Marathon of Madness

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Repulsion


This movie bored me to death. An overly symbolic and boring look at sexual frustration and insanity that goes on for forever, bringing more and more cryptic imagery and dream/rape sequences into the life of a very pent up and quiet girl who is home alone. Polanski struck gold with rosemary's baby and Knife, but this movie is fucking pretentious and bored me from start to finish. I gotta be honest.

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Gremlins


This movie and I don't get along. While it sports a very comfortable atmosphere and also some good creature design, it is absolutely destroyed by its own attempt at black comedy. Frankly I just don't find it funny. Its very low tier and immature, resulting in basically a bunch of pseudo pigs making a mess in a very 6-year-old-snot-nosed-rat kind of way. They'll imitiate disney movies and sing the theme, stuff their faces with food, fart, smoke, etc. Its a yuck-yuck sense of humor that does absolutely nothing for me. Period!

The props I can give is that, for the time, the creature animations and designs was excellent and at multiple occasions gizmo still seems incredibly realistic akin to E.T. Also its surprisingly gory and helped make the pg-13 rating which still lives today. You'll see one explode in a microwave, stabbings, stuffed into a blender, smashed, run over, etc. All shown on screen with gratious gore.

But it doesn't save this slapstick and very annoying movie.

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Se7en

While not literally a horror movie, Se7en sports a very grim and dark atmosphere that does something right for me. The pacing, the acting, the clues, the atmosphere, the villain--this movie is fucking excellent in my book and really drives a grimy and hopeless atmoshere home all the way. Morgan Freeman plays one of my favorite characters on film as a lonely, broken down, wise detective who's days away from retirement who takes up the "Seven deadly sins" case. The crime scenes he and Brad Pitt visit are beautifully done. The sets are disgusting and detailed from top to bottom. Gore is not hidden off screen either. Its a shocking movie to some but I love the detail and atmosphere it creates.


There are only two main characters and two important side characters, and of course the villain at the end. The incredibly small cast is the main downfall of this movie as it makes the characters extremely stiff and wooden. Pitt gets along with his wife. Him and Freeman become cautious allies and disagree all the time. R. Lee Ermey plays the loud mouthed and shoot-first sheriff. Its really run of the mill interactions even if the character's themselves are well acted. Kevin Spacey and Freeman deserved oscars for their input but Pitt plays a character I absolutely despise. The way he says his lines, his fake new york accent, his mannerisms and paper-thin character is easily *the* worst part of this movie. Key scenes that make me facepalm: The ending car ride with spacey and pitt's lines. When he kicks in the door. The bar scene. I could name dozens of scenes he sucked in.


Still this movie is excellent despite a few short comings. Great atmosphere, great acting, fantastic villain and a twist nobody expected that really elevates this movie into the top tier category horror or not.

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Halloween


John Carpenter is my favorite horror director. His early career was innovative, horrifying and had some fantastic camera and atmospheric effects. His style, his scores--there is so much I could say about Carpenter and how much I like his movies. Halloween, arguably one of the first slashers made, is his most popular movie for good reason. It invents the "girls get slashed with a butcher knife" genre of slasher but does it intelligently.

The story is a kid goes crazy and kills his sister and then is put into a mental asylum. He is looked after by Donald Pleasance, who plays a wonderfully creepy role. After 15 years of trying to deal with him Donald Pleasance is about to drop him as his patient and when driving to the mental asylum finds out he has escaped after 15 years of silence. Michael Myers hasn't ever said one word, but now is on the run back to his home down. From here we find out his backstory, we're introduced to a group of girls (One of them has something to do with his past) and we're also slow burned into a really thick and creepy atmosphere of uneasiness and surprise. Every time Myers is on screen he is silhouetted in the distance or in the shadows subtley on the side of the screen, easy to miss. He is the "darkness", he is "evil" on screen. While the murders themselves are *easily* the weakest part of the movie Myer's mask and sheer personality despite not saying one word make up for it.

Another complaint is the weak ending but the 15 minute chase scene before it are truly intense and exciting, propelling the movie from subtle horror into pure slasher and intensity. John Carpenter proves he can reinvent a simple genre and for 30 years after, its been used thousands of times but never quite as good as the original Halloween.

