What kind of monster would I be if I didn't end this adventure with Halloween? I guess since it was a Friday, I could have done Friday the 13th for all the number dyslexics out there. But I didn't. I went with Halloween, mostly because I had never seen it all the way through (although that means I miss out on Kevin Bacon getting an arrow stabbed through his neck while smoking a J).
Let me start by saying this movie has one of the most iconic horror movie themes ever, perhaps only rivaled by The Exorcist, but unlike The Exorcist, this movie hammers the theme into your brain until just thinking about the tune send shivers down your spine and makes you turn around to check for murderers. Also, John Carpenter, the director, made the music, so that's cool.
Speaking of turning around, that's where so much of the fear in this movie comes from, the sense of being watched an followed. This is a strategy of fear-inducing that has evolved into one of the found-footage genre's greatest tools. Several of the found-footage movies I watched this month featured a scene where the antagonist manned the camera, providing a first-person view into the nefarious acts of the bad guy. These scenes were often the most tense and scary of the respective movies. Halloween is not found-footage, but implements the first-person shots several times with consistently high tension-levels.
The murdering is also well-paced through the movie. After opening with a kill scene, the body count slows to set up characters, such as Jamie Lee Curtis in her film debut. But just because there is no killing during these scenes, doesn't mean they aren't scary. This is where the "being watched" scenes begin to appear, and the looming sense of dread starts to build.
"I'm in the corner, watching you kiss him..."
Most of the tension-building takes place during the day, which again, shows its power. Any movie that can instill fear in daylight is doing something right. One detractor is that the kill effects are a little cheesy, but that's balanced out by Carpenter using a lot of shots focusing on the killer or the knife pulling away all blood stained.
I know I'm going to get shit for this, and maybe it was all the hype, but after having never seen The Exorcist, I was kinda disappointed. Yes, there were scary moments, primarily when devil Regan was on screen, but not only was that a fairly minimal part of the movie but also the scenes in between failed to keep the tension for me. On top of that, I found the ending to be abrupt and unsatisfying.
I dunno. I feel bad about not being blown away by it. I mean it tops just about "Scariest Movie Ever!" list, but it just didn't get to me the way some of the others on I've watched this month. That iconic music? Super stressful and awesome. Yet they play it like twice in the whole movie for about ten seconds each. I want more damnit!
That shit gives me chills every time. So why use it so little? I know I've used the term slow burn on here a bunch, and that would apply here, but again, the final act just didn't do it for me. In fact, the most scariest scene for me, and it was truly horrifying, comes almost exactly at the halfway point. After that, I was really excited for the rest, thinking it would only get more tense and awful (which remember is a good thing for horror films), only to be disappointed that the climax (my apologies for unintended future pun) came at the halfway point. Here's the scene:
That scene really gets to me. Rewatching it while putting it here gave me just as much unpleasantness (again this is good) as the first time, but again, what follows just doesn't do this scene justice.
Disappointed. I wanted to be terrified of this movie. I so wanted this to be a contender for scariest of month, but it just fell kinda flat.
All that said, from a movie as a whole standpoint, it was great. Characters that were somewhat developed, beautiful cinematography, it was even nominated for Best Picture (the first horror movie to do so).
If anyone hasn't seen it and watches it, please tell me what you think. Or even if you have seen it, tell me what you think. I just feel really weird about this.
Rating on the Spook-o-meter: 4 out of 10 boos (the above scene is 7 boos)
Man, Choi Min-sik makes some hard to watch movies. To be fair, I've only seen this and Oldboy, but good lord, they are both rough. Albeit in different ways. He clearly likes hammers though...
I'm pretty much just gonna drop spoilers throughout, so don't read on if you want to watch it blind.
In a nutshell, I Saw the Devil is Taken meets a mixture of Silence of the Lambs and Hostel. The film begins when Kyung-chul kills Joo-yun seeming for her refusing his help with her flat tire (although after finishing the movie, I realized he probably would have killed her anyway). Turns out Joo-yun is the daughter of the former chief of police and her fiancee is a secret service agent (Liam Neeson). Because of this, they pull out all the stops to find her body, which they do, or at least her head. This lead to one of the two laugh out load moments in the otherwise very serious film.
