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Bride of Project Horror, Day 31: Barney's Halloween Party

10/31/2012

And so we come to the final night of another installment of Project Horror.  As always, the last movie doesn't have to fit into any of my blocks, it's Danny's Choice.  Last year, I watched The Halloween Tree with Blake.  This year, I wanted to watch something with the kids again, but I also wanted to watch something really disturbing.  That's when the answer jumped out at me from Netflix's homepage: Barney's Halloween Party.

You guys, I've watched some horrible, messed-up, depraved stuff this month.  None of it was as difficult to watch as this.  With something like Bloodsucking Freaks or Nekromantik, you can at least brace yourself for what's to come.  They may have extreme elements, but there are scenes where you get some relief, too.  With Barney, it's relentless and without relief, from the time the show starts until the time that it decides to release its grip on you.

But enough about what I thought.  Let's ask the target audience.
ME: OK, Jack, how did you like that?
JACK:  It was pretty good!
What was your favorite part?
Well, I liked the song about picking apples in the fall.  Did you?
Um... I'm glad that you liked it.  Was there part that made you laugh?
Yes, when Baby Bop and BJ kept forgetting the stuff to go trick or treating with!
Was any of it scary?
Yes.
What was scary?
Daddy - Barney never blinks.
Oh my gosh.  You're right.  That is creepy.  It's like the abyss staring back into you...
What's an abyss?
It's a deep, deep hole.
You're silly, daddy.

I'll teach him to call me silly.  It's 11 PM, and I'm going to raid his trick or treat sack.

Check in tomorrow for my end-of-project wrap up!
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Bride of Project Horror, Day 30: Antichrist

10/30/2012

It's the final night of the Surreal & Trippy block of movies, and the next to last night of Bride of Project Horror!

I've only seen a few of Lars von Trier's films, but they always stay with me for a long time afterwards.  He's often accused of misogyny in his work, and although I can understand that argument, I don't agree with it.  Of the movies of his I've seen (this, Breaking the Waves, Dogville, Dancer in the Dark), they all revolve around women who are either degraded, abused, humiliated, or suffering a slow slide into a worse state.  Of course, I can't see inside von Trier's mind, but I don't think his intention is to sanction this treatment of women, as much as it is to examine people's behaviors towards each other.  The main character in each of these movies is a person in a position of extreme vulnerability first, a woman second.

Antichrist is a hard film to get a handle on, and an even harder one to summarize succinctly.  This is the kind of movie people write dissertations on.  It's about a couple (never named) whose young son dies in the first scene of the movie.  Although the death is accidental, it's hinted that the wife knew about, and could possibly have prevented, the circumstances which lead to their son's death.  To help deal with her grief, her husband (a psychotherapist) takes her to a cabin where their family used to travel together, and where she had gone the summer before with their son, in order to work on a thesis.  She has identified this place as the origin of her fears, and he believes that she can be helped by forcing her to face those fears.  Once they reach the cabin, things get worse and worse, as it seems even nature is turning on them.  He begins having visions of animals in extreme circumstances, almost like they are warning him.  Then he finds some of her writing from the previous summer, and realizes that she has been dealing with mental demons for far longer than he had thought.  When he finds evidence that she may also have been hurting their son, things become much worse, and far more gruesome.

There are some really severe scenes in this movie, both of sexual violence and other graphic trauma, but that's not what's going to haunt me.  Watching the gradual deterioration of both the wife's mental state in this movie, and of their relationship (to say nothing of the very enigmatic and creepy final scene) is the stuff that nightmares are made of.

Like some of the other movies I've watched, I definitely would not recommend this one to just anybody.  It's got some scenes of a very frankly sexual nature, and it raises some very uncomfortable questions about relationships, gender, and violence.  But I can say that, like von Trier's other movies, it's one that's going to stay with me for a while.

I give Antichrist five grindstones out of five.
Tomorrow night: I don't actually know for sure yet what the final movie will be!  Stick with me to find out!

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Bride of Project Horror, Day 29: Beyond the Black Rainbow

10/29/2012

I'm just going to be straight with you.  I fell asleep about 30 minutes into this movie, and only now woke up.  That's not any reflection on the movie, which I was actually enjoying a lot.  It's just that a month of late nights has caught up with me.

From what I saw, this seemed to be much more of a sci-fi thriller than a horror movie.  It had a very 70s-throwback look to it, kind of like Logan's Run.  Again, I fell asleep pretty early on, but it was about a cruel scientist and the girl with strange powers who he keeps captive.

I enjoyed what I saw, and I'm planning to come back and watch this one again when I'm a little more rested.  In the meantime, I'm going to give it an unknown score, a great big ? out of five.

Tomorrow night: Antichrist, available on Netflix instant streaming
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Bride of Project Horror, Day 28: Carnival of Souls

10/28/2012

Not bad!  Not great, but not bad, either.

Carnival of Souls opens with Mary in a car with two other girls when they are challenged to a drag race.  The car they are in goes over the edge of a bridge and sinks.  Three hours later, while the town is still searching for the car, she emerges from the water, unharmed.  When we see her next, she's traveling to Utah to begin a job as a church organist.  On her trip there, she sees a strange ghoulish man.  She begins to see him in different places even after she's reached her destination, along with other strange delusions, such as suddenly becoming invisible to the people around her.  As she tries to figure out what's going on, she's mysteriously drawn to an abandoned carnival near a dried lake.  When she travels there on her own and sees the ghoulish man, what does it mean for her?

I dug this one.  It's low budget, low tech, and low action, and aside from the lead actress the cast is only so-so.  Despite those limitations, though, it succeeds.  The scene near the end of the movie, when Mary returns to the carnival for the final time, actually made me shiver like nothing else this month has.  The creepy man has the most awesomely sinister face.  The soundtrack is excellent.  The plot is kind of like Let's Scare Jessica to Death by way of An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge.

I give Carnival of Souls four pipe organs out of five.
Tomorrow night: Beyond the Black Rainbow, available on Netflix instant streaming
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Bride of Project Horror, Day 27: Begotten

If you've been reading Look What Danny Made! for a while, you may remember way, way back to the second move that I ever watched for Project Horror, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  That movie is, of course, a fairly well-known classic, but the way that I first heard of it was in a book about cult movies that I checked out from the library.  Tonight's movie was in that same book that I checked out when I was a kid.  It's always kind of played in my imagination since then, and tonight I finally checked it out.  Let's just say that it was much better in my imagination.