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Dark Water


This confusing, often annoying J-horror is one of the weakest I've seen it a while. It follows the life of a mother raising a small child in an apartment room. The room hasn't been sold in years and is often the concern of plumbing problems, water leakage, etc. But she takes what she can get. Water starts to become a symbolic nuisance--dripping from corners of the screen and out of applicances left and right during the span of the movie. As the mother settles into a new job and every day life she starts to uncover a mystery about a missing girl who lived in the apartment above her with her mom. The girl looks awfully like her own daughter and she starts to see her everywhere, almost always accompanied by water.

The premise is ridiculous to me--Its obvious almost from the get-go what the conclusion is and the whole thing reeks of being pretentious. It complicates itself with little reason with time warps, loop holes, repeating scenes, and general cosmic oddities that ultimately boil down to the filler category. The fact is its a murder mystery with a stupid twist anybody could see coming. I didn't enjoy this movie at all

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The Hitcher

This movie owes more than a fair bit to The Duel by stephen king. However Hitcher remains its own beast, detailing an odd and complex villain cast alongside dull and boring teenagers. The killer, played convincingly by Rutger Hauer, is a hitchhiker who is picked up by travellers who he then quickly kills in a sadistic and morally complex manner--at least in his own eye.s He toys with them along the road, using a sickly layered sense of humor mixed with plain sadistic and violent qualities. And thats really the quality and drawing point of this show. His character and his odd bond with the main star and victim, played by C. Thomas Howell.

Its an unsettling psychological thriller but its not horror, and is one of the unfortunate "miscast" movies on my list. But the finale, the early killings and the constant tension and paranoia in this movie is really well crafted and present. It also features some fantastic shootouts and driving scenes in paticular, though completely farfetched as they are. So to wrap this up the villain is sweet, its a tense movie and has some gripping moments. My main complaints go to how farfetched it is, how silly the main actor is and also the very-very end of the movie itself

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Cloverfield


There are some things this monster mash movie does right. First off, it keeps the monster shrouded in mystery even after the credits roll. You don't know what it is and you don't need to--the movie plays off like you're in the eyes of HUD, the guy with the camera. Thats the second part it does right, its really cool to be confined to an FPS perspective the entire time like you're in on the action. This movie manages to feel authentic without sacrificing too much quality. This movie sheds pounds in realism though--While trying to maintain a psuedo immersion of being there, it also decides to leave any logic outside of the film set.

While our heroes travel the war torn city, the military engages the hundred story monster with brutal speed and reckless efficiency for collateral damage or even quality. Apparently the generals running this program decided attacking a 1000 ton monster with infantry and jeeps would work. If this didn't work, its fine, we'll use rocket launchers and jeeps. Oh, right, its as big as the towers we're protecting. Lets try 250lb bombs and napalm instead. Logic is also lost when cruise missiles, bunker busters, carpet bombs and so on don't kill a big, but still soft, creature.

My last complaint is it takes WAY too long to get started. An exact 35 minutes in a 1.2 hour movie before the creature even shows up. This entire time is spent in a nauseating party scene that serves no purpose later on other than to briefly introduce dozens of characters we'll never see again.


Anyway lets talk about the atmosphere. Its not really all that good up on the streets, reminds me of independence day or other mass destruction movies, but once we get indoors or more specifically in the subways things get excellent. In a homage to aliens the big monster sheds parasites that feed off it. Now they feed on people. We see these crab-like things in the sewers in a very intense and frantic fight scene. Although this is their only introduction its all that is needed; its a gripping scene and probably the best in the movie.

This tension is lost when a tell-all scene follows in a military camp and it becomes a tedius "race to the finish" on a time limit before manhatten gets nuked or so its implied. And really I just explained the entire movie. Its a very little bit over an hour long, a painfully short run time thats surpassed even by the black and white godzilla epics.

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Ils (Them)


This extremely brief french horror is a lot like The Strangers, an American horror that came much later after its release. This movie chronicles the events of a couple who move into an apartment to be attacked and harassed by short, hooded, people or creatures. As they invade their house you get glimpses of them, hear the sounds they make, and see the overall panic among the couple. But like the Strangers its anonymity is its greatest flaw--It becomes so concealed in the secret and lucid atmosphere of it all it becomes painfully whats going on only 25 minutes into the movie.

