favorite aspects of the movie are simple: Both villains, and the chemistry between Starling and Lector... in the first half.

I think the film goes down hill fast when Lector is put in that cage after the meeting with the senator. Plausability goes out the window and my suspension of disbelief was shattered during that hour or so it took to end. That's my last complaint; It goes on too long and the chemistry between the character's starts to unravel.

Still a remarkable, but flawed, movie.

Tonight is Kwaidan, nearly 3 hours long.

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Kaidan

This is an anthology film with four movies in one, all short stories/ghost stories put to picture. And I've gotta say right off the bat this is one of the most visually appealing and artistic movies I've ever seen. All four tales are lucid and deliver some chilling buildup and visuals. Pause anywhere and you'll have to soak in the art and the expressionist style of the film. The sky is almost always a macabre painting, the costumes are very fluid and symbolic, the stories are great and the acting in all four is awesome. I found myself a bit creeped out 5-6 times during the whole two hour thing.

The first tale is a pretty sad/morbid one about a samurai who abandons his wife in order to marry a daughter of a rich family. It all ends in horror inbetween some really unsettling imagery. Each "movie" has some great artistic and technical values ofr a 1964 film. Sound cuts in and out on purpose, huge visual backdrops, impressive scaled battle scene and other treats.

Overall its a spooky asian horror film, and one of my favorites in that field.

Evil Dead review in a bit.

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Evil Dead

This is one of my favorite B-slashers so to speak. Its got a great campy atmosphere, some awesome camera effects, surprising gore--even for the time--and spawned one of the cheesiest horror heros. Though, surprisingly, Bruce is a bit of a wimp in the first one. It was all about the other guy being the hero until the end.

This movie does tension right and that is my favorite part. The chases in the woods with the camera and sound effects are spectacular. The paranoia of not knowing when one of the "things" will take over your friend. And, lastly, the very well done and gory fight scenes that rarely stray out of reality. (The deadites are made superhuman in 2 & 3 though). Another minor note: The girls are pretty hot until they mutate...

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Chucky


I don't like horror movies that play on: Toys, Puppets, and children going crazy. It just destroys my suspension of disbelief that in reality a 3 foot doll can be possessed and begin to go on a murderous rampage. A pyscho? Sure. Even an otherworldly monster? I'd buy it. But the fact a doll overpowers grown men and women and *wins* drives me up the wall. Its the same story for children of the corn.


Childs Play (I call it Chucky out of habbit) plays on the fear of dolls. It gets possessed by the admitedly excellent Brad Douriff and seeks revenge on the people that abandoned him in a police shootout. It is bought by a mom and single mom and begins to kill their friends. All of this is done in a comical, and annoying, manner. The little boy is a terrible actor and constantly whines in the montoone vocie "Chucky did it. He's alive!" I think this was said around 45 times in the movie. I couldn't stand the buildup. You never see Chucky until the last 35 minutes. Its just a constant overuse of the boy's perspective or using the camera as chucky's eyes.

When he's on screen he's a wisecracking, pun slinging Douriff-voiced stopmotion doll with some terrible facial and movement effects. And simply the fact a grown police officer couldn't kick the shit out of the doll makes it worse. And this happens over, and over, and over.

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Re-Animator

One of my favorite Lovecraft adaptions even though its not faithful. Jeffrey Combs gives a pitch perfect performance of Lovecraft's own Herbert West. A nosy, odd, poindexter scientist who has come up with a chemical that brings corpses back to life. He studies at a university and begins clashing with the head professor about brain death, confident he has found the solution. From there he moves into a couple's house which is owned by a fellow scientist. After he gets dragged into the experiments, things get quite awesome.


The whole thing is expertly done. The tension is great, the humor is smart and fits (The "cat" scene is fucking hilarious) and the gore is really over the top. This movie has a few unbelievably controversial scenes. Included: A headless corpse holding his head with his hands, and orally raping a woman who is tied down. But this serves a single point: Re-animator doesn't have any walls or boundries. The gore is great, the kills are great, the humor is great and the whole premise is just odd enough to work. Lovecraft had a different and much more sinister look, but Re-Animator looks at it with a bit more humor and a lot more gore. Keep in mind though its still scary, and still as "dream like" as most of Lovecraft's books. In short: I love this movie. In my top ten horror movies.

