I wish someone would create a solid modern slasher flick. Something along the lines of the original Halloween. No supernatural haunted house bullshit, just a deranged maniac with a knife (or whatever) killing for no reason. I always enjoyed that fact about Halloween... that there was no explanation... no 'reason' for the killing... always thought it added a much more real aspect to the film and made it much scarier than a lot of it's contemporaries. I think with the right director and treatment a modern slasher flick could be pulled off rather well without being a mockery of the greats of the past and turning into some 'teen' slop. Make it dark, make it foreboding, make is suspenseful, and make it believable.

Recently I've watch 'House of a 1000 Corpses", the Rob Zombie movie- The only one I haven't seen besides it's sequel, "The devils Rejects". I'm personally not a fan of his music, but I love his movies.
I'd say it was about a 4/5.

Also, can anyone reccomend any movies similar to movies like "May" (Lucky Mckee)?
If so I'd appreciate it.

I wish for the opposite. I wish for slasher flicks to die off and never, ever come back. The original Black Christmas was the only (I repeat, only) good slasher movie. And even then, it was ridiculous.

I'll take atmospheric haunted house movies over slashers any day of the week.

I still haven't seen this, but I know I really really should. I just can't accept that David Twohy made something actually good. Although I guess The Arrival was kinda watchable. Kinda.

I'll pick up Perfect Getaway next time I'm at Family Video.

Hatchet is great. It's nothing like Halloween but it's easily better than any Friday the 13th film or any of that series' knock offs. Totally goofy, gruesome slasher fun.

Zelkiiro, you are now my enemy. How dare you blaspheme against the retarded godliness that is the slasher genre?

Seriously, Black Christmas is the only good slasher? What a crock of shit, Halloween and Maniac are two undeniable works of art that prove you wrong. I'll give you that there aren't many brilliant ones but there's a handful that are solid, such as Visiting Hours with Michael Ironside as an unstoppable wrecking machine.

Knowing the twist had nothing to do with why I didnt like it though. I saw just about every fake jump scare coming. . There were probably more, but I dont remember.
On a funny note, a coworker said Im too cynical, since I thought Paranormal Activity 4 was awful, along with a few others. Thing is, I didnt see, just a few scenes on youtube. People in the theater were FREAKING out over that dumb shit. I watched the ending again, this time with a quiet theater, and it feels like very little effort was made.

Excuse the overload of emoticons; I am a bit too fond of them at times. I agree with your view of Perfect Getaway - quite awesome (surprisingly so), for pretty much the reasons you mentioned. But... Orphan? That was possibly the most ludicrous twist I've ever seen; I actually fell off the couch laughing when the, ahem, revelation was made. Few films, even good comedies, have made me have injure myself at home. I mean...

I grant that it was funny, in an unintentional way (maybe intentional - surely, the writers or actors must have had a giggle here or there), but it wasn't remotely believable; the film wasn't particularly terrifying before then, but after that it just made itself the candidate for a good drinking game. And I thought it was rather derivative;

The twist was pretty weird and kind of silly, but it's not any less plausible than Sleepaway Camp or most other old horror films anyway. If you don't like that, then I can't really see how you'd really get into a lot of old 80s horror films anyway - all of them had similarly off the wall things going on. And Orphan made up for it because the girl playing Esther was so damn good of an actress. That performance excuses any silliness in the twist, and the twist never bothered me much anyway.

What I meant by believable was that the film just focused on the family and what they were going through, and the fact that the characters and acting were good made it a step above most other films like it. The fact that it had so little of the tired cliches of other modern horror movies, such as a lengthy backstory on Esther or long scenes of the characters going to the library and reading books, helped it quite a bit too. And it made up for a few jump scares by having them be really good jump scares. The rest of the scary parts in the movie came from how far the movie pushed its characters, and how intense everything felt. Very viscerally heavy, gratifying horror movie.

Addams Family (1991) 3.5/5 {*}
Raul Julia (excellent as always), Angelica Huston (stunning as Morticia), Christopher Lloyd (the lovable Fester), and Christina Ricci (playing Wednesday perfectly) star in this film version of the 1960s TV program. A fake Fester attempts to steal the family's fortune. Since its days as a comic, its had a hint of Jewish otherness to it, which can plainly be seen in the film version. Worth a watch.

