When I first saw it I didn't like it, but it's so different to the original that it's best judged independently of it. And looked at like that I quite like it. It's just a shame that by taking that name it'll never escape the comparison. The producers made that decision so they can hardly complain about the consequences, but then they'd probably argue that if they hadn't done it as a remake it would've probably gone straight to DVD without a theatrical release. And maybe not even been made at all.

Shame cos its not a bad film, especially if you ignore that it's a remake. As is so often the case.

Dracula with Bela Lugosi. It's very funny in 2016. Can't wait to see the Zucker brothers parody of it.

The original Evil Dead.

I love bits of it but Lugosi always comes across as a slightly creepy head waiter.

yeah my big problem with him in this movie is that he acts like in a silent movie. like that lady in 'sunset boulevard" ha ha ha. norma... something.

also it was too much like filmed theatre, not just the way the lines were delivered (by everyone, which points the finger at the director), but too many wide shots and very little film language proper. compare to fritz lang in the same era.

tod browning would go on to make the amazing FREAKS though, so all is forgiven.

i love the way the set was lit. except for the hilarious spotlights on dracula's eyes, i though the lighting people did a bangup job creating a spooky atmosphere in both dracula's castle and the sanatorium's balcony.

--

last night watched half of MULHOLLAND DRIVE. it's really great but i was tired and had to turn it off. will pick it up tonight, but this morning it's REANIMATOR.

since there is no futbol.

btw did you watch italy/spain? great 2nd half.

Agree about Dracula.
It's based on a stage production which helps explain the general staginess of it all. The scenes in the castle are its saving grace, done by Karl Freund, who funnily enough worked a lot with Lang. So it's a key film regarding Hollywood's absorption of German Expressionism, but by no means the best.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh.....

this all makes sense--thanks for that info-- i had no idea

i mentioned lang because the first that came to mind as contrast was spies which makes such great use of closeups and cutaway shots as opposed to this. the germans were closer grammatically to the soviets i suppose.

anyway-- reanimator was a lot of fun!

i might watch zombies in the snow next... what's the name of it... DEAD SNOW. bhaa haaa haaa.

for later the rest of mulholland drive and probably HIGH TENSION. which is presumably a sexy slasher if i go by the cover.

I always thought of dead snow as a kind of modern evil dead, the sequel maybe even more so.

Hated the evil dead remake. Can't remember why, it was more ghosts and less possessed demon types?! The memory is wine-enised..either way, it was awful and took a massive dump on everything that made the original great.

Cannot wait for that new Blair witch. I wonder if there's not much action like the the original. Then people can discuss it likewise and say it's rubbish because of a perceived lack of action so then I can call them out on their lack of imagination thus them obviously being a massive fucking idiot. Well nay good, there's apparently action going down so i'll have to find another excuse.

Hard to talk about before you've seen it without massive spoilers but I'd be really interested to see what you make of it, especially the ending.

I'm excited to see it but prepared to be let down. Unfortunately most films are made to cater for idiots now. Horror used to be an alternative to all that but it's now one of the worst offenders. It's all about merchandise now. Mugs in HMV, sold to mugs in HMV.

I buy my horror mugs from Ebay thanks.

Saw this recently which wasn't, awful.

 

Just look at that Shaun Of The Dead font style and placement above the title trying to make the movie look like a spin off of Shaun Of The Dead. Horrendous genius marketing.

i have only seen the original evil dead but yeah it's the same template! remote location, wake up the old evil, etc, and even the ending is similar

dead snow is more fun (action) and more spectacular -- has better budget and also better looking people ha ha. also some really funny moments.

i liked it a lot. it was going good, and when the twist was revealed it really freaked me out!

eta: i watched the original french version, director's cut, not the american release or any dubbed or recut version. just straight-up original french.