What Them does right is creating a pretty decent atmosphere in the opening, and ending, scenes. But as soon as the secret is thrown out there to the viewer all of the suspense goes out the window. "Oh, I thought so. Well, great. Now to wait until it ends". The "twist" into reality comes way too soon and takes another 15 minutes to close during a painfully obnoxious chase scene

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Rosemary's Baby


This movie is a lot like Suspiria. They both deal with the same subject, both of them have an otherworldly atmosphere and both movies fail to deliver any real coherent point until the last 30 seconds. Rosemary's deals with a young couple who move next door to very strange neighbors. The husband takes very kindly to them very quickly and the couple plans to have a baby. Rose begins to have dizzy spells and headaches after eating a chocolate mouse prepared by the neighbors, and then collapses on her bed. She has a lucid dream she is being raped... by satan... and then wakes up in her room with scratches on her back and her husband having a satisfied look on his face.

From here on out we're really just drip fed a very lucid, surreal story of paranoia as she researches her neighbors and as allies drop dead around her. Throughout this two hour movie nothing really happens beyond this--Her husband acts shady and protective of the neighbors, the neighbors push and push themselves into her every day routine and even the doctor she is seeing is acting odd. We find out whats up at the very predictable conclusion, and overall you're left with a bad taste in your mouth. Oh, so it was that obvious. Oh well... two hours wasted.

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Stalker

This isn't really a horror movie but its still one of my favorites. It is a devastating, bleak look at the life of a poor russian family and the heartbreak between them. The man is revealed to be a stalker--a tour guide, of sorts, into the Zone which is a very mysterious and deadly area quarantined by military and police alike full of wonders. Stalker meets up with two men, Professor and Writer, at a bar and they begin to discuss their lives and goals there and finalize some details. This is when you realize two things about the movie: Almost every scene is a work of art in some form or another. The color pallete, the shots, the angles--the entire movie looks spectacular visually and it only gets more and more stunning once you enter the lush Zone.

The other thing is just how good the writing in this movie is. No taboo, no emotional state, is left untouched by these three men as they converse and travel the Zone. The dialog is very fluid and mostly driven on by Writer, an analytical and jaded man who hates Writing but sees nothing better to do with is life. He is the most complicated character in the movie and it really shows. Professor is a quiet, elderly man who keeps to himself but sometimes joins in on Writer's arguments--often taking the role of the other side. Stalker keeps to himself, but mostly butts in about purpose/religion/cruelty of life.

The characters excel and are some of my personal favorites ever on screen. The last thing to mention is the sheer stunning atmosphere The Zone has. It is a creepy, unsettling, mysterious world full of things in the side of the screen and vast imagery and "traps". There are some select scenes that are impossibly tense without doing anything really. The Meat Grinder, for example.

The movie's ending is also my favorite almost of all time. The final 30 minute conversation and struggle between the three men, the moral choices put into action, and the finale are some of the most well executed scenes I have personally seen. It manages to stay atmospheric and unsettling the entire way through without showing any monsters or goblins. Its about human emotion, survival, and the mysteries of The Zone itself

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Eraserhead

David Lynch's masterpiece is know as Eraserhead. A fucking bleak, disturbing look at odd families, having a new born, desires of life and by the nescessity to sleep. It is an experimental and artistic movie in every single sense. There is no coherency in the sense of what you're accustom to. The narration, the progression, the actors, the imagery-- it is disturbing and bleak. Every scene is and artistic and pessimistic reimagining of the frustrations of every day life for a man who is forced to marry a cautious lover of his after she gives birth to a mutant baby.

He lives in his apartment with the baby, it constantly spitting and crying to eat disgusting food as he simply tries to sleep. I'm explaining too much already--to give away the progression is to make it seem like this movie is normal. Its not. The imagery you'll see, and the drawn out scenes, are highly symbolic and plain disturbing in some parts. I... can't really review a movie like this. What I can say is its not horror ,but its bleak and experimental. I can also say I highly enjoyed it, and it is Lynch's best work by far.