Begotten is kind of a horror film, but very much an experimental film.  It's like Un Chien Andalou; it shows very unsettling imagery in a very artistic way.  Unfortunately, it's also like five times as long as Un Chien Andalou.  It features no spoken language, and is shot in black and white.  And when I say black and white, I don't mean like Citizen Kane.  I mean that it was shot in some kind of process that makes the images onscreen render only in black and white, with no grays to provide contrast.  This, combined with the already bizarre onscreen occurrences, makes it incredibly difficult to tell what's going on for a lot of the movie's running time.

To very, very loosely summarize, the movie shows an Old God killing himself.  A woman emerges from his remains, pregnant with his son.  The son is born a fully grown man, whom she abandons, and who is killed by nomads.  But then he resurrects.  But then they come back and get his mom and kill her and dismember her.  Then they come back again and do the same thing to him.  Then some flowers grow over the spot where he was buried.  Except there was a lot more gruesome stuff (kind of) shown in the process.

I've got to be frank, I hoped to enjoy this film because I like when a movie can show me something new and different, but I honestly just didn't know what was going on for most of this movie's run time.  I'd probably still be lost if it wasn't for Wikipedia.  I'm glad to have seen it at long last, but this one just wasn't for me.  I give Begotten two straight razors out of five.
Tomorrow night: Carnival of Souls



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Bride of Project Horror, Day 26: Fear(s) of the Dark

10/27/2012

I just watched this move and then promptly fell asleep before my computer even finished booting up, so I hope you'll understand if this one's a little short!

Especially after yesterday's movie, today's was great.  A nice palate cleanser.

Now, there are probably some obvious examples that I'm forgetting about, but have you ever seen an animated horror film?  I never had, but I decided at the start of this project that I wanted to try and find one.  I really enjoy animated movies, especially ones that are a little experimental.  I especially like animation for adults, and I wish that there was more of it.

Fear(s) of the Dark is hard to summarize, because it's an anthology film.  Several different animators contributed segments, so there are a variety of styles on display, although all are in black and white.  Each of the segments is about the subject of fear.  Some of the segments recur throughout the movie.  There really wasn't a bad one, but my favorite was the final one, a classic haunted house tale about a man who breaks into an old house for shelter against a storm.  There was a moment that literally gave me goosebumps.  When has that ever happened?

This movie is in French, and there are parts that are very... French.  One of the recurring segments features abstract shapes and patterns morphing across the screen while a voice lists all the things that it's afraid of.  The list includes things like mediocrity, shifts of personal philosophy, and the bourgeoisie.  Oh, France... It's like you want to be pushed over and have your lunch money taken.

A good one tonight.  I give it four creepy bugs out of five.
Tomorrow night: Begotten, available in its entirety at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCegnCnCsjE
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Bride of Project Horror, Day 25: A Serbian Film

10/26/2012

Ouch, my soul.

Until tonight, Martyrs was probably the most extreme movie I've ever seen.  Its extremity at least led up to an ending that was remarkable.  As of tonight there's a new titleholder for both the most extreme and most transgressive movie I've seen, and it did not have an ending that I hope to think of ever again as soon as I finish this review.

I'm actually really hesitant even to summarize this movie.  It's that harsh.  Here goes...  Milos is a semi-retired porn star with a beautiful wife and young son.  His infamy as a performer comes from his reputation for being, um, ready to perform in any circumstance.  He takes occasional roles to make money for the family, but their situation is not secure.  When he is approached to star in a film with a director he's never heard of before, he's offered enough money to take care of his family for the rest of their lives, but he won't be told about the scenes he'll be shooting ahead of time.

And really, you may read that and think you're prepared for what comes next, but believe me when I say that you really, really are not.  That's as far as I'm going to go, other than to say that Milos is eventually forced to do unbelievably horrific things, and in ways that will make your jaw drop and stomach clench.

The director has said in interviews that his film is a political statement.  A statement about what exactly has changed from interview to interview: sometimes he says that it's a comment on Serbia's culture of political correctness, sometimes he says that it's about the consequences of postwar society, other times it's about how workers are exploited in order to provide for their families.  Honestly, I think that any of those interpretations is a bit of a stretch, but I could at least believe that he was trying to make a statement if he could choose one interpretation and stick with it.  The fact that he's got so many different takes on it makes me think that he either has a really inflated opinion of his own work's importance, or else he's just really full of shit and is trying to make the rest of us assign his work a greater importance.

I know that there are people who will see this review and take it as a challenge, to see if they can handle this movie.  Please let me urge you not to read this as a challenge.  Maybe, like me, you are a big fan of horror, and want to find a new experience.  Please see something else.  Seeing A Serbian Film will not make you any more satisfied.

I've said this before about just a few other movies, but I just have no idea how to rate this movie.  Watching it was not a good experience.  My body literally was ill when it ended.  The ending was simply awful, but there was one redemptive thing about it: Milos, for all the awful things that he's coerced into during this film, starts his journey out of a desire to do for his family, and the final decision he makes is also, in its own way, his way of trying to do what's right for his family.  For that, and that only, I'm going to give this one a few points.

I give A Serbian Film three Serbian flags out of five.
Tomorrow night: We are officially done with the movies in our Deep End block, and tomorrow night begins five days of Trippy & Surreal horror with Fear(s) of the Dark.


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Bride of Project Horror, Day 24: Nekromantik

10/24/2012

I am so sleepy.  I have literally no memory of typing and posting yesterday's blog entry.  I remember watching the movie, and I remember waking up in my bed this morning, but someplace in between those two events, the blog elves must have come and cobbled together a post for me.  I reread it just before I started typing this one, and I honestly don't remember typing some of it.

Back in September, when I solicited suggestions from my friends, Kristin came back with a few that I hadn't heard of before.  (You remember Kristin.  We watched Cannibal Ferox together.)  Last night's movie, Schramm, was one of the choices that I included in this year's lineup, and tonight's movie is the other.  I have to tell you something, Kristin: I still think you're very cool and pretty, but I'm also kind of scared of you now.  Of course, I'm watching these movies, too, so I'm probably in no position to talk.

This might be the most taboo-breaking movie I've ever watched.  Rob is a nobody, bullied wherever he goes, especially by his coworkers.  He's kind of like the guy in Bruiser.  Instead of losing his identity like that guy, though, he instead finds his identity through a hobby that he shares with his girlfriend: necrophilia.

You know what?  If you read that word and cringed a little bit, you might want to stop reading now.  For real.  I'll understand.

Rob's job with a cleaning agency frequently requires him to remove bodies from crime scenes or public areas, and he brings one of them home as a gift to his girlfriend.  After a night of various, um, amusements (graphically, agonizingly depicted amusements) featuring their new friend, Rob is late to work the next day and loses his job.  Well, girlfriend ain't havin' that, so she and the corpse move out.  From there, Rob just gets worse and worse, taking revenge on her cat, a hooker, and an old man who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I won't give away how Rob meets his end, I'll just say that it's an unforgettable climax (pun absolutely intended), and that it looks like he may end up being somebody else's new friend.