[Fake from State Jarm]

if you want to watch one that's so bad it's funny, try automaton transfusion. I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone would say 'best ever' or whatever it says on the cover. they must have paid that critic in secks, and also not let him seen the movie.

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I haven't seen that one, but I will give it a watch eventually.

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Pulse

This movie left me confused as shit. I don't know if it was the poor video quality, the atrociously written dialog, the vaguely introduced characters or all of the above but this nearly two hour long mess of a movie left me just wondering what was going on. I watched it a second time to be sure it wasn't me not paying attention. The theme is a website that lets you view dead people, and upon viewing them you soon go insane and... disappear? Something else to do with rooms with red tape. Another thing to do with the apocalypse and... I just don't fucking know. There weren't any good scares, no tension--The only props I can give is a fantastic soundtrack.

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Swamp Thing

DC comics spinoff directed by Wes Craven about a scientist who turns into a plant-man in the swamps, bringing justice down on terrorists and also striving to save his love interest (adrienne barbeau, who is the best milf ever). This movie is in the top five cheesiest, most useles movies I've seen. The costume designs, the finale, the acting, the ridiculous stunts, the midgets--Its so bad its shocking Craven even had anything to do with it.

The pros this movie has is:

1: The most hilarious villain, who becomes more hilarious after he transforms into a plaster-masked wolf.

2: adrienne barbeau nude scene.

3: Four actors playing every soldier, repeatedly showing up even after they die with slight costume changes to act like new soldiers.

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The Brood

Cronenberg has a very odd style that translates to some extremely lucid and symbolic movies that almost always interest me. You need to go into his movies with a thinking, serious mind. You need to analyze his symbolic avenues, his monstrous shadowing fears and the monsters in the corner of the screen. His work is strange and incidentally fits well into the horror genre.

The Brood is about a ground breaking form of psychotherapy in which the therapist takes the form of the person's "father", and the patient will "go through" their anger to him. As in, act out to him and just be completely open. This takes the form of physical manifestations. We meet a guy who develops lymphatic cancer etc. A man's wife undergoes this therapy and he loses contact with her. As he tries to find out where she is being kept, and why, a series of gruesome murders happen around him. A brood of mutant children are the murderers and have something to do with him and his wife. Things get worse, and worse, for this guy and his kid and we soon begin to learn the secrets behind the therapy and its faults.

Its obviously a jab of a movie at institutionalization and also at the massive side effects harboring rage and grudges do to people. Its a very deep, thoughtful and personal horror movie that has some excellent gross out moments and also a meaty core/moral to tell.

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In the Mouth of Madness

This and The Thing are why John Carpenter is my favorite horror director. He has perfectly captured the atmosphere, the style, the scares--the *everything* from Lovecraft's shorter stories and put it perfectly into film. But Madness has an original story, simply inspired by Lovecraft. An insurance agent detects frauds, and is good at it, and is assigned through a series of unlucky events to find a multi billion dollar horror writer that goes missing in the fictional Hobbs End. He travels there with a female from the writing agency and must find the writer. But what happens when fiction becomes reality, when whatever the writer pens down becomes real?

You get an interesting story and, more effectively, some of Carpenter's creepiest scenes and easily some of the creepiest scenes in horror. This movie flew under the radar but has amassed a cult following, and it deserves its fanbase. It is a very subtle, very smart horror movie that works at you slowly. A painting slowly becoming more and more grotesque each time its on the corner of the screen ,eventually becoming a cosmic horror when originally was a painting of a couple at a lake. Or driving in the dead of night and passing by a young boy on a bike going away from hobbs end. After a flash, he's driving towards you again, but he's 80 years old.

