Finished it... I thought it was quite bizarrely set up and I think the filmmakers got overambitious over making the twist, but at the end it just didn't feel like an actual twist at all.

Atmosphere is still top-notch, though, and what goes on later in the movie very much made it scary.

Watched Rear Window...never really been into older movies but this was great, should really try more

It's fairly obvious what the twist is gonna be after a certain point, earlier in the movie for some than others, but it's still a very unnerving, twisted, disturbing movie, especially once the third act starts and shit really starts going downhill for the mother.

Yeah the atmosphere was really superb and so dark/sinister. I'll definitely be looking out for more from that director.




It's a classic for very good reason. Hitchcock truly was the master of suspense.

On another note... I watched "We Steal Secrets" which is a documentary about the WikiLeaks founder Assange. I felt it gave the whole WikiLeaks story a more neutral and two-sided analysis than most modern documentaries that just preach at you. It didn't paint Assange himself in the best light, though I thought it did a good job of describing his motives and "vision" behind the project, ideals, and the importance of the effects WikiLeaks has had - both positive and negative. I briefly checked on IMDB and it seems there are many Assange fanboys who really hated it and the filmmakers allegedly weren't too unbiased, though I'm not sure of specifics. Something I'd like to look into more. Regardless, something I really appreciated about this documentary was that for the most part it didn't have all the emotionally-manipulative dramatic music and visuals that so many documentaries choose to include. This one was much more to the point and laid out the facts, though it wasn't exactly dry either. It's a decent flick IMO.

@James Rolfe, honestly if you watch any of his non-scripted James and Mike movie reviews he's fairly bad at voicing his opinion or using common verbal structure, mostly just "yeahs" and "it was pretty good", and when being pressed about negatives he takes many minutes to be critical. It's like his mind is blank without a script. Not to mention his obsessive love affair with Frankenstein, Godzilla, Dracula and the classics gets old.

Maybe unpopular opinion but I thought the Rear Window with Christopher Reeve was a worthwhile watch. Certainly not great like the original but very watchable, suspenseful and entertaining with it's updated take but retaining the feeling/tension of the original.

Watched a thriller called "Heist" earlier. Fairly basic stuff about guys (Dave Bautista as the mean sadistic robber and Jeffery Dean Morgan as the not evil family man robber) robbing a money-laundering casino director played by Robert DeNiro. Lots of cliches and predictable crap all over, especially the eye-rolling melodrama, but I still kinda liked it. It didn't take itself too seriously (fair amount of funny lines scattered throughout), the action scenes weren't half bad, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan and DeNiro worked very well with what they were given.

Nothing special, but worthwhile if you need to kill an hour and a half.

Yeah, it was completely fine especially for a low-budget TV movie, and Reeve was great. I also think it was his final film, and while I guess it could have been better, it could have been a helluva lot worse.

It was also a really cool casting choice considering his disability; whoever decided to cast him in the lead deserves a pat on the back.

^Totally agree, it was his last acting gift/swansong beyond brief tv show appearances. Even as a quadraplegic, the fact just his voice and facial expressions are greater and more engrossing than most newer actors today speaks volumes to the man's capability in the field.
Yes they do, sadly most directors treated him like he had aids after his accident. Kind words but prevailing disconnect.

Definitely read 'Still Me' if you haven't, darkeningday, it was the first book Reeve wrote after his accident. It chronicles his life thoroughly from stage to screen to his accident to his eventual return to a feature film. Everyone likes to summarize Reeve as Superman which is a nice sentiment but the man was much more and the book captures that beautifully.

Sausage Party wasn't as funny as I hoped it would be, but the fucked uppiness of it kinda makes up for it.

Dementia 13 - Pretty decent slasher/mystery from Francis Ford Coppola way back in the day. This was very basic, nothing too out of the ordinary, but there were a few very creepy moments and the atmosphere was good.