First things first: if I never see another onscreen animal death again, it'll be too soon.  I'm not talking about having to put down Ol' Yeller after he catches rabies, or the horse having a heart attack in the dean's office in Animal House.  I'm talking about detailed, exploitative, grisly, unstaged depictions of animals being killed in order to add shock value to a movie.  This movie featured not just one, but two separate animals getting offed.

Second: I knew that I was signing up for a few days of very extreme viewing when I lined up this section of Bride of Project Horror, but I had no idea that I was going to be watching three movies in a row that would feature onscreen penile trauma.  Talk about hitting a guy where he lives...  Schramm still takes the cake on this one, but tonight's was pretty gross and over the top, too.

So, what to make of Nekromantik?  It is truly a gross film, and it doesn't back down from showing some things that you will probably wish you hadn't seen.  At the same time, though, it's pretty well made, in spite of an obviously low budget.  It's got a few moments of fantastically dark German humor.  I have to admit, I actually ended up kind of liking it.

I give Nekromantik three preserved brains out of five.
Tomorrow night:  A Serbian Film, available at FlixFling.com

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Bride of Project Horror, Day 23: Schramm

10/23/2012

Tonight's movie, Schramm, was mercifully short.  I say that for two reasons.  First, I'm reaching the point in the month where it's getting really, really hard to stay up this late every night.  Second, it was such a strangely upsetting movie that 65 minutes is about all I could have taken.

This was one of the movies recommended to me when I polled my Facebook friends for things to include in this year's project.  I hadn't heard of it before, but that actually attracted me to it even more.

All three of the movies that I've watched so far in the Deep End block have had one thing in common.  They have all finally shown me where my boundary is.  There's a lot of things that I can handle watching onscreen, but dental trauma just is not one of them, and so far, each of these movies has given me a good strong eyeful of bad things happening to people's teeth.

It's a little bit difficult to describe the plot of this movie, because it moves around a lot.  It starts with the end of the story, and then flashes back to different parts of the killer's life, not necessarily in sequence.  Schramm is a German film loosely based on the life of an actual serial killer.  The main character, Lothar Schramm, is a cabbie who lives by himself.  His neighbor in the next apartment is a beautiful prostitute who Schramm has strong feelings for.  We see him fantasize a life with her where he is a sophisticated gentleman.  He suffers from paranoid delusions, and the idea that unexplainable things are happening to his body, such as one of his legs being mysteriously amputated below the knee.  When missionaries come to his door, he murders them in cold blood and poses them for his amusement.  When he is trapped by self-loathing, he punishes his own body in a very memorable, very gruesome way.

This could have been like so many other serial killer movies, but a few things set it apart.  I felt like it made an attempt to go into Schramm's head.  It's a twisted place, but it shows us what drives him.  Second, it's a very moody film.  More than being scared, there were many parts where I just felt like resting my head on my hands and sighing deeply, just from the melancholy of this movie.

It's a strange, filthy look inside a crazy guy's head, but it succeeds.  I give it four bottles of cognac out of five.
Tomorrow night: Nekromantik

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Bride of Project Horror, Day 22: Bloodsucking Freaks

By all rights, I really should have hated this movie.  It is perverted, misanthropic, tasteless, and shocking, and that's just in the first ten minutes.  And yet, in spite of myself, I ended up getting swept along by the madness of Bloodsucking Freaks.

Master Sardu is the owner of a Grand Guignol-style theater where, with his assistant Ralphus, he presents shows filled with acts of torture and murder.  What the audience of his shows does not know is that these acts are not staged, they are genuine.  His "performers" are women who he has kidnapped; some are sold into slavery, and the ones who don't make the cut are used in his shows.  When a theater critic interrupts a show in progress (you know, like theater critics do) to heckle Sardu and belittle the show, Sardu suddenly decides that getting a positive review from this particular critic is essential.  Naturally, he sets about doing this by abducting the critic and trying to torture him into acquiescence.  Sardu figures that if he can just make his show more artistic, it's sure to get the reviews he wants, so he also kidnaps a famous ballerina, to brainwash her into participating in his show.

That's the bones of the plot right there, and the rest of the movie just adds lots and lots of (often literal) flesh to them.  Every now and then we get a scene of the ballerina's boyfriend searching for her, but mostly it's scenes of Sardu and Ralphus torturing the critic, the ballerina, and their other captives.

I'm not generally a big fan of the torture genre of horror, but Bloodsucking Freaks is just so insane, so giddily over the top with its own excesses, that I couldn't help getting sucked into it. There are all of these Arnold-worthy puns, like when a victim is being stretched on the rack, and Sardu says that things are about to go farther than "any stretch of the imagination."  It's really bad, but knowingly so.  I wouldn't recommend this to just anybody: it's sleazy, nasty, and has some very imaginative abuses of the human body.  But if you're looking for something to take you around a corner from where most movies take you, you could do worse than Bloodsucking Freaks.

I give it three bondage racks out of five.
Tomorrow night: Schramm

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Bride of Project Horror, Day 21: The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)

10/21/2012

This was a really bad movie.  Just... really, really bad.

I watched the first Human Centipede movie two years ago for the first Project Horror.  I saved it until right near the end, because it was surrounded with buzz, and I wanted to end the project on something with a punch.  After watching it, though, I decided that it was kind of like getting called to the principal's office: worse in the anticipation than it is when you actually go.

Human Centipede II is both better and worse than the original.  The story is about Martin, a truly unfortunate looking man who works in a parking garage and is obsessed with the first HC movie.  Right, see, this movie isn't a sequel in the sense that it follows the first movie.  It exists in its own separate universe where the main character can watch the first movie and decide that he wants to make his own centipede with far more people in it.  And that's really it.  That's the whole story.

I say that it's better because it definitely cranks up the unpleasantness from the first movie in a big way.  The movie is shot in black and white, and I imagine that it wasn't so much an artistic choice as it was a choice of necessity.  If the things in this movie were shown in color, it would definitely have been rated NC17.  And that's really the only thing that's better about it, the way that it raises the stakes.

Worse: everything else.  Until the end credits rolled and I saw that it was written, directed, and produced by the same guy who made the first one, I really thought that this one was parodying the first one.  The main character communicates entirely in grunts, snarls, and bug-eyes.  I've mentioned this once already during Bride of Project Horror, but there's only so far that I can suspend my disbelief before it breaks - I know it's horror, I know it's supposed to be extreme, but you really can't expect me to believe that some of the things that happen in this movie would be able to happen without somebody noticing something at some point.  It's absurd.