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Saw



This movie is so painfully pretentious and strung along that any single minute detail or half second scene being altered in any way would completely change the outcome of the movie. It is so linear that it makes Dark Knight look plausible and dynamic. The entire premise is two men locked in a bathroom on opposite ends, between a dead body from a third man who was there. They must follow clues around the bathroom explained to them via sound tapes from an un-named "Jigsaw" killer. The basic premise of the movie is one man needs to kill the other, for reasons untold, according to Jigsaw. The doctor who must kill the man also has his family kidnapped by a third party. This is the premise explained 15 minutes into the movie.

What happens next is so strung along, so poorly acted, that you need to wonder how many drafts the screenplay had before it was just launched through customs. Logic is not present--None of the men try to escape how most people would. Break the shackles with a heavy brick, saw through the shackle lock instead of the 2 1/2 inch industrial chain, etc. The Doctor, who's only goal is to kill Adam, never even attempts it. He tries to save Adam--who is, by the way, a fucking annoying character. Instead Lawrence tries to save both of them. Even after the "reveal" in the end, his solution is to saw his own foot off to get help.

You need to remember that the Doctor's family is kidnapped and the doctor only needs to kill Adam to escape. He is given, across the movie, over 15 items to kill him quickly with. He does not try to use one of them.

And the fabled twist in the end is only a cliff hanger. It only catapulted the series into cult fame. The twist doesn't change a thing and is so out of left field that it doesn't really even matter.

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Event Horizon

This is the movie that could have been. It could have been one of the ultimates in space horror, sitting proudly next to Alien. And while Event Horizon is still one of the creepier movies in space, the sheer annihilation it received in post production and the amount of cliches thrown in on the last minute bog it down to a near unwatchable level. Anderson apparently only got a fraction of what one would call "post production" time so he wound up shaving off a whole 40 minutes of random scenes to make the MPAA happy and to bring the apparently brutal gore down a notch. What we get is like the worst paper art you can imagine, whole chunks and slices ripped or scissored off but still connected by the thinnest strip of paper.

The movie is about a rescue crew who gets flung into far un-colonized outer space around Neptune. The reason they are there is briefed to them by a guest on their ship, doctor Weir. Apparently a top tier experimental ship--Event Horizon--was testing out a new gravity drive when it disappeared from reality for seven years until to reappear off Neptune's Orbit. The gravity drive is code black and could revolutionize space travel.

After an introduction to the very lively and charismatic crew that could have been a dynamic cast, we're dropped onto the ship and things go down hill right away without any buildup. What happens across the rest of the movie is skippy, badly narrated and poorly acted for one reason only--entire scenes and leaps in time are made to try and make the progression coherent. After one scene it could be days later and they could be discussing something we never got to see. It could lurch foward in time to a scare scene where they show you a monster you're supposed to know from the backstory. The movie was butchered.


It still retains a creepy atmosphere though. Weir is an excellent villain up until the end and the ship itself is very remarkably detailed. My last point to note would be that the gore and imagination in this movie is top notch. The tech and space suits are still my favorite in any film and the whole movie is intelligent and--was--well planned out and didn't break your suspension of disbelief. Its too bad though, this could have been great.

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The Abyss


This isn't a horror movie and is one of the few "accidents" on my list. I won't review it, I don't need to. Its a science fiction/fantasy movie with a thick love story and pink aliens underwater.

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The Thing

This is John Carpenter's masterpiece. He is, in my eyes, the best horror director currently alive. He mastered all of the genres with this one ingenius, horrifying, paranoia driven chilling tale of a group of scientists in an Arctic outpost who come upon a mimicing, shape shifting, disgusting alien lifeform. There's a lot of good I can say about this movie but I won't bloat this mini review; The gore is fantastic for including 0% CGI. The acting is great and when the paranoia gets going, it becomes so thick you could cut it with a knife.


The monster designs are apalling and creative; the mystery behind the film really drives it foward and it has the best atmosphere out of any movie I've seen. The best part though is the pacing which is completely perfect. Its a slow burn style that slowly drip feeds the tension and paranoia into your head after the first opening scene. Who to trust? Who to kill? Where is the thing? Etc etc. Every character on screen is thinking this and so is the viewer and it becomes such an engrossing, nearly perfect, horror movie.