Baskin - Really good atmosphere and vibe - sort of a campy, over the top gorefest with all the weird tribal rituals and guts pulled out and people in weird makeup you could ask for. I thought this was fun. It seemed to be missing something in a way, though - the plot was sort of murky and vague and they didn't bother explaining much. I felt like this was a ton of fun to look at but the story just never really came together as a whole.

I thought it was good fun all-around. Definitely way, way better than it ever had any right to be.

Sure, it was pretty funny throughout, but I was hoping for some more really, really fun parts. Long time since I've watched a new, great, really fucking funny comedy.

Forgot one from earlier - Before I Go To Sleep: pretty decent thriller in the mode of stuff I used to rent from blockbuster 10 years ago. The plot is like 50 First Dates but not funny or romantic, and more of a seedy, weird mystery. I thought parts of this were very intriguing, mostly the parts where you're seeing things through the eyes of the amnesiac main character that are the most confusing, but then other parts fell back on a lot of sappy exposition and almost soap-opera-y stuff. The twist wasn't too bad, though I've seen this kind of stuff before. It felt kind of dated in spite of only coming out last year. Not bad at all, though far from essential.

Watched Texas Chainsaw Massacre last night, too. Still one of the sickest ever. Just pure rawness and ugliness. Love the Texan mise en scene and the weird creepy glowering dusk colors, and the violence is depraved and stark. The whole thing, even on the remastered version I own, looks like it was filmed on a handheld camera you fished out of a rest stop toilet. Just a classic of horror, and the scariest of all time next to the original Halloween in my estimation.

I wouldn't call Texas Chainsaw Massacre scary, really. Gritty and uncomfortable and fun to watch with others, yes, but scary? Nahhh. Saw it when I was a kid, and my first words after seeing it were, "Wait, did the chainsaw guy change his mask? Why's he wearing a 'pretty lady' mask?"

And maybe I'm just an asshole, but I couldn't wait for Franklin to bite it. All he did was whine whine whine. Maybe that's the reason I didn't see The Babadook as much of a horror movie, either--I wasn't afraid of what would happen to the kid, because I wanted to slap the kid around like he owed me money.

I never really see "annoying" characters as a bad thing by default - in The Babadook, that was the entire point, to show the kid as annoying from the mom's POV. In TCM I didn't really find Franklin too annoying, he just had a personality that was bitter and frustrated, and I liked that about him. I didn't want to hang out with the guy but that isn't a prerequisite for a movie character to be effective. Definitely some other, less good movies can have really annoying characters though.

They did too good of a job--other infamously annoying characters in pop culture like Navi or Shortround never filled me with as much rage as this fucking kid did.

You're not an asshole for wanting Franklin to bite it. I hold the original TCM on a horror pedestal and I can't stand Franklin one bit, either. He's not what makes the movie work, but the scenario and the grime and how plausible it is (since serial killing cannibals actually exist). The entire third act is nothing but pure tension until the credits roll, which is something that the remake lacked (its best scene being when the sheriff deals with the corpse in the van, barely halfway in).

This is probably why I give the original TCM a pass for its lack of what I normally expect in a horror movie main character.

Like when I try to explain why I think Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) blows away Halloween (1978), a major reason is that Nancy's story is so much more compelling than Laurie's. Nancy experiences more traumatic things earlier in the movie than Laurie does, and is more active in coming up with a plan and fighting back.

I probably should dislike TCM on that level because, let's be honest, Sally doesn't do much besides look hot, then scream and run once she sees the chainsaw. But the overall craziness of everything from that point on is so entertaining, I throw out my phony-"objective" checklist of how a movie should be structured.

TCM and Halloween are both >>> than Nightmare for me.

Nightmare is a great movie, but I never found it as scary as either TCM or Halloween - it's too fantastical and over the top to really hit me as a bone-chilling scary film, though it certainly is scary at what it does do. But I just think TCM and Halloween are better - both of which just encapsulate what 'scary' is in a movie for me. The former is a group of teens unwittingly entering a horrific, unearthly environment and the latter is evil coming into a normal environment, and both are undiluted and pure at what they try to do.