I absolutely loved it till the twist, then I was like, "fuck right off". I'll give it the benefit of the doubt on plot points that sort of make sense if you accept everything's just Marie's twisted version of events (even those she's not actually present at) but it felt cheap, unnecessary and ultimately spoilt for me what till then was a fantastic movie. I felt as duped as I would have had Alex woken up to discover it was all just a bad dream.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

see, as a 'murrican, i was mystified that an old fat man with a 3" razor could wreak so much havoc in a multi-person household plus a dog, unopposed. that was all along the vaguely implausible part to me.

so all along we're trying to figure out why she acts so stupid and how can it all go so wrong and why things don't make sense and what we'd do in case of a home invasion (i mean, tales of horror are some kind of mental vaccine)

so while it's all gory and shit we're basically saying-- that dude comes to my house, i'm the one with the shotgun and he doesn't last 10 seconds. and stuff like what a shit friend that hides and does nothing, it's too late for the phone etc etc.

so i'm like-- this is your basic serial killer, but he's maybe only scary in france where people think of the phone as their salvation whereas in my rural environs people have signs outside their ranches saying "we don't dial 911" and "trespassers will be shot" and shit like that. so, creepy guy, but quite manageable in real circumstances.

but then-- no! it's the fucking houseguest! uaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! aaaaaaaaaaa! no more house guests in my place ha ha ha ha.

so for me it worked on that level-- exploiting the fear of trust rather than the fear of poorly armed old fat serial killers having their way with defenseless elois.

i never took the film seriously as a reality, in the sense that i was watching for thrills and willing to accept any nonsense without questioning it. i had just watched nazi zombies come out of the snow earlier that day anyway ha ha ha. so it actually got way creepier for me with the multiple personality angle.

[eta: but i can totally see how it can be superfrustrating when you're invested in the storyline in a sort of ripley vs alien way]

END SPOILERS

speaking of dreams, and things like that-- MULHOLLAND DRIVE! every time i watch it i like it more-- started from near zero and now i find it really really good.

Thing is I wasn't invested in the storyline until the twist forced me to start thinking about it. The film tried to be too clever for its own good.

Anyway, a film that definitely wasn't trying to show off, and all the better for it:



Tarantula

50s square-jawed awesomeness.

that looks cool. i'm going vintage again today but a different direction

-mario bava's BLACK SUNDAY (i've heard you mention bava a lot but have never seen his stuff yet i think)

-CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON special edition DVD

i'll also be braising some beef tongue for added horror, ha ha ha ha.

internet crapped out so i watched black lagoon instead-- first time ever

one thing that really pissed me off with this "special edition" bullshit is that they broke the aspect ratio to make it fit a wide screen. so it looks like the whole frames are there, just anamorphically distorted in fatvision. who the fuck is the tetra-moron who makes these decisions??

same thing they did with dracula btw. which did not help.

fuckers.

The Hit. Terrance Stamp, John Hurt

I don't have the same problem with my copy but that aside, did you like it?

Along with Bride of Frankenstein it's probably my favourite of the Universal horrors.

Anyway, watched this last night ... well sort of ...



Slaughter High

I've tried to watch this all the way through a few times but always give up before it finishes. A slasher film that's pretty gory and where half the cast are British, so it's kind of funny watching them pretend they're American high school kids (many of them looking far too old for their role), the novelty value soon wears off, about the same time I just switch it off.

The only interesting thing on my DVD copy is a neat little documentary about the 'legendary' British scream-queen Caroline Munro.

looks like i might the tetramoron after all, since after much stuff i found a setting in the player than keeps the original resolution-- it's a new bluray macheen. the old one broke, and it's been ages since i set one up, and the new one is inferior to the old one actually (bought it cheap refurbished), has cheap controls and i'm still playing with them. does your print have a bright blue line on the left side? the one i got does.

--

anyway, i did like black lagoon, yeah, good sunday mantinee. i didn't love it, but i liked it--found many good things about it.

the underwater photography was great. the portrayal of the ugly american going abroad to kill everything for money was great. the little psychological things like when the couple were smooching and the dickface starts to brandish his speargun were great-- the whole macho competitiveness over the girl was well portrayed. the curves of jane adams, sweet jesus, of course they'll fight over her, but why don't they put women who look like that on the screen anymore? i also like the character of the captain, especially when he pulls the knife on said dickface. i liked the science fiction aspect of the thing and the whole talk of going to space, etc--very 50s.