I wish I could find a gif or a video of it, but I can't. But basically, the police put Joo-yun's severed head in a forensics box and the guys carrying the box proceeds to stumble in front of a ton of other police and journalists and the head rolls out. I know it was supposed to be a serious and tragic moment, but holy shit, it was hilarious.
Anyway, Soo-hyun (Joo-yun's fiancee, the secret service agent) receives the police's top suspects from his father-in-law and begins a vigilante spree against them to figure out who was Joo-yun's killer. His first stop is not the killer, but does provide some harsh violence as he interrupts the suspect's masturbation session.
If you didn't watch the clip, then you missed my other laughing moment, right at the end. When the police chief asks the hard-hitting question, "Who broke your balls?" Sometimes, even in the most dreadful moments, you just need a laugh.
Soo-hyun eventually figures out that Kyung-chul is the killer and begins to stalk him via a tracking device on his car. Soo-hyun then interrupts Kyung-chul's current rape and soon to be murder by beating the shit out of him and forcing a gps/microphone pill down his throat. He is then able track Kyung-chul even better, allowing KC (abbreviating now on for my ease) to get patched up at the hospital. Now as if we didn't already know, we see KC continuing to be a monster as he begins to sexually assault the nurse. But thanks to the tracking device, SH shows up and lays an even more severe beatdown on KC, culminating in a scene that left be truly breathless in horror and visceral pain. I'm not even going to try to look for a gif, picture, or video because it was too horrifying, but I'll just say this: scalpel meets Achilles tendon.
Just writing that made me feel icky.
This sick catch and release by SH continues and you see him basically becoming the monster that he is trying to extinguish. You also meet some other horrible characters like a slovenly cannibal. SH wins out in the end, but at such a cost to both his family and conscience that you really question if you can even call it a victory. This is something that KC expresses several times in the final act, but you really don't believe him until the film ends and the dust settles.
Then you're just sitting there. Depressed, horrified, and just generally feeling shitty about everything that was once good in the world. But then I remembered that I'm not a secret service agent, and if my non-existent fiancee were killed, I wouldn't go on a rampage of vengeance. I'd probably just grieve in the normal fashion and try to move on with my life. No moral and mental breakdown for this guy!
I didn't mention it yet, but his jacket is really cool.
Movies like this one are kinda cheating when they act as though they are based on a true story, but never actually say so, so you can't get mad at them when the unbelievable starts to happen. The film begins by saying it has been edited from an unfinished documentary, outtakes, and news footage to create what you're about to see. So it kinda seems like maybe this is real, but we actually live in a world filled with lies. In short, this isn't a true story.
But that is not really important at all to the quality of the movie.
The premise here is that a medical student is creating a documentary on Alzheimer's disease, focusing on a particular patient, Deborah Logan. At first, things are harmless, yet depressing enough. This frail old lady is clearly losing it, but doesn't seem to even realize it, while her daughter turns to alcohol to cope with the stress of being her caretaker. While I've not experienced living with someone with Alzheimer's directly, the increasing dementia was rather hard to watch.
Things begin to get a bit more eerie as her mental health deteriorates leading to a pretty wild final act.
I won't talk much about this movie because despite being told that it was really scary, it turned out not to be much of horror movie. Shouldn't you have figured that out before watching it, I hear you ask? Why yes, probably, except I like to go into these movies as blindly as possible, so as to not spoil stuff, ass.
Sorry about that.
Let me say, just because it's not horror, doesn't mean it wasn't scary, but it was scary in a different way. In a gross and uncomfortable way. Basically, Martha escapes from a cult of sorts and stays with her sister while she recovers. We learn through flashbacks that "the family" has some strange ideas, like the women can only eat after the men have finished. Oh yeah, and the leader drugs and rapes the women through what they call "the cleansing." The flashbacks reveal more and more intense situations for Martha, which she doesn't talk about but is still affecting her, even after escaping.
There are some "what is real?" moments when some of the dreams/flashbacks seem to bleed into her current waking life. In addition, there's a real sick to your stomach feeling whenever "the family" in on screen, particularly Patrick, the leader. The movie ends just when the real horror would seemingly start. From a "film as art" perspective, it's a bold and powerful (flavorful?) ending, letting your imagination define what happens next. But from a horror fan perspective, it was unsatisfying and left me wanting.