Rewatching last night, yeah, Sally is not a terribly well developed character, but there was hints of something with her and Franklin's brother-sister relationship, a kind of unease and friction between them, that made it good enough for me. It wasn't a movie that really needed much character development beyond what we got in the beginning - it wouldn't have really fit later on as she was so out of her element there wasn't much she could do but run.

As for Halloween, the way Laurie interacts with her friends and has that quiet charisma and charm just made her likable to me. I like how Nancy fights in Nightmare, too, but personality and characterization are just as important to me as what a character does. I didn't think either one was really lacking so far as being likable.

I personally don't care whether horror film characters are likeable or not, what I look for the most is if they act in a believable manner in the context of the situation. Sally running like a chicken with her head cut off is very much believable for me given the setting and circumstances she was thrust in. I also liked how Laurie was kind of the nerdy, smart girl but she still had a rebellious edge to her (smoking a joint with her friend before they pull up next to her friend's police officer father). The one thing I didn't like about her actions in Halloween was how she had literally three seperate opportunities where she had incapacitated Michael with a weapon, but refused to finish him off (and in some cases actually left the weapon behind). I like Halloween more than Nightmare though because of the incredibly creepy stalker vibe you get from Michael in several shots of the film where he's lingering in the background, and the soundtrack is absolutely amazing and super minimalist.

It's difficult to rank Nightmare vs. TCM, because I saw Nightmare at some point in elementary school whereas I was much older when I first watched TCM. Still, both are clearly better to me than Halloween.

Even though I just acknowledged that movies are more than the sum of their parts, and attempting to break down the factors that make me like or dislike them is so full of inconsistency it's pretty much worthless ...... I'm going to do it again. Between the three movies, Nancy is by far my favorite heroine, and Michael Myers is easily my least favorite villain.

Freddy will always have the advantage of being the one I liked as a kid, but between MM and Leatherface, two mostly mute guys in masks who will cut you to death, the guy with the chainsaw just looks scarier.

As far as which movie has the best ending (final minute or two), I give it to TCM. Nightmare's unsatisfying wrap-up is my main complaint about that movie.

The only one of those movies that's even really about the villain is Nightmare, though. Those others could barely considered characters, in fact John Carpenter considered Myers to be a "force of nature" who isn't really a person or anything like that. He's more accurately considered a sinister sort of MacGuffin, which is why I wouldn't even compare him to Freddy (who is arguably one of the only classic stalker villains with character, kind of a strange outlier among his peers) in the first place or even call him a villain. To me villain implies some sort of character. The focal point of Halloween, in my opinion, are the themes of obsession and stalking.

TCM was great because it's just about this incredibly fucked up, isolated family that's lost their way of life (grandpa used to work at a slaughterhouse until they automated the killing procedure, lost his job )and has cloistered themselves in their own community. It's just an unfortunate happenstance that those kids made their way to that neck of the woods. They were all stupid for not packing heat.

Yeah, agreed with rexxz's last two posts. Likability is sort of an overrated way to look at any movie characters, I feel like. It's about believability to me - do they act like real human beings, do they have real struggles, flaws, insecurities? That's what I look for. Horror movies especially don't focus much on character development like a drama or something, so it's good to get the sense of a real person with humanity, like Laurie Strode, who is caught up in the terror. That's where many later horror films failed - the characters were either so bland they barely had names, or they were cartoon-caricature asshole bullies. But if they act like a real person would - which is not an easy thing to write - then the horror is thus more effective.

And yeah I barely see a comparison between Nightmare, TCM and Halloween beyond the fact that they're all iconic movies. I think they're all very good, and comparable in quality. But so far as scary, the latter two are some of my picks for scariest of all time. Rosemary's Baby and The Thing would be right after those.

I don't think Halloween and Nightmare are scary movies. They're absolutely classic, incredibly well put together, just endlessly watchable, for sure, but compared to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? That movie is pure gritty insanity. You put it on and you feel like you're watching something you shouldn't be seeing. The cumulative effect of all the perfect decisions made during the making of that movie is nothing less than deep unease almost the whole way through.