the monster itself didn't do a lot for me and i couldn't figure if he was intelligent or a dumbshit. i did get the whole king-kong aspect of it right away, but i was neutral about it. i think making a more, i don't know... "civilized" monster would have made it more interesting and the humans more brutal-- not to cheesy "avatar" levels, but if those caves had been ruins and fishboy the last of his kind... i would have liked to see that, for some reason-- like abe sapiens in hellboy. that would have been utter cruelty, but here i don't know, i hate the greedy dickface but it's hard to sympathize with the monster also.

the thing about "bringing a woman" to the expedition was outdated lols, and it did bug me in a plot--disturbing way that in the aquarium she's this accomplished scientist, but at the lagoon all she does is pose on her hot swimsuit and provoke the males with her amazing breasts. did they leave her brains in rio or something? that was ridiculous. also, they killed all the brown people first, of course, ha ha ha ha. fuckers! but anyway, it's the 50s, so it's a nice anthropological angle to look at the way things were portrayed, fun monster movie aside.

haven't seen bride of frankenstein but will try soon!

managed to see PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES last night.

my wife made me watch a couple of the regular pride and prejudice productions last summer--so by know i know the story pretty much. also, one with keri russell about going to some modern day jane austen vacation thing, i forget the name.

i had read bad reviews of the zombie version but for me it was hilarious. if you know the story, and the way it's supposed to go, it's fun to see it go to bizarre places with zombies and kung fu and absurd shit like that. i laughed and laughed.

someone who gets jane austen for the first time will probably miss the ridiculousness though. so i'd say watch a regular, long, ponderous version first (i remember one with colin firth i think is his name), then watch this one for the lols & action.

I watched it again recently and if I wrote an all time top now, regardless of genre, It'd be on the list. Plenty of monster movies from that era flirted with romance but I don't think any went as far or were as convincing. Bits of it, like the scene where they swim together, are genuinely erotic.

Julia Adams was the ultimate 50s monster movie bombshell. Universal apparently insured her legs for mega $s as a publicity stunt and mostly cast her in Westerns but the publicity shots of her with the monster are some of the most iconic in all horror films.




I absolutely had no problem sympathising with him. Although you might be interested to know that he was originally designed to look more human, but test audiences didn't like it. I like him just the way he is. Had he been more human, the love-angle might've been too obvious and corny. As it is it feels more mysterious, but somehow never perverse.

There's been talk of a remake for years, with names like Guillermo Del Toro and John Carpenter mentioned. The last thing I heard was that Scarlett Johansson will play Kay. Just leave the thing alone. It's perfect in a way that no film made now could ever understand. The only director who I think would get it is Spielberg, who's apparently obsessed with it. But even so, leave it be.

yeah i didn't want him to look more human-- his looks are great. rather, i would have liked his caves to look like some lost atlantis or something. you know what i mean? like... the last survivor of an old civilization? hence, hyper-lonely?

to me it's hard to sympathize with him because there's a couple of indians by the water and he just goes and kills them for no reason. wtf. fuck him. and the indians would know better than not to be stuck in tent without a machete anyway. but yeah--so, i don't find his presentation sympathetic. it's more like-- here's a serial killer who is ALSO stalking a hot lady. and his main adversary is a greedy ugly american. who do i root for? the couple that's on the edge of that volcano, sorta.

julie adams, right, i don't know where i got "jane" (probably from austen in my mind). what an incredible body and yes her swimming is truly erotic, but i just hated that they made her character "dumb" . she's there for decoration almost-- a prop for the males to fight for. like, she's supposed to be this accomplished scientist, right? the first wounded blanco tells her that much--what a great career she has, etc. but there's nothing that she does or says that shows her as a competent person with a great career-- it's almost like-- yeah, they shouldn't have brought a woman on this expedition, look at the trouble she causes. i know it's an artifact of its time, but it still throws me off a little.

i wouldn't mind a remake with a smarter female character, like, an actual hot scientist who does science and voices her opinion--but looks awesome in a swimsuit. plus underwater shots in color would be amazing. sorry if this sounds like sacrilege! maybe like for me if someone tried to remake la dolce vita. do not touch that. not that one can, i think, as that transition has passed. but still, a remake of la dolce vita, i don't know, i'd likely be enraged by it.

speaking of female characters, i just saw a trailer for the ghost busters reboot and it seemed to me funnier than the original. maybe it's just the trailer that has all the good lines but i wanna see it.