Addams Family Values (1993) 4/5 {*}
Raul Julia, Angelica Huston, Christopher Lloyd, and Christina Ricci return to star in the sequel to the 1991 film. This one is a bit edgier, dirtier, and more death-oriented than the first one while still retaining the slapstick humor found in the 1960s TV program. The Addams welcome a new addition to the family. To help with the baby they hire a nanny, who just so happens to be a black widow preying on Uncle Fester. Much more explicit "Jewish humor" can be found in this one. I enjoyed it a bit more than the first.

Absentia: A strange film to review. It was funded through donations on Kickstarter (ending up with a budget of a measly 70 thousand dollars). It lives and dies on it's atmosphere. With a very sparse drony score and long drawn out scenes of character development. This was less of an overt horror movie than I expected and more of a meditation on loss with horror elements. It really managed to instill a sense of dread while showing the viewer pretty much almost nothing. One shouldn't expect any gore, nudity or any other such thing going in. The atmosphere, cinematography, and acting (for amateurs/unknown) were all impressive. I don't want to give anything away about the story but I think it's worth seeing. Anyways, I'm about to watch Megan is Missing and I have no idea what to expect.

Absentia and Megan is Missing are definitely two of the most unnerving movies of the last few years.

Wow. That movie was too much. Definitely disturbing. It managed to break through my vast desensitization. I'll post my thoughts later. For now I just want to think of nice things :/

I've mentioned it before, but Megan is Missing really got me. The subject matter and the film itself and everything was effective enough, but that first girl (it's been a while so I can't remember if that was Megan or not) talks EXACTLY like my best friend. Her voice is a tad deeper and she's the total opposite of a party girl slut, but the way she talks, her mannerisms, they way she talks with her hands, her speech patterns, just everything reminds me so much of her that it just made the movie extra uncomfortable for me. It wasn't a character I was watching all that happen to, it was somebody very dear to me. So yeah, it's pretty safe to say I will not ever be watching it again

Alright, so my thoughts. I thought the set up being really long and unnerving, slowly moving to the point of no return was really effective. I've read reviews stating that the acting was poor, but they only made me wonder if those people had never met any stupid teenage girls before. It was spot on. Sure, that party may have been unrealistic to an extent, but I've been to similar parties and I tend to stay away from massive douches/intense tools like the dude who makes the girls pay for their entry. I think it did a good job of establishing things that actually go on. Getting into more spoilery territory now.

Ya know now that you mention it I've heard good things about Hatchet but never checked it out, I'll have to remedy that.

And cosigned VTS, Black Christmas is top tier for slasher flicks but I'd put Maniac as it's equal easily. I love atmospheric supernatural horror as well... The Exorcist is probably the greatest horror film of all time but it just seems like hollywood can't do that shit right anymore and that seems to be all they put out aside from remakes of films that don't need to be re-made. I watched Zodiac for the first time since it came out the other day and it just reminded me that there's a lot of room for genuine horror to be created by normal human beings and their sadistic obsessions. That film actually did a great job of creating a foreboding and ominous atmosphere and any of those kill scenes could have easily been in a slasher film.

Absentia was mind-numbingly stupid. The entire movie was its premise. Some people may find the fact that we know no more at the end than we do at the beginning artistic or clever, but to me it was just irritating. Ok, I know that it's implied that some thing was taking these people, but it wasn't expanded upon nearly enough to fulfill the movie's promise. A complete waste of time. At least the one actress was really pretty.

I only found that to be a small problem. I think not knowing was the whole point. And it did pretty much heavily imply what was happening, revealing small snippets at a time. I actually doubt they had the budget to show a big reveal.

If not knowing was the whole point, then anyone could just skip the movie entirely. Basically the movie is this: some guy is missing. Then more people go missing. The end. Anyone would assume that something took them; that's how kidnapping works. Whether it's human or not doesn't really matter when the movie does so little with it.

It sounds to me like you just have a problem with the less is more aesthetic which a lot of old horror movies used. Also, it was made abundantly clear that it was not human.