I don't think any horror movie is a scary movie, because I personally don't feel frightened while I watch them. It's a poor way to judge that genre anyway, because as an adult it's much more difficult to be scared by something like a movie, show or a book. The more interesting thing to take from it is the psychological impact that those mediums have, as well as the topics being examined by them.

Doctor Strange: One of the more severe entries into the Marvel Universe, there's a certain crawling, sluggish progression to its structure that highlights the desperation faced by the main characters, and its use of space-time bending is a novel idea that adds to messes with the ebb and flow of the movie. The effects are amazing and of course the acting is excellent, with everyone filling their roles comfortably and naturally. There is the odd snag of Guardians of the Galaxy-esque humour being juxtaposed into a darker movie, because while the humour works it feels inappropriate in tone to the rest of the movie.

Overall though, it's an entertaining watch. My standards are admittedly low for movies (because I don't watch a lot of them) but I liked it.

The argument of what horror movies are scary is tired and subjective so not bothering there.

Well if you compare main protagonists of horror movies from 80's, 70's, even 90's, they are infinitely more likeable/relatable (two of the same thing that go hand in hand) then the cream of crap we currently have. Even something like 'Scream' you still somewhat root for the people the killer is trying to kill, even though they're the bored horror counter-culture who have "seen everything".

Unfriended is just one movie in a long line of arsehole main characters that apparently is today's youth/ or is trying to be different by throwing main characters you'd like to see burn alive. The whole reason is Max Landis type writers who believe portraying complex bitchy/highhorse/Joss Whedon-esque sir quips-a-lot is apparently fresh and good, that anything deviating from that are boring Mary Sue's and should be subject to ridicule. Like I don't know what weirdo feminazi soulless parasites that Max Landis hangs around with but real everyday people aren't like that.

Sure you had the silly disposable characters in the 80's but they were never mean spirited arseholes. And anyone saying that is not a reason to dislike a movie are only fooling themselves. One of the reasons 'Hush' (2016) works is because the main characters aren't whiny/bitchy/callous awful people, you deeply care about the girl who's stricken with no hearing and dread that situation if you're ever put in a similar situation - thus projecting yourself into the shoes of main character.

While true, this also applies to everything else you wrote.

I won't dignify your poorly thought comment with anything other than; not true.

Apparently you won't dignify it with proper grammar, either. But I shouldn't be too harsh, English is after all your second language.

Oh that's a real knee slapper. Huck-huck, tips fedora to Mr. White Knight.

Take this week to clean the sand out of your vagina.

That's pretty sad.

Man, that guy is a fucking lunatic.

Anyway, yeah, pretty much nothing in a movie is gonna be scary to a full grown adult, not on the visceral level as it would be at younger ages. But I like looking at the intent and the methods a film uses, and the atmosphere and feelings, and I like to gauge how scary I find it anyway.

I'm pretty sure every grown person here knows what someone means when they say a movie is "scary". I never really brought that up in the first place anyway, and what I did say is that I don't think it's a very useful way of talking about horror as a genre except for something you'd say to your friends when recommending something. He's just pedantic like that and loves to get into keyboard fights.

I think horror is one of those genres that's just begging for an expert cinematographer-director, because in much of my experience, most of the uneasiness I get from watching horror films relies on weird angles, lighting, unsettling pans and closeups, things of that nature. I love long hallway shots, especially dark ones. That shit right there just stirs something primal in a person, a kind of fear of the unknown like wading to the deep and dark part of the ocean.

I quite appreciate volutetheswarth's contributions to this thread? Does that make me a 'lunatic' too? I've enjoyed almost all of his posts, even the ones with which I vehemently disagree. He also got me hooked on Millennium, quite possibly the best TV show of the past decade. So he's far, far from a 'lunatic,' at least in my mind.

You mean the past decade of the past decade?