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

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!

Bride of Project Horror, Day 30: Antichrist

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!

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

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

Bride of Project Horror, Day 28: Carnival of Souls

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

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

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

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

Bride of Project Horror, Day 25: A Serbian Film

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.