Also absurd is the way the movie keeps putting new little details in without rhyme or reason.  Remember in The Phantom Menace how there's that scene near the end where they're pursuing Darth Maul, but the red force fields keep springing up between them?  I remember watching that and thinking, "There is no plot reason for that to be happening.  The only reason that is in this movie is so they can make you do that same thing when they make a video game of it."  That's how some of the extremities in this movie play - there's absolutely nothing leading to them, they're just included as a way for the director to elbow you in the ribs and say, "Huh?  Did you see that?  Pretty gross, right?  I'll bet you've never seen that shit before, right?"

But the movie's biggest mistake is what I already mentioned above: it exists in a place where people in the movie are conscious of the first movie's existence.  Do you know why people still talk about The Blair Witch Project, but almost nobody even remembers that The Blair Witch Project 2 exists?  Because the second one existed for pretty much no reason but to tell us how we should have looked at the first one.  At least in that case, it was different filmmakers who made the second one.  With the HC movies, it's the same filmmaker, which makes the second one basically one extended act of auto-fellatio.  Tom Six can't have it both ways: he can't gleefully cram the screen full of awful details, and then pretend that he's shining a light on his audience to accuse us for watching those same details.

This is a gross movie to watch, so congrats for that, filmmakers, but that's about all you succeeded at.  I give it one centipede out of five.
Tomorrow night: Bloodsucking Freaks

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Bride of Project Horror, Day 20: Three…Extremes

10/20/2012

Tonight's movie was kind of a three-fer for my Directors Showcase.  The movie Three…Extremes is three different segments, each directed by a different well-known Asian director: Fruit Chan (who I hadn't seen anything by before this), Park Chan-wook (Oldboy), and Takashi Miike (Audition).  Tonight's movie was also very deeply disturbing.  Not frightening or terrifying, just horribly unsettling.  If this ever showed in theaters, I have no problem imagining people walking out within the first twenty minutes.

We're with family tonight, and I had to sneak time away to watch the movie, so I'm just going to give a capsule summary of each part of the movie, instead of going too deep into them.  The first third is called Dumplings, and is directed by Fruit Chan, a Chinese director.  It's the story of an aging actress who wants to turn back the clock.  She finds a woman who makes special dumplings with a secret ingredient that reverses aging, but that comes at a great cost.  The second story is called Cut, by Park Chan-wook from South Korea.  A successful director and his wife are kidnapped by a man who played extra roles in several of the director's films.  He's willing to release them both, but only if the director is willing to commit a horrible act, and for every five minutes that he delays, his wife loses a finger.  Third was Box, the most complex of the three stories, but also the most chilling.  It's directed by Takashi Miike of Japan.  Twin sisters perform in their father's magic act, but the neglected sister becomes unhappy living in the favored sister's shadow and takes revenge.  The rest of the story is revealed bit by bit, in a grown woman's recurring nightmare.  It's kind of hard to explain, but will leave you thinking once the credits roll.

There's some dark humor in this film to lighten it a little bit, but make no mistake, there is something to upset everybody in this movie.  What's really impressive is how it steers clear of most of the horror cliches to go for something new, something that feels like watching somebody's nightmares play in front of you.  I really recommend this one if you're a fan of horror, but want to see something unique.  I give it four bowls of dumplings out of five.
Tomorrow night: Things are about to get SO MUCH WORSE.  We're starting the Deep End block of movies, where the shows are going to be a sampling of the most depraved things I could find.  We're going to kick it off with Human Centipede 2.  It's available on Netflix instant streaming!

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Bride of Project Horror, Day 19: Lovely Molly

10/19/2012

Tonight's movie is Lovely Molly, directed by Eduardo Sanchez, who also directed The Blair Witch Project.  Now, in the 13 years since that movie was released, it's become fashionable to write it off or talk down about it, but the fact remains that it reshaped modern horror in several important ways.  First, and most obviously, the found footage genre of horror is still going strong, as evidenced by the fact that Paranormal Activity 4 is opening in theaters today.  You could argue (and I would agree with you) that it's become an overused gimmick, but it's one that people are still willing to shell out cash for.  Sometimes it works (Cloverfield), other times... not so much (Apollo 18).  Second, it ushered in the return of low-budget horror.  It was made for under $500K and made nearly $250 million.  In fact, I just read today that every movie in the Paranormal Activity series so far has made over 20 times what they cost to produce.

If I sound overly defensive of Blair's merits, it's probably because I really, really got into that film before it even came out.  I mean, I spent hours scouring for information about it, talking about it on bulletin boards, looking forward to seeing it.  At the time, the whole first person perspective and the implied-but-not-seen scares were such novel things.

So anyway, I was looking forward to this movie.  The very first scene made me a little bit wary, though, because the movie opens with its main character (Molly) speaking directly into a camcorder and crying while talking about eerie occurrences.  Sound familiar?

I'll be fair and say that this was the only spot in the movie that I felt was being derivative.  Most of the movie is shot traditionally, with the exception of a few scenes shot through Molly's camcorder, and one scene that makes use of surveillance camera footage.

After the opening video, the movie jumps back a month earlier, to the wedding of Molly and Tim.  He's a truck driver, and she works on a cleaning crew so they don't have much money.  They decide to move into the farmhouse where Molly and her sister grew up, which has been vacant for years since the deaths of their parents.  Molly is left alone in the house when Tim has to leave for work, and the longer she's by herself, the stranger things become.  She begins to remember unpleasant things from her childhood, unusual noises and events start to happen in the house, and she is attacked by an unseen assailant more than once.  The stress begins to drive her back into old habits and patterns, and the people closest to her try to help, but may be too late to save her.

I'm up in the air about this film.

There were definitely some things about it that I appreciated.  Gretchen Lodge, who plays Molly, does a great slow slide into madness.  Seriously, there were times when I was watching this movie that I was reminded of Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion, slowly going crazy in a home she's alone in.  Repulsion is actually a good movie to watch along with this one, because both movies' main characters are the products of damaging relationships with their fathers, damages that have carried into their adult lives.  And I've got to say this about Lodge, too: she's very attractive, in kind of a tomboyish way.

I liked how the movie kept me uncertain about what was really happening (although I'm going to come back to that in a minute), and whether the events Molly saw were supernatural, a result of her drug relapse, a mental breakdown, or some combination of all three.  I was impressed with how each of the people in Molly's life (her sister, her husband, and her pastor) have a different perspective on what may be happening with her, and struggle to help her while dealing with their own insecurities (especially the pastor).