If you know lovecraft, or carpenter, at all you'll know you're in for a great ride. Sam Neil is fantastic in this. The scares are great and some of Carpenter's best. It really plays on insanity, alternate reality and cosmic horror. The mutant cop scene, the "transformation", the scene with Ms. Pickmen getting revenge... This movie is just excellent.

What makes it work is its smarts, as said. It knows the source material and plays like it. Its a thinker's horror movie through and through.

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Dead Alive

Peter Jackson really hits it home with this movie. Its one of the goriest movies made and that's putting it lightly, but its also genuinely hilarious. and well acted. A man's protective mother catches him on a date at the zoo and gets bitten by a horribly animated puppet "Siberian monkey" and gets a horrible flesh eating disease and becomes a zombie, wreaking havoc on the neighbor hood and infecting others. The man keeps all the zombies in his house until things become out of control.

The gore is outrageous. Full decapitations, intestinal spills, limbs being chopped off, babies put in blenders, people killed with a lawn mower, massive explosions, zombies eating people, etc. This is one of the goriest movies of all time. The good part, for some, is that it's all done in a very light hearted manor because it is a black comedy after all. To people like me though the whole goofy style really brought a possibly excellent zombie film down a few pegs.

But the comedy is still outrageous and well done. A priest killing dozens of zombie's bruce lee style. A pile of intestines using liver's as feet and a rectum for a mouth chasing our hero through an attic. The zombies constantly wanting to have sex with the opposite gender whenever possible, etc.

Its not scary but the gore is unbelievably satisfying and its genuinely funny at times. One of the best black comedy horror's made.

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Alien

Ridley Scott's Sci Fi epic is one of the most paranoia filled, suspenseful horror movies made. Whats more remarkable is Scott hardly was, and still isn't, a horror director. But when things hit the fan Alien keeps you wondering who to trust, where the Alien is, and how the crew will react. It will also drip feed very meaty lore during the movie. Has humanity made contact with aliens yet, the technology in the ships, the reasons for colonization, etc are all very subtlely placed for the more... aware viewer. This is done by some masterful script writing and pacing made possible only through Scott's directing.

Alien isn't a masterpiece, but its close, delivering a great premise with some great scares and an atmosphere you could cut with a laser knife. The set pieces are gigantic and well detailed, the monster design is horrifying, the characters are decently fleshed out--there isn't much to complain about besides maybe the little screen time Alien actually gets.

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A Tale of Two Sisters


What starts off as a basic disfunctional family horror story turns into a very lucid, very pretentious movie about insanity and hallucinations and not letting go. A girl returns from a mental institution to her step mother's home and is greeted by her loving sister who always follows her. They play, hang out, etc. But tensions rise at the dinner table when we learn the father is a sap apparently and the step mother is pure evil. The two are tortured, hit, beaten, locked in the closet their mother died in, etc. What is mildly engaging turns into complete oddness by the end though. Expressionist imagery starts splicing in. A grudge-like monster starts crawling around the house complete with the hair over face, and the oldest sister and step mom's feud comes to a head.

The horror drops off around this time and it just becomes a very odd, pretentious look at insanity after the reveal of two really fucking out of the blue twists that don't add to much, but subtract from the plausibility of what you just saw.

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Sixth Sense

I'm not really a fan of this movie as a whole but I need to give it credit for a few things: Some excellent chemistry and dialog between Cole and Crow, a great slow-burn style to slowly revealing the secret, and an expected but still powerful twist ending that is only marred by the Ghost-esque final scene between him and his wife.

What this movie does wrong is most of the ghost scenes. They are very, very quick jump jolts that make you fling back a bit but don't provide any density or meaning. There isn't really a growing tension throughout the movie or fear of the unknown. Being completely obvious is this movie's biggest flaw. And the "sick ghost" scene and conclusion seemed tacked on. Shows up then leaves in a matter of ten minutes with no closure. I enjoyed this movie before Cole's secret was revealed. I thought the tension and mystery far outplayed the reveal and jump scares.