I don't have a problem with that aesthetic at all; I just didn't think this movie did a very good job with it. I don't know, I see all the things you're saying. Maybe I'm just not in the right mood tonight. The movie itself seemed well made, but it just didn't strike me well, so it's probably me. =P

Just watched Antichrist last night. Very slow paced, which I understand to be typical of Lars von Trier, and very creepy. I almost gave up about halfway through, as I was not interested in another psychological study of depression a la Melancholia, but I'm glad I stuck it out. The movie is very artistically done, and ultimately makes its



point. It is explicit and graphic in parts, and will make you recoil. If you saw Melancholia and found it as mind-numbingly dull as I did, I posit that it is largely due to Kirsten Dunst being a terrible actress, because Antichrist is proof that Lars here knows how to make a movie.

There was plenty of implication enough of what was going on. It was ambiguous, but not so much that you couldn't figure it out with a little imagination. We knew just enough for the film to be a masterpiece, which it was.

Yeah, I was wrong to say that we didn't know any more at the end than we did at the beginning, because we certainly did. But that's as much as I can say for it. I just wasn't made to care what was happening, nor to whom it was happening, nor why. Take, for example, the younger sister. They say several times throughout the movie that she used to be a junkie, but that's as far as it goes. At no point did I actually believe that this girl ever used drugs in her life, because the way she was portrayed made her seem pretty straight-laced. So when they all disbelieve her when she says she saw some creature, it was struck me as idiotic. The tension and dread in the movie only built to a certain point, a low simmer as it were, and progressed exactly no further. No breaking point. No climax. No terrifying realization or revelation, as the masters like Lovecraft delivered. All we get is, 'Ooh, there's some hideous creature spiriting people away, isn't that scary?!' and all I can say is, 'No, not really.' I'm not even asking them to show the monster full-on and have a big bloodbath; I'm just asking them to flesh things out a little more and bring the terror home, because aside from an ill-defined glimpse or two of it, all you get is a bunch of hearsay, none of which elucidates the horror any more than my own guesses did - guesses which I already had before the movie even started! So no, this was not a masterpiece. A great idea, definitely, and by no means a complete failure, but mostly a failure? Absolutely.

Addendum: Just to explain why I'm so frustrated with this movie. I did not feel like the makers of this movie were inept, nor that the actors were incompetent. Quite the opposite. For the first quarter or third of this movie, I was really interested in what was going on, and I felt like it was building up to something great. But then it just... stopped. I think of it as an expert marksman who has a great, powerful gun, and he's in a shooting competition. 19 times out of 20, he's going to hit the bull's-eye, but for some reason, this one time, he botches the shot. This movie was really going for something remarkable, and didn't make it. So I'm a little frustrated, haha. Oh well, can't win 'em all. I'm glad everyone else liked it at least.

I haven't seen Absentia, but what you're describing sounds like my reaction to The Blair Witch Project. I thought it was quite good, the buildup of tension was excellent, only just as there's about to be some kind of big scary payoff in the abandoned house - it ends. I'm a proponent of 'less is more' when it comes to horror, but a horror movie still needs a proper climax where it reveals something.

Insidious (2011) 4/5 {*}
For being a newer horror film which did fairly well in the box office, I am surprised how much I enjoyed this one. A boy in a nice middle-class family falls from a ladder and succumbs to a coma. Soon unexplained events occur in the house which inspire the family to move. In their new home the unexplained events intensify so they decide to contact a "paranormal psychic." She informs the family that their comatose son is lost in his dreams and a demon is attempting to enter our dimension through the son's body. For a plot that ridiculous it was still very good!

Trick r Treat (2007) 4.5/5 {*}
This is one of my favourite 2000s horror films. Ive been wanting to watch this for a few years now, but just got around to it recently. A few different stories overlap in this story about various people around a small town during their large Halloween celebration. Murders galore take place throughout the evening which keep you guessing as to who the culprit is. Many horror film traditions (punishment for a terrible act done decades earlier, a supernatural twist, etc) are sprinkled through this horrifying, yet comedic (read: campy) anthology (in a "22 Short Films About Springfield" sorta way). Very well written, this will become a classic.

failsafeman, I thought the climax of Blair Witch Project was awesome and the image of the guy staring at the wall was extremely memorable. it's definitely a stronger one than Absentia's (a movie I wouldn't consider a modern classic).

Agreed. The climax of Blair Witch was excellent and that ending with the guy staring into the corner terrified me when I first saw.