But here's what I didn't like, and unfortunately it's major enough for me to dock the movie a couple of points for it.  This movie introduces too much ambiguity without addressing enough of it.  Look, I don't need everything tied up in a neat little bow by the end of a movie.  In fact, I kind of enjoy movies that leave you with something to wonder about.  But there's just so much about this movie that's introduced as part of Gretchen's descent without any explanation about what it means or why it's important.  (Spoilers follow.)  When we first see the weapon Gretchen chooses, it's shown to be something significant to her, something that is set apart, but we never know why.  What did she see (and reach out to) in her childhood closet that started her downward path?  Why does her sister seem to see the same thing at the end of the movie?  Why does she associate her dad with horses, to the extent that she covers his face with cutout horse heads in every picture of a photo album?  Like I said, I don't mind a little mystery, but the answer to even one of these questions could have added so much depth to this movie.

I give Lovely Molly three horse heads out of five, but I give Gretchen Lodge five out of five.
Tomorrow night: Three…Extremes directed by Fruit Chan, Takashi Miike, and Chan-wook Park; available on Netflix instant streaming

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Bride of Project Horror, Day 18: The Innkeepers

10/18/2012

There's this really beautiful village in New Mexico called Cloudcroft, just a few hours from Lubbock. My family used to take trips there sometimes when I was a kid; if it was a special trip, we'd stay at a fancy old hotel called The Lodge.  We always looked forward to these trips - there was a pool with a view of the mountains, a gift shop that had an old drugstore-style candy counter, and hiking trails to explore.  Most exciting to us, though, is that the hotel is said to be haunted by a beautiful redheaded ghost named Rebecca.  As you know if you've met my wife, I've got a weakness for redheads...  More than once, we tried to convince our parents to let us leave the room late at night to try and spot her.

When I heard about The Innkeepers, the kid inside me who had always hoped to see Rebecca came back, and I knew that I was going to watch it for this year's project.  It's directed by Ti West, whose movie The House of the Devil I watched during the first Project Horror.

The Innkeepers is set in a formerly grand old hotel called The Yankee Pedlar Inn, which is about to go out of business.  Only two employees, Claire and Luke, are working during the hotel's final weekend of operation.  Both are interested in ghosts, particularly the ghost of a jilted bride who is said to haunt the Yankee Pedlar.  Between their job duties, they plan to spend the last weekend trying to collect some kind of evidence of her existence.  The hotel's final guests add to the hotel's spooky final weekend.  One is a psychic who gives Claire a warning about her search, and the other is an old man who insists on staying in a specific room for his own reasons.  I don't want to say too much more, because the fun in this movie is in seeing how all of these elements end up coming together.

If I have one complaint about this movie, it would be the same as the complaint I had with The House of the Devil: the pacing.  There's a whooooole lot of build-up before the movie finally reaches its payoff.  I felt like the payoff was worth it once it arrived, but it still would have been enjoyable to get a few more crumbs along the way.  Also, I'm pretty tired of horror filmmakers who use the equation character tiptoeing down a quiet hallway + mysteriously slammed door = SHEER TERROR.  You can also substitute "door opens but nothing's on the other side" into that equation.

But those are pretty minor complaints, and overall I really liked this movie.  Sara Paxton, who plays Claire, does a good job of showing how she gradually becomes too absorbed in the ghost hunt, because it is the only thing she has to hold on to.  The psychic's vision ("there are three" and "she can't be saved") is delivered in a way that you think you have its meaning figured out, until it ends up meaning something else entirely.  Add in a couple of scenes that are pretty funny, and it rounds out into a pretty good haunted house movie.

I feel like I may be acting too generously, but after yesterday's 1/5 rating, I'm ready to give this one five spooky pianos out of five.
Tomorrow night: Lovely Molly, directed by Eduardo Sanchez
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Bride of Project Horror, Day 17: Bruiser

10/17/2012

Do you remember when you were in school, probably in junior high or high school, and sometimes you'd rush through an assignment without giving it much effort?  Maybe you forgot about it until the period before, or maybe you just didn't care about it all that much.  And when your teacher would hand it back to you with a grade on it, there would also be a note written in the margin in red pen (or green, if you had Ms. Whittington at Lubbock High School) that read, "I know you're capable of much more than this."

Or that most bemusing of parental rebukes, "I'm not angry with you.  I'm just very disappointed."

After watching Bruiser, I want to write that note to George Romero in the margin, and I want to tell him that I'm not angry with him, just very disappointed.

I'll admit to being drawn to this movie in part because of its cover.  The blank face staring out at me made me think of Michael Myers in the Halloween movies.  More than a horror movie, though, this was sort of a revenge thriller.  The main character is Henry Creedlow, a corporate nobody who works for a popular men's magazine.  His boss abuses him, his wife is cheating on him (with the boss), his housekeeper steals from him, and his financial advisor (who is also his oldest and closest friend) is in cahoots with his wife to rob him blind.  Henry is pretty much a doormat, the textbook example of the saying "nice guys finish last."  After things come to a head during a party at his boss's house, Henry wakes up the next morning to find that his face has been replaced by a featureless white mask. He's swallowed his pride and dignity for so long that it's finally cost him his own identity, and now that he's a man without a face, he sets about righting the wrongs in his life.

I'll try to start with a note of fairness.  Apparently, it was never George Romero's intention that this movie should be marketed as a horror film.  He meant for it to be more of a revenge fantasy piece.  (This isn't the only time he's lost control of how one of his movies was sold.  When Season of the Witch was released, it was actually called Hungry Wives, and the trailer was very deceptively edited to make it look like a porno.  No joke.)

That said, even as a revenge movie, Bruiser just isn't very good.  Peter Stormare plays the abusive boss almost like a cartoon character.  Everybody who has wronged Henry is just impossibly despicable, and he's just impossibly wishy-washy until his transformation, when he inexplicably turns impossibly badass and crazed.  The movie makes this big allegorical leap about him losing his identity by laying down to the whims of others for so long, and it could be an interesting path to explore, except that pretty much everybody who knew him before he changed is still able to recognize him almost instantly after the change.  What's the point of removing the dude's identity if everybody is still completely aware of his identity?  And the very last scene pretty much breaks the movie's own logic - Henry has his face back and is at a new job with a new abusive boss, and when he wheels around to defend himself, his face is blank again.  So, does he lose the face when he has to swallow the world's insults, or does he lose it whenever he needs to go into vengeance mode?  Because the two things are kind of mutually exclusive.

