• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Horror Films

Gallowwalkers

Oh my god. Wesley Snipes, western gun slinger, vampire like zombie things, looks good right?

Wow. Just awful. Director in his head had a number of scenes he wanted to film that looked stylish and had no idea how to write a plot that linked them together, the answer was of course, don't have a plot, people will think it's all arty and stuff.

Utter gash, stuff happens, more stuff happens, on two occasions characters stop and try and explain at length the whole of what has been happening for the last forty-five minutes to another character who wouldn't care, I knew the feeling I couldn't have given two shits by that point.

Snipes, if you weren't quite so hard I'd probably slap you for appearing in this tosh, as it is I'll just tut at you over the internet.
Click to expand...

Worth repeating my thoughts from last year on the matter....
 
ramonmercado said:
The Mummy: Not as bad as the reviews suggest. A vein of humour runs through the film. This though results in the undead being funny rather than horrifying. There are Knights, lots of Knights Templar but they are all long dead, reanimated by the eponymous Mummy played by Sofia Boutella. Some really good scenes of skeletal Templars swimming underwater in pursuit of Tom Cruise the Tomb Raider soldier. Cruise has a dead sidekick who appears and gives him advice.

There is also Annabelle Wallis as an archaeologist and Russell Crowe as Dr Henry Jekyll (and Mr Hyde), Director of the Prodigium, a Fortean Institute which deals with the Paranormal/Supernatural but specialises in Monsters.

All of these elements don't quite gel together, hence I give it 6/10.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2345759/
Click to expand...


Will not be watching this as I cannot stand Tom Cruise or Russell Crowe. Will just stick to the original Universal monster movies the classic stars...
 
Berlin Syndrome: An Aussie backpacker meets a German teacher of English in Berlin. She is not naive but she has a certain shyness. He is erudite and charming but the next morning she wakes and finds herself locked into his apartment. Thus starts a brutal imprisonment resulting in her eventually developing Stockholm Syndrome but not before some spirited attempts at escape.

Some rather disturbing scenes. 8/10.
 
Nails: Irish Horror Film. An athletics coach is recovering in hospital after being injured in a hit and run. She can only communicate through a keyboard voice synthesiser. In the night see sees a strange creature but no one else sees it. Eventually it starts to harm her.

Atmospherically set in a hospital which has seen better days. Indeed this hospital has a sinister secret, of a serial killer nurse in its past. But it also has a disturbing psychiatrist in its present. A few good shocks and some red herrings about potential guilty parties. Frightening but not totally satisfactory. 6.5/10.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4695098/

Thirteen of us saw it tonight on a Dublin Horror Society Meet Up.
 
Chucky's back and he's going to Hell:

Straight to DVD Hell, that is. What does it take for a long running franchise character to get a cinema release these days? "Hi, I'm Chucky, wanna press play?"
 
Not a film but a trailer for a play. Maybe there's a more appropriate thread?

The Dead, Live - theatre ghost story with Howard Whittock - July 2017 trailer

In a new play by Daniel Thackeray (Together in Electric Dreams), Howard Whittock plays Lawrence Dodds, a popular 'psychic' medium who knows he's a fake - but the world of Spirit may still have some surprises in store for him.

The play also stars Carly Tarett, is directed by Alex Shepley and is playing at several Greater Manchester venues in July as part of the Greater Manchester Fringe.

 
sherbetbizarre said:
Well, he's going to open this years FrightFest, so that's ONE cinema showing!

http://www.frightfest.co.uk/
Click to expand...

Yeah, despite my cynicism, I believe Curse of Chucky got a handful of festival screenings too. I'm just glad Jennifer Tilly has more to do this time. I remember listening to her audio commentary on Bride of Chucky and being entertained by her having such a throaty laugh for a lady with such a high voice.
 
Controversy over ‘satanic’ films showing in former church
Concerns have been raised over plans to screen horror films like The Exorcist and The Omen, branded “satanic” by a Belfast alderman, in a former church.

The Belfast Film Festival is set to show the chilling movies in the former Holy Rosary Catholic Church on the Ormeau Road in the south of the city.

The building has not been used as a church in almost 40 years, is no longer consecrated, and is to be turned into a restaurant in future.
Click to expand...
http://www.itv.com/news/utv/update/...r-satanic-films-to-be-shown-in-former-church/
 
sherbetbizarre said:
Controversy over ‘satanic’ films showing in former church
Click to expand...

So controversy over 'Satanic' films shown in building then. He is either embarrassingly clueless about what consecration (and subsequent deconsecration) of a church means in a spiritual sense or being willfully clueless to get a bit of free publicity.
 
Hypersomnia: An actress is rehearsing a play when she seems to fall into a an alternate reality which closely resembles the subject matter of the drama. In the other reality which is frighteningly real, women are imprisoned in a building where they are abused, raped and tortured. The two realities then start to coincide.

A disturbing film, definitely horror, not full on torture porn, more is implied than is shown, but some scenes are not for the squeamish. Set in Argentina it is partially based on some real life events. On Netflix. 8/10.
 
The Blood Lands (AKA White Settlers): Couple move from London and buy a farmhouse in the wilds of Scotland. They have more to fear than feral haggis though. Locals prove unfriendly and film turns into a cross between Straw Dogs and Deliverance. Awa' wi' ye Sassenach colonists! On Netflix. 6/10.
 