Oh OK, yeah, that would've been great. I suppose it's just about budgets. But yeah, more could've been made of the caves.

[

Maybe Trump should play him in the remake: pushes himself on women : doesn't like brown people. Hmmm.



I don't see the need for a remake. It is what it is and the gender stereotypes certainly don't detract from my enjoying the original. I'd have to stop watching 50s monster movies altogether if they did. Part of why I don't like the idea of those films being remade is that they're so defined by their own time. And saying that, the same audience that wanted the creature to be less human also objected to the suggestion that Kay and the hero were living in sin. The producers never changed the script on that point, which in its own modest way borders on subversive.

Baahaa! I swear to Christ, I would read a BOOK of your unscripted movie ramblings. Serious.

Btw last movie I watched was Amazing Slider-Man 2, with that guy from Social Network who's like 30, playing a fucking high school senior.

The movie started off at a disadvantage by giving me something to make fun of and obsess over right off the bat. When Spidey swings into his graduation I assumed it was from, like, college, and the camera pans up to the banner and it says "Whatever Blah Blah HIGH SCHOOL" and whatshis face jumps onto the stage looking like ME after a smoking a pack a day for three weeks with his hair all gelled up.

I couldn't do it it, man. Might have been a fine movie, but I spent the duration substituting lines for Peter Parker and Gwen. Like Peter saying "I can't do this anymore!" And Gwen saying (in my voice) "Bevause you have terminal emphysema?" And other things that were more funny in my head.

Crap! Next!

ha ha ha, trump. well eventually the monster kills whitey as well, but that's not the point i was trying to make. there are 2 things i conflated. one is the token browns of course, which is tiring, but whatever, it was what it was. the other is that the monster just up and kills people that are hanging out--so that makes him unsympathetic in my eyes.

the gender stereotype doesn't bother me in the sense that it's a stereotype, but that it sort of bothers the plot. if she was some impresario's trophy girlfriend, okay, but she's supposed to be a competent person who can handle herself as it's repeated several times (when they set the expedition and with the 3rd scientist in the ship). problem for me is that the action doesn't reflect that. i'm not trying to nitpick, but the dissonance got on the way of my enjoyment of the film.

also, i'm not saying that the movie needs a remake to make it politically correct, but rather, that a remake could be successful and (to me anyway) more interesting than the original... both for more well-rounded female roles and because of advances in photography.

but at the same time, we've already seen shit like that-- the annoying and in-your-face avatar, for example, with cartoon-zoe-saldaña. so, we don't need an underwater avatar. or the ET of the amazon. and ripley and sarah connor have already beaten a bunch of monsters. so maybe there's no room for a remake in that sense.

the real referent is king kong, and that movie has gotten a couple of remakes, though they haven't been great. i find the great ape a lot more sympathetic than the fishman though--many a grown man has shed tears for kong. he's sort of like the ape in all of us.

at last, POLTERGEIST



it was a lot of fun! some truly creepy moments, but mostly good rollercoaster entertainment a la jaws, except with "the beast" and ghosts. fucking spielberg was really on a roll in the 80s-- yes he didn't direct but this is evidently his baby.

AMERICA: BUILT ON CORPSES!

I'm on the fence about this one in retrospect. Haven't seen it in forever, but it's always seemed almost deliberately offensive to me, what with the whole "ancient Indian burial ground" thing. Like, it's that kind of offensive from the '80s, when white guilt was starting to pour into pop culture, but before anyone really knew what to do with it. So they *kind of* made a movie about the white man getting his comeuppance, but they also kind of just made a movie that doubled down on the whole "savagery" portrayal of early Americans. "They're man-hunting savages, even in death!!!" I guess. Y'know?

But again, haven't seen it in forever.

I DO know that when I was younger, I considered Poltergeist II to be the absolute pinnacle of terror. They introduced that creepy ass "Kane" character (can't recall if he was supppsed to be symbolic of Cain, or if he was just a creepy old Luifer-request dude) and that old bastard haunted my dreams.