George, you know how much I think of you, and I hope you feel like we can still talk about anything, but I have to leave a disappointed red note in the margin of this movie.  I give it one blank face out of five.
Tomorrow night: The Innkeepers, directed by Ti West, and available on Netflix instant streaming

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Bride of Project Horror, Day 16: The Brood

10/16/2012

The second half of Bride of Project Horror begins with my Directors Showcase.  The movies in this block don't have any common theme, but they're all made by directors whose other work I've enjoyed.  First up, The Brood, directed by David Cronenberg, who made two appearances in last year's project: VideoDrome and Dead Ringers.

The main character of The Brood is Frank, a divorced father whose ex-wife Nola resides as a patient in Dr. Raglan's institute.  The doctor has created a new type of treatment called psychoplasmics which reaches deep into patients' minds to cure them of mental disturbances by having patients experience the physical manifestations of their suppressed emotions.  That description is a mouthful, but it becomes important later.  When Frank notices scratches and bruises on his young daughter, Candice, after one of her visits to her mother, he makes plans to challenge for full custody and informs Nola of his intentions.  Nola continues her therapy sessions with Dr. Raglan, and as she identifies people in her life who have caused her pain, those people begin to die violently.  It appears at first that they are being killed by children, but we learn that the killers are actually strange dwarflike creatures who are not quite human.  What are these creatures, and how are they connected to Nola's rage?

This was obviously made on a much smaller budget than Cronenberg eventually grew accustomed to working with, but it still holds up.  The character of Dr. Raglan could have easily been played as an evil mad scientist, but instead they made him a conflicted character who really was doing what he thought would help people.  Child actors are so often the weakest link in horror movies, but the actress who played the daughter did a good job in this one.  Best of all, though, is Samantha Eggar in the role of Nola.  I say this to her credit: the single scariest scene in the entire movie has nothing to do with the strange little creatures or people being killed, it's when there's a close-up shot of her face near the end of the movie.  There's no special makeup effects or anything like that, it's just that her face is so crazy and intense that I actually had to look away from the screen for a moment.

SPOILER - I also really liked the idea of the creatures being physical manifestations of Nola's rage, and of her being their psychic mother.  There's probably been some other horror movie that lifted this idea at some point, but I can't think of it right off.

I give The Brood five Killer Dwarfs tour posters out of five.
Tomorrow night: Bruiser, by George Romero, available on Netflix instant streaming
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Bride of Project Horror, Day 15: Blood Creek

10/15/2012

Tonight is the last night of the Cannibals, Zombies, and Nazis (Oh My!) block of movies, and Blood Creek is the movie that I actually created this block for.  Several of my friends suggested this one when I asked for recommendations (although one of them only recommended it because she likes looking at Henry Cavill, and he's shirtless for a while in this movie), so I added it to the lineup.  Somehow, this movie had entirely escaped my notice before now, so I looked it up, and its description made it sound like it had, well, cannibals, zombies, and Nazis, so there you go.

The movie opens on a small farm in 1936, where a family of German immigrants receives a request to host a visiting German scholar.  When he arrives, they learn that his goals are much more sinister than they'd been led to expect.

Cut to present day...  Evan is a paramedic who also takes care of his elderly father, who suffers from dementia.  Two years earlier, Evan went fishing with his brother Vic, a veteran of the war in Iraq.  During that trip, Vic mysteriously vanished and has not been heard from since.  One night while Evan is asleep, Vic wakes him up, tells him to get as many guns and ammunition as he can, and to get their boat ready - and not to ask any questions.  They travel to the family farm where the movie started, where the buildings are now covered with strange symbols.  The same family still lives there, and none of them have aged since World War 2.  They held Vic prisoner for the two years that he was missing, using him as a source of blood to feed their mysterious visitor, who they are terrified of, although they have managed to confine him and protect themselves from him.  Vic's thirst for vengeance accidentally frees the visitor, threatening to unleash his evil on the rest of the world unless they can figure out a way to stop him...

I've seen Michael Fassbender in two movies this year, Prometheus and Blood Creek.  In Prometheus, of course, he plays David the android, and in Blood Creek, he plays the Nazi scholar who seeks to gain occult power.  If Fassbender isn't careful, he's going to end up typecasting himself into a very narrow niche: the dude who wants to find the secret to everlasting life, and who will fuck your shit up if you stand in his way.

Fassbender is the good part of this movie.  Other than him, though, I don't know.  A little bit of suspension of disbelief is to be expected when you're watching horror, but this movie wants me to suspend just a little bit too much disbelief.  If the family had the bad guy contained, and he relies on them for food, why don't they just stop feeding him?  If he's able to come out of his cell when it's time to eat, why has he never created minions to attack the family's house before this particular night?  If part of his power relies on a certain item, why doesn't he do a better job of protecting it before it leads to his undoing?

I've got to give it a few points for a good boogieman and a pretty original premise, but there are just too many questions that it didn't answer for me.  I give it two runestones out of five.
Tomorrow night: We're going to start the Directors Showcase block of movies.  There's no real common theme to these movies, other than being directed by people whose other work I have enjoyed.  First up is The Brood, by David Cronenberg.
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Bride of Project Horror, Day 14: The Keep

10/14/2012

Blah blah blah really do not want to type tonight...

Here we are, two weeks into the project, and still going strong.  Tonight's movie is The Keep, directed by Michael Mann.  Perhaps you didn't realize that Michael Mann had ever directed a horror movie, so let me help you visualize it - take all of Michael Mann's usual signature elements, and put them into a movie with a monster.  Slow-mo scenes, shot in front of backlit smoke, while a synth-heavy score pounds in the background... Voila!

I'm being a little unfair to Mr. Mann here.  I actually liked this movie quite a bit, although I hear that he and the writer have both disowned it over the years.  The movie is set in a small Romanian village, high in the Carpathian mountains.  A division of Nazi soldiers arrives to guard a pass, and sets up their headquarters in a foreboding citadel that overlooks the village.  The men are soon troubled by terrifying dreams.  One night, two soldiers who are on watch decide to neglect their duty and search for treasure within the keep's walls.  They accidentally uncover an enormous subterranean hold, releasing the evil force that the keep was built to contain.  Mysterious events begin to happen within the walls, and soldiers are dying almost every night.  Will they be able to discover the source of the evil?  Will they be able to stop it before it escapes and spreads into the entire world?

That's a very nutshell description, and I've left out some of the important characters and plot points, but you get the idea.  As I mentioned above, the movie's makers are no longer willing to claim it, and it didn't meet with critical or commercial success, either.  I don't know if I'm just feeling more generous this year or what, but I thought it wasn't bad.  It's got a great cast (Jurgen Prochnow, Gabriel Byrne, and Ian McKellen), interesting set designs, and characters with some interesting depth to learn about.  The effects are about as good as you'd hope for in a movie filmed in 1983, but when the evil force is revealed, it's got a great look.