Missing Girl

A girl finds a Missing Person poster that is eerily familiar..

This short, short film (100 seconds) was created as part of a challenge where three journalists were given a theme and a crew, and then told to create a film from scratch in under 24 hours.

Written and directed by Kim Newman, and starring Maribel Jimenez and Stephen Jones. 2001.


Does a lot in 100 seconds, pretty good.
 
A little bit of nerdy horror film injokes ..

The Breakfast Club
tcm22.jpg


The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
tcm2.jpg
 
He Never Died: Henry Rollins as an immortal who has lived for thousands of years (at least). He seems indestructible - he plucks bullets out of his dead because if he leaves them in they cause migraine. To keep going he has to consume human flesh, he can subsist on amputated limbs from hospitals but living flesh is more nourishing.

His invulnerability doesn't save him from pain or being tracked down by an abandoned daughter. Most of the plot centres around his run ins with local gangsters. But there may be darker forces behind them. On Netflix. 7/10.
 
I found the witchcraft business redundant in Jane Doe, but the theme of the slasher movie victim getting her revenge on a callous world literally post mortem was truly original and provocative. Well worth a look.
 
It Comes At Night: Post Apocalypse territory, unexplained. We see a man in the terminal stages of a disease, his family put a bullet in his head and burn the body. The family, father mother, teenage son, live in a barricaded house in a forest. A man breaks in, eventually he is accepted, his wife and toddler son move in.

No Zombies, just a lot of psychological horror and a few violent scenes. Claustrophobic indoor shots with dark rooms and narrow passages. Even the outdoors are oppressive as the forest scenes are made to look tunneled, fiimed through upturned tree roots and branches. 8/10.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4695012/
 
Last edited:
GNC said:
I found the witchcraft business redundant in Jane Doe, but the theme of the slasher movie victim getting her revenge on a callous world literally post mortem was truly original and provocative. Well worth a look.
Click to expand...

I thought it was like an American "Grudge", a normal person so horribly killed in the past that she was created into the very thing that those people feared.
 
MrRING said:
I thought it was like an American "Grudge", a normal person so horribly killed in the past that she was created into the very thing that those people feared.
Click to expand...

Yes, that's a valid way of looking at it, but I'm not keen on the fictions that present the victims of the witch hunts as actual witches, because it deliberately or unintentionally justifies their murders (in a fictional context, but still...).
 
GNC said:
Yes, that's a valid way of looking at it, but I'm not keen on the fictions that present the victims of the witch hunts as actual witches, because it deliberately or unintentionally justifies their murders (in a fictional context, but still...).
Click to expand...
I guess I had a different interpretation of that - I thought that she was a normal person accused of being a witch, and that the extremes used for the killing made her a demonic entity where there wasn't one before, perhaps as a subtext for today's world where international policies created out of a sense of fear or revenge in the recent past have made many of the profound problems of today. As a friend who is a Wiccan priest would say, the Burning Times can't be forgotten... but I didn't take Jane Doe in that way.
 
Suffer, Little Children gets a DVD release... but it's in the US!
https://severin-films.com/shop/suffer-little-children-dvd/

From the website:
"The British tabloid press called for it to be banned among the furor of the Video Nasty witch hunts. The Censors refused it a rating in its uncut form. Many of the children involved in its production were never seen nor heard from again. Now SUFFER, LITTLE CHILDREN can finally be seen FULLY UNCUT AND UNCENSORED!

The full story behind this mysterious occult feature may never be known. The super rare and intensely troubled original UK video release was cut by several minutes and the box copy simply read:

Suffer, Little Children a tale of a child’s demonic supernatural powers and the brutal…. terrifying results. Suffer, Little Children is a reconstruction of the events, which took place at 45 Kingston Road, New Malden, Surrey, England in August 1984. None of these events were reported in the press and now the house is scheduled for demolition in the immediate future."

I think they're being a little too mysterious, it was a project arranged by a children's drama teacher, but when it escaped onto VHS in the mid-80s it got caught up in the moral panic, despite being, to all reports, amateurish and silly. I haven't seen it, but who isn't curious about that blurb?
 
The Moth Diaries (2011): A Gothic tale but in a contemporary setting. A girls boarding school gets a new,
mysterious pupil, Vanessa. She breaks up existing friendships, in particular that between Rebecca
and Lucy, and seems to be able to exert power over some of the girls. Lucy starts to fall ill, becomes
lethargic.

Could Vanessa be a Vampire or some sort of Evil Spirit? Is Rebecca becoming paranoid because of the
class in Vampire fiction taught by the English teacher? 7/10.
 
razortooth.jpg


Razortooth (USA 2009) is the best freely available film I've caught in a long while (Kings of Horror have made it available on Youtube). A quality B-movie.

A genetically mutated oversized eel - ravenous and semi-amphibious - is on the rampage in the swamplands of Florida and terrorising a small community there. The film is goodhearted, with a cast of interesting characters (although some have accused it of promoting anti-Southern sterotypes) and a not too absurd premise.The humour never undermines the suspense, and the locale is pleasantly escapist (unless that's where you live, I suppose!) There are some cheap CGI effects to take on board - but it doesn't stint on the gore when it needs to.

A state of the art creature feature with no pretentions to being anything else.

8/10 - but only for those who like monster movies.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top