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The Birds


Its one of Hitchcock's worst movies if you ask me. His signature suspense, shock moments, tense scenes, striking camera angles, and crafty scripts--they are completely unpresent in this really cheesy, really campy thriller that really just seems to exist to show off the gory, special effects version of Hitchcock. The two main characters are really unbelievable--literally. The entire movie is a string along with the most absurd notions of flirting and chase/catch I've seen in a movie.

Anyway most of the scares come in the form of really random, but really technically good looking for the time, bird attacks. There is no subtle horror or classic tension Hitchcock has been obsessive about. No.... its just random gore and bird pecking swarms. Meh, I don't feel like saying anything else

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28 Days Later


The atmosphere and tension this movie builds up in the first 45 minutes is classic. Its gripping, its got great zombies, its got great combat, its got great directing and acting. The abandoned atmosphere complements all these qualities to make one of the best zombie movies of all time. Well if you don't watch the second half...


28 Days Later is about Great Britain becoming the victim to a disease only called Rage. When bitten (Or if blood gets in your mouth or eyes or an open wound) you turn into a oozing, screaming, insane person who's only purpose is to devour people and presumably animals alike. The disease almost wipes out all of London and apparently most of the surrounding country. Its an uninteresting concept done well. The art style, the bleak imagery and the gripping action scenes really help drive the story home. Furthermore this movie rebooted the idea of a "zombie". Actually they are just live people infected, bodies do not ressurect. Furthermore the infected run fast as hell after their pray with no sign of endurance.

The movie has a ton of memorable scenes up to the half way point. As soon as it goes to the army base the entire thing degrades and basically turns to shit. Realism is out the window in favor of sexual tension and really lame action scenes. The main star turns into rambo and really the entire thing just goes to shit, I can't put it any other way.

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The Exorcist


Some people still like to praise this as the scariest, most nerve racking horror movie ever made. Personally I don't believe a word of that. The Exorcist's greatest strength is in its imagery and its subtle reveals of captain howdy. It all breaks down to crap when the possession actually happens and we're dealing with a demon that acts like a five year old. When the pea soup starts flying and the heads start twisting, I can barely watch this movie anymore for how plainly boring and direct it is. The sometimes beautiful buildup of imagery in the beginning with Merin vs Pazuzu amounts to nothing as he only makes a last minute appearance, I was disappointed because instead some whiney faithless priest is the main character and Max Von Sydox got stuck on the baaack burner.

The horror in this movie, I thought, was the unknown and sensitive taboo horror that surrounded everything. Once the possession actually hits it becomes an explosion of cheesy effects, gore and vomit.

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Dr Giggles


Hehehehehehehe

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Dead of Night


Much like Kwaidan, Dead of Night is an anthology film where there are multiple short stories filmed by multiple directors. The story revolves around some backbone literature written by H.G wells and is immensely creepy at times. The gist is a man arrives at a house where a party is about to start; there are five guests. The catch is he remembers each and every one of them because they are a part of a recurring nightmare he's been having. He introduces himself, predicts the future in multiple occasions to set the mood all while being scrutinized by a psychiatrist present who doubts the predictions, and eventually the five people all share a ghost or horror story of there own. Some of these are misfires--Well, only one. The other five told are really chilling and match Kwaidan's mystery and delivery.


The first is "Room for one more'', which used to be a famous horror story. A man who is not well wakes up in the dead of night to hear the roaring and rumbling of a hearse outside in the gravel. He peeks out the window and the driver turns to him with a disgusting face and says, "Just room for one more inside, sir". The man dives back into his house and the hearse drives away. It used as a premonition of the future where a bus driver, who looks exactly the same, repeats the line in the same delivery. He does not enter the bus and it crashes and burns, killing all inside.

The other stories are all as.. familiar, as engrossingly inviting and the entire movie ends in a bombtastic twist and climax that almost no one will see coming. I love the camp-fire style of the movie, I love how it dips in and out of the stories, I love the acting and line delivery and--most of all--the extremely disquieting horror stories. The last one, a ventriloquist who thinks his dummy is alive, is perhaps one of the scariest short stories I have seen played on film and the ending of it is absolutely horrifying.

This movie got to me a bit, despite being made in 1945. Easily placed in my top ten.