I give The Keep three golems out of five.
Tomorrow night: Blood Creek, available on Netflix instant streaming

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Bride of Project Horror, Day 13: Demons

10/13/2012

When I asked friends for movie recommendations this year, the wonderful, marvelous, lovely Laura posted, "Demons is the one that scarred me for life in 1986, and is the reason I cry whenever I see zombies of any kind!"  My buddy Steve concurred: "Demons is great!"  Good enough for me.  Tonight is Demons!

If I had to create a primer on 80s horror for somebody, this would almost definitely be one of the movies to be included.  The music, the atmosphere, the sleaze...  Even if you haven't seen this movie before, you'll feel like you have when you turn it on, and I mean that in a good way.  It just feels familiar.

The story starts with Cheryl, an attractive woman who believes she is being pursued through the subway by a man in a mysterious demonic-looking mask.  He finally approaches her, and it turns out that he is passing out tickets to a free show at a newly renovated movie theater.  She takes a friend to the movie with her, and they sit with two men who had been flirting with them.  The movie begins, and it's a very violent horror movie featuring a mask which was on display in the theater lobby.  In the movie, a character scratches his face with the mask and begins to transform into a zombie-demon thing.  In the theater, the same thing begins to happen to a woman who accidentally nicked her own face on the mask in the lobby while she was playing with it.  You've seen zombie movies, you know what happens next.  She takes a bite of somebody, who takes a bite of somebody else, etc.

This was a fun movie.  Surely there's been another horror film set in a movie theater at some point, but I can't think of one right away.  It's really a great setting, though.  It's enclosed, it's dark, there's a cross section of different people in the audience.  It makes for a good horror setup.  There's also some very cringe-inducing stuff.  I was beginning to worry when I was able to watch two cannibal movies without getting too grossed out, but I guess all it took was some close-up dental and fingernail trauma to get my adrenaline going.

I give Demons five film reels out of five.
Tomorrow night: The Keep, available on Netflix instant streaming
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Bride of Project Horror, Day 12: Cannibal Ferox

Remember last year, how I had some posts where my friends Kyle, Will, and Scott joined me for an evening?  That was fun.  I have this friend from high school, Kristin, who made some really interesting suggestions for this year's lineup, so I wanted to invite her along for a couple of viewings!  Tonight's movie, Cannibal Ferox, isn't one of the ones she recommended, it's just one that she felt up to the challenge of taking on.

We did something a little different this time; after we each watched the movie, we jumped on Skype and chatted about it.  Instead of editing it down to an article, I thought it would be fun just to let you in on the raw feed that is the awesomeness of the inside of Kristin's head.