It was memorable I guess but it was much less so than a lot of the other 'scares' - by far the scariest part is when they find the lost guy's teeth wrapped up in the scrap of his clothing. When they go into the house I was like 'oh shit, what's going to happen, what's going to happen...' Then nothing happens, they just drop the cameras. Yeah you see the guy staring at the corner, sort of like what the serial killer guy did, but fuck, they should have shown SOMETHING more. The image of him staring into the corner was not, in itself, scary at all, when that was the very point at which they had to hammer home with something really disturbing. I know they had a small budget but with some thought they could have come up with something. For me the end just left me feeling empty, like great sex ending right before an orgasm. Maybe I'm just not as susceptible to basic scares as you guys, I don't know.

I get what you mean. They built up everything so much and implied a lot of the supernatural and it ended up just being some ghost of a serial killer. I think that if the ending hadn't been so effective, I would have been dissapointed.

I guess is was more the reference to the story of the serial killer and the implication the girl was being killed. I do tend to like minimalism in horror movies though. For example you've got Paranormal Activity, which had it's moments (grating stupidity of the characters aside) but the ending was just brutal. The image of her standing over the bed was far more unsettling than that silly possessed demon jump at the camera.

In other found footage news, I watched The Fourth Kind yesterday. I kinda figured it would be dodgy at best, but I do like alien abduction stories. In the end yeah, it was a bit of a mess. The idea of a psychologist becoming delusional after the suicide of her husband and possibly experiencing alien phenomenon is a decent premise and could have made for a great unreliable narrator story but the execution was awful. Why they felt the need to have side by side frames of 'real' and 're-enacted' footage is beyond me.

I can see where you're coming from, but I guess I just watched this movie in a much different way than you did. I didn't find it pants-shittingly, balls-out tense or brutal in the way of Orphan or as sadistic as Megan as Missing, but Absentia was more of a dark, haunting and deeply depressive sort of horror film, as much about its human characters' despair and trauma as it was about the supernatural glimpses. Plus I am a sucker for movies that just lightly sprinkle their plots with supernatural stuff - i.e. gritty/urban fantasy, if you want to call it that. I found Absentia an incredibly effective, atmospheric masterpiece and it really, really left a mark on me the first time I watched it. It's the implications of it, like Failsafe said, that got to me. Your criticisms make more sense now than they did in your first post, but I guess it's just a matter of what kind of horror you like.

For the record, Absentia was ten times better than that Blair Witch nonsense...the ending (of Absentia) did not leave me feeling unfulfilled at all, personally. It was a perfect way to close the story and left me feeling incredibly lost and hopeless - the mark of a good horror movie really. I'm not gonna spoil it, but I think you ought to go check it out, failsafe; you'd prolly dig it.

Good points. As a drama, it works much better than as a horror film. Maybe I'll watch it again a little later and see if my opinion changes. I was a bit harsh in my initial reactions, but that was because the disappointment was fresh.

I don't like to think of things in such hardened terms like that. It was very much a scary film, as much as it was also dramatic. Genres shouldn't ever become too constricting.

The Beyond (1981) 3.5/5 {*}
Rather slow, this eerie tale which takes place in New Orleans involves a haunted building. A Yankee woman inherits an old N'awlins hotel. As she is having it restored mysterious things start to happen. These incidents are not limited to the hotel; the Book of Eibon apparently follows the woman around. After some deaths at the house, she does some investigating to discover the murder of a warlock at the location decades earlier. Incoherent at times (intentional surrealism?), this film features some classic gore moments. The ending is the greatest, so watch all the way through!

Maniac (1980) 3.5/5 {*}
A NYC photographer who has mommy-issues decides to rape and murder some ladies. He's dating a fashion photographer and likes to kill her models. Then he goes after her as his grip on reality fades. Intensely graphic, apparently the bleeding heart feminists came out against this one.

You make a good point, Empyreal. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about this movie, and move on to something else. Good debating with you man. =]

I watched Crank today, it's like Grand Theft Auto in a movie and it's so good.
Also the first movie I've seen with Jason Statham, he plays Chev so damn well.
Has anyone noticed that he looks a lot like Frank Mullen though? Thought that was cool.

I'll definitely have to check out the sequel to it.

8.5/10

I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time last night. I didn't understand the ending at all, but at the same time I felt really reassured that that wasn't really the point. It's beautiful, unsettling and fantastically thoughtful, and to top it off, it's a Sci-Fi film with no sound in space, which makes watching it with my flatmate who studies Physics that little bit less prone to pedantry.