There's some really interesting things that You're Next does including possibly the greatest death scene ever (will get more into this later). First of all, there's a good amount of nostalgia in this film, starting with the opening scene, a classic horror trope. Unknown characters are boning and then are promptly murdered by a masked assailant.
We then shift to a different story line. A recently retired couple arrive at their new home and notice that their neighbor must be there (the unbeknownst to them, murdered neighbor). The couple's adult-aged children begin arriving to celebrate the parents anniversary. There's a funny moment where they here something upstairs and the mother insists on them leaving and calling the police, which is a huge overreaction for the situation, but she's obviously seen horror movies before. She's not taking any chances. What makes it funny is that there actually is an intruder, but they don't find him, so they assume it's safe.
Things are going seemingly fine, until...
We get to a dinner scene!
Classic dad sweater vest.
Fans of this blog will know that I've mentioned the importance of dinner scenes in horror movies, and this one is no different. Now it's not uncomfortable because the people are cannibals or sadists, but rather because the family doesn't completely get along. Ever go to your friend's house for dinner and they end up arguing? This was like that on steroids. So much so that no one seems to notice when the daughter's boyfriend gets murdered with an arrow.
Spoilers!
What follows is the family being taken down one by one. Despite them holing up in the interior of the house, no one is safe because, surprise! someone was already in the house. Remember that noise they heard earlier? Well it was a murderer. One of the sons' Australian girlfriend begins to take charge in how to survive, which is due to her being raised by her dad on a survivalist compound. This becomes apparent when she gets the best of one of the intruders and just unrelentingly murders him with a meat hammer. The youngest son watches her do this with little reaction.
It was around this time that I realized this movie is basically Home Alone for adults. Traps are set by both the intruders and the family, several of which end in some very visceral activations. Speaking of visceral, I know I'm a little weird in how I react to stuff, but in the dinner scene, I had little reaction to the arrow murder. But during the struggle, one of the characters effs up his ankle and that made me seize up something fierce. That being said, I did grasp my neck on the several throat slits.
Anyway, we find out that the youngest son is the orchestrator of the entire thing, having the whole family killed so he will be the sole benefactor of the family's enormous wealth. But they've clearly not counted on Erin (the Aussie girlfriend) being a badass and fighting back. At this point, we're well into the second act, nearly the final, and I'm starting to think that the movie is losing steam.
Well boy was a fucking moron.
Remember when I mentioned that best kill? Well, I couldn't find a gif, and the only video I could find is this awful quality one. To set the scene, Erin smashes a blender on Felix's (the douche son) head. She then slams it, blade-side down into the top of his head. AND THEN SHE TURNS IT ON!!!! FUCK YES, SHE BLENDED HIS BRAINS OUT!!!
The ending has another turn or two that I won't cover so as to leave something to surprise. but it has a fun, bleak end that is very reminiscent of Night of the Living Dead. Between the quality scares, killer deaths (hehe, deal with the terrible pun), and actually solid character development, I was very pleasantly surprised by this slasher flick.
Note: I like this poster more than the normal one, but that tagline is garbage. Personally, I really think it should be "Officer, we've had a doozy of a day." If you don't get it, don't worry, it's funny in the context of the movie.
I tend to believe that this movie is much better going in not knowing anything about it. So if you haven't seen it, please take my word and watch it without reading on.
Otherwise, spoiler city:
So first off, I fully admit that this was kinda cheating to pick. Not only have I seen it before, but its also much more of a funny satire than a truly scary movie. That being said, I can always pretend that i hadn't seen it, and thus picked it not knowing what it was truly about. But here's the thing, I wanted to watch it, so deal with it.
Seriously though, as I enter the final week of Spooktober, I'll be watching several of the scariest films (according to various lists and whatnot), so I decided to kick off the week with something a little light, so that I don't end the month with a bout of depression and/or fear-somnia.
All that said, this movie kicks ass.
It's just such a perfect send up of so many backwoods horror tropes. Promiscuous college kids on spring break stumble upon two hillbillies in their decrepit cabin and bad stuff starts happening. Except the hillbillies in question are not evil in anyway, just always in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Hilarious, yet gory deaths are strewn through this slasher meets comedy. I really just can't recommend this enough. Yes, it's not particularly scary in the traditional sense, but again, I don't care. See the movie and enjoy.