I'm the black text, and Kristin's in blue.
===========================================
Kristin:
Hey mister! It's Kristin! Finished the flick...
Kristin:
Not even sure where to start on this one. Maybe with... THE SOUNDTRACK.
Danny:
YES - I had a note to bring that up with you!
Danny:
It got repetitive here and there, but that main theme was FANTASTIC.
Kristin:
It was so fantastic. It was so bad 80s, and yet, also porn-o-riffic.
Kristin:
Boogie Nights SO should have used that main theme song.
Danny:
Especially porny in the scenes where it's back in the city, you know, to let you know that you're in the real jungle now.
Kristin:
Well stated...
Danny:
But coming off of Jungle Holocaust last night, I appreciated a score with a little punch.
Kristin:
The fashion went with it perfectly- the braided headband, the puffy sleeves. Almost made me miss Olivia Newton John... but not really.
Danny:
Yeah, I'm trying to remember - didn't the blonde guy have on some kind of puffy vest?
Kristin:
No- but a sleeveless shirt/vest thing.
Danny:
And a skullcap.  *rimshot*
Kristin:
HAA!!
Kristin:
THAT was definitely the only time I've ever seen that death as well. There was NO DOUBT which death you were referring to once I saw it.
Danny:
Yeah, the closest I can think of is in Man Called Horse, but he doesn't die from it, and it's definitely not quite as sensitive.
Danny:
We're talking about the booby-hooks, right?
Kristin:
No- I was referring to trapping him under the table and slicing off the top of his head! But you're right- the boob hooks were something.
Kristin:
Can one die from boob hooks? I actually made note of asking that question while watching it...
Danny:
It doesn't seem like there'd be a ton of blood loss. Maybe from the eventual dehydration and hyperthermia?
Kristin:
That, I can see- but I wouldn't think just from the hanging itself. Otherwise, the Amazing Mr. Lifto would be toast.
Danny:
Man, I haven't thought of that dude since like 1995. Jim Rose Circus, baby!
Kristin:
Love me some Jim Rose!
Danny:
I can't wait until my kids are old enough that the wave of 90s nostalgia comes along. I'm saving flannels to hand down.
Kristin:
They will be so proud!! Save some Docs for them as well...
Danny:
All of mine were worn until there was no more wear in them. I was a few years behind the curve, though. I spent the late 90s discovering looks that you'd already found in the early 90s
Kristin:
Bah- I was just copying people on album covers.
Kristin:
So I'm curious - what did you find to be the most shocking/surprising thing about this movie? I feel fairly certain we'll agree on this point...
Danny:
Ooh, good question.  See, as a guy, my mind goes to the castration scene.  But more than that was probably when she got back to civilization and went ahead with her original thesis instead of the truth.
Kristin:
GAH- again, I was wrong! Although I found that last bit to be really interesting. Why do you think she lied? To protect herself from having to explain the whole story?
Danny:
Wait, wait! We can come back to that.  I want to know what shocked or surprised you the most.
Kristin:
I was genuinely shocked and surprised by all the actual footage of animals dying/being cut apart. Surprising, considering some of the stuff I do, but you just never see that.
Kristin:
The tortoise scene was BRUTAL.
Danny:
Ugh. YES. I keep coming back to knowing that it's an exploitation film, but STILL...
Kristin:
Poor turtle was still alive when they were cutting its legs off!! That's horrifying- exploitation or not!
Danny:
Some of the scenes, too, like with the snake eating another animal, just felt shoehorned in so that they could put another violent scene in.  And it wasn't even edited in particularly well.
Kristin:
Yes- that and the iguana scene, I totally agree.
Danny:
I need to see which came first, this or Cannibal Holocaust, since they did the tortoise thing, too.
Kristin:
Was the turtle alive in that? I don't even recall...
Danny:
Come to think of it, they may have beheaded it before they opened it up.
Kristin:
I will agree that the castration scene was pretty shocking too, though- but more because it was full frontal male nudity (although brief) than the castration. And really, Mike kinda had it coming...
Danny:
Yeah, and that brings me to another thing I wanted to talk about.  I've now seen 3 of the Italian-made cannibal flicks, and two of them come down very heavily on this idea of, "Yes, these people are about to get torn up, but boy, did they have it coming."
Kristin:
True of Cannibal Holocaust as well...
Danny:
Exactly.
Kristin:
I haven't seen many of these kinds of flicks actually. I've tried, but I normally bore quickly. Oddly enough, this one kept my attention. Maybe because the actor who played Mike reminded me of Josh Lucas.
Kristin:
What's the best of the Italian cannibal/mondo genre to you?
Danny:
This isn't a genre I think I'll be watching much more of.  I watched Mondo Cane a few years ago, and it wasn't at all what I expected, so I haven't really gone back to the mondos much.  I think the crown goes to Cannibal Holocaust.  It's repulsive, but it sure does do what it sets out to do.
Kristin:
It does indeed.
Kristin:
There's a great doc called Snuff (about snuff films, obviously) and they talk quite a bit about Cannibal Holocaust and why it was so horrifying back then- that people genuinely thought it was real.
Danny:
I'll have to check that one out.
Danny:
I heard they had to show in court how they staged the impalement scene.
Danny:
I kind of joked about it earlier, with the city being the jungle, but there's definitely this underlying finger pointing in these movies, "Who's the real savage?"
Kristin:
Completely. This was even more heavy-handed with that idea when the village elders were seemingly "afraid because they were white."
Kristin:
And of course, the villagers aren't nearly as horrible as Mike and Pam. They were both quite deliberately unlikeable.
Danny:
There always has to be somebody who you're glad to see buy it. And if it's a woman, it has to be the one who has sex
Kristin:
TOTALLY. The tramp has got to go! And how?? BOOB HANGING. That'll teach girls to keep their knees together!
Danny:
Oof.
Danny:
Scream pretty much deconstructed all of this for us (when? THE 90S!), but it really is true about girls in horror. And for that matter, all the other bad decisions they're making in this thing. You're hanging around their village, having sex in their beds and trying to rape their girls - how do you imagine this will end?
Kristin:
Precisely.
Kristin:
I thought it seemed a bit too easy for him to convince her to "have a go" at the village girl. I was glad she ultimately thought better of it and decided to forestall the rape.
Kristin:
With exploitation flicks- you never really know how far they're going to go. And as a girl- a rape scene would have been worse than the castration scene. It's all relative, isn't it?
Danny:
I should have probably known better, but when he asked her that at first, I guess I thought he meant they'd jointly seduce a girl. That would be a different movie, I suppose.
Kristin:
Probably a more profitable one...
Danny:
OK, so let's come back to that end real quick.  You felt it was so she wouldn't have to explain the whole thing?
Kristin:
That was my assumption. She didn't want to have to explain how awful THEY were.
Kristin:
But still- she could have concocted some kind of story to make herself a hero or victim. She didn't even do that. She just did... nothing, basically.
Danny:
I see.  That does make sense.  And she's definitely a passive observer through the whole thing.  I saw it as her being penitent and protective.  She knew that the tribe had retaliated, but it was because they'd been mistreated. She still felt like she was basically right, that they wouldn't have cannibalized her party otherwise. And she doesn't want other people going in there now - both because they could hear the truth about her party and because she still feels some sort of protectiveness of her thesis.
Danny:
But I could be reading too much into it...
Kristin:
I certainly like your take on it better. It appears you have more faith in human motives than I do...
Danny:
Which probably makes my take wrong, since I don't think these filmmakers have much faith in humanity.
Kristin:
HA! Well, I don't know that they even thought it out that much. They set out to make a cannibal flick with some shocking scenes, and that's what they did. They do make the point, intentionally or not, that all the animal kingdom can be a bit savage though.
Danny:
That's what I thought watching the snake scene. It was like a Natl Geo special.
Kristin:
Indeed. It was a mix between Nat Geo subject matter with the shitty camera work and contrivance of Faces of Death.
Kristin:
I feel certain Cannibal Holocaust came out first and these guys were trying to ride its coattails.
Danny:
Oh, hey, I looked up "Ferox." It's Latin for fierce, and is pronounced FAIR-ox
Kristin:
GO YOU. I was planning to look it up as well. I'd never heard that word before.
Danny:
When I Googled it there was a link to a site that had a cool British guy pronounce it for you.
Kristin:
It would make a great stripper name!
Danny:
Oh man, it really would. "Welcome to the main stage Roxy Ferox!"
Danny:
(Is the kind of thing I imagine they say in strip clubs...)
Kristin:
SO MUCH. In a leopard thong and heels!!
Kristin:
And they'd play "Maneater"
Kristin:
I think we've got the plot line for a sequel, Danny!!!
Danny:
BOOM. I think we just became collaborators on a screenplay!
Kristin:
GENIUS
Danny:
A BunWerda Joint
Kristin:
We're gonna be huge.
Danny:
That movie where Natalie Portman was a stripper did pretty well. So as long as we keep it classy-ish…
Kristin:
Natalie Portman as a stripper??? Why are we not watching that right this minute??
Danny:
Cuz it's getting too late. Another time though, I promise.
Danny:
Holy cow, I just realized this could be my chance to meet Allison Brie
Kristin:
LOL! You wish...
Danny:
Yeah... The part probably calls for somebody a little grittier anyway.
Kristin:
So how many turtle shells are you going to rate Cannibal Ferox?
Danny:
Hmmm...  It's not one I'm ever going to find myself seeking out again in the future, but it did work for me.  3.5/5?
Danny:
And you?
Kristin:
Personally, I'd give it 3. The voice dub was awful, but the soundtrack was grand. It was certainly watchable though. If the end wasn't so damn random and puzzling, I'd have given it 3.5.
Kristin:
I'd give it a 5 for the skull slicing scene though! Two severed thumbs up!!
Danny:
Oh yeah, the skull slice was great, and the way they just kind of took a bite or two of brain and left the rest for later...
Kristin:
All righty, Movie King! Did I do okay??
Danny:
This was great! I really enjoyed it.  Want to do another one soon?
Kristin:
I'm in! I definitely want to participate as much as you'll have me for the super-crazy-and-wrong movies.
Kristin:
I can't wait to hear what you have to say about Nekromantik.
Danny:
Beautiful. Thanks for joining me tonight!
Kristin:
It was fun!! Thank you for having me!

  Tomorrow night: Demons