See, I think they nailed "scary" a bit better in the second film. Creepy old Lucifer-esque dudes with vaguely pedo inclinations are WAY scarier than amorphous ghosts floating around in houses. The fact that they made him WHITE and SOUTHERN (aaaaahhh!) just put it over the top for me.

So I guess he was just some old creepy bastard. The Reverend Kane. No Cain analogue. Or maybe? Who cares. That motherfucker scared the shit out of me, but I had an inexplicable desire to watch the film as much as possible.

I think I was going through some shit as a kid, now that I look back on it. There was a lot of scary shit that I was inexplicably attracted to. Ah well, divorced parents and whatnot! I turned out fine. Ish.

Anyway.

CAROL ANNE!!!! CAROLANNNE!!!!!

yeah the movie wasn't so scary as it was entertaining-- turns out spielberg took over the direction after disagreements with tobe hooper. and yeah it's totally his cut. things like the zolly in the corridor (straight out of jaws) and the mother charging with a football shirt on-- that has to be spielberg.

i did sympathize a lot with the lost child aspect though. that's gotta be a horrible thing for any parent. brrrrrr!

but here's the thing though-- they're not on any indian burial ground. in fact the movie goes out of the way to state this. the dad says to his boss--"at least it's not an ancient indian burial ground" or something like that. this is white-on-white desecrations. and the dead have coffins, watches, etc.

but see, it was superfunny to me that the movie starts with the national anthem. i was like "what's the meaning of this?" and immediately recalled jaws and the 4th of july. but no, it was just a dead channel (channels used to go dead, lol). so you say, it's nothing just the normal music. and then when they're finally at the holiday inn i started laughing cuz i got it.

i'll check out the sequel-- that was apparently tobe hooper on his own. but maybe i'll try texas chainsaw massacre first. i did try once and it grossed me out.

but this coming weekend-- EVIL DEAD 2!! (and later, army of darkness)

Wait, huh? Then... what'a the one with the "ancient Indian burial ground?" I know there's one of those out there. Always thought it was Poltergeist. Even the "remake" makes references to it.

I'm confused. So it was white folks the whole time?

Then I suppose it is pretty much awesome.

Watch the second one though. It's not as good as a film, but Rev. Kane makes it on to just about every "scariest demon/monster/ghoul" list that floats around on the internet.

They totally fucked him up for the third film. Don't bother with that one.

I watched it about a year ago. Very gross. And not in a fun "How'd they do that?" sort of way. Sorry, I can't remember an exact sequence to describe.

Yes, the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is extremely gross.
It's not that it's really worse than most slaughterfest slasher flicks... but it's definitely really fucking gross in a way I can't quite find words for. Difficult to watch.

I actually thought THOSE remakes weren't half bad, for just plain old dumbass bloodbath porn.

yeah the indian burial ground is in Poltergeist, but its not the Indians killing anyone, its more like the karmix damage of disrespecting the sacred opened a portal to hell. i think the movie is a critique of "modern American consumerism culture" which really had a big revival and boost in the mid-to-late 70s. the suburbanization and tract houses.. the idea is in a fictional way to ask, "what is the cost?"

I've always considered Texas Chain Saw Massacre to be a dark comedy.

"HEY LEATHERFACE, COME HELP ME WITH GRANDPA!"

But then again, I think the same thing about Eraserhead so maybe I'm just nutty...

thanks guys, i might not have the stomach for texas chainsaw massacre after all... but hey, if i read it as a comedy... perhaps. but wait-- it was based on a real serial killer. maybe i just don't wanna know.

IBG was definitely NOT in poltergeist. i googled up a bit and there are 2 movies that coined this trope, in quick succession: 1) the amityville horror, 2) THE SHINING (this i recall).

poltergeist is only guilty by association or bad recollection, but they made a clear point that their cemetery wasn't indian-- i just watched that yesterday. the one that had indians was POULTRYGEIST which is the Troma version but is obviously a huge parody.

anyway more info here. i like this one: http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles...burial-grounds