(https://i.imgur.com/pFZNEwy.jpg)You know I've never played Resident Evil 5...oh, that's not Resident Evil :hmm
I wasn't scared at all watching this, but I'm also not a racist :trumps
(https://i.imgur.com/pFZNEwy.jpg)
I wasn't scared at all watching this, but I'm also not a racist :trumps
Silent Hill: Revelations Dir. M. J. Bassett, 2012 (Blu-Ray) **
This movie is pretty bad obviously, but about half-way through it I came to the realization that this could have been the best DTV Hellraiser movie ever made by literally only changing the title. At the end of the movie Carrie-Anne Moss (who, yes, is in this movie for some reason) turns into a literal Cenobite when all of her skin flies off and these buzzsaws stick into her skull while she's sword fighting Pyramid Head (don't ask). She could have been Pinhead, they could have called it Hellraiser: Revelations and I would have pogged out of my mind. Fun Fact: M. J. Bassett is the third director to come out as trans after directing a movie with Carrie-Anne Moss in it. 8)
16. Final Destination 2 (HBO Max): I'm struggling to think of a horror sequel that so perfectly understands the formula set for it and executes it with such precision. The absolute dumbest fucking movie imaginable and it is great.
Midnight Mass - Dir. Mike Flanagan, 2021 (Netflix) ***Please stop erasing atheists with your non-horror series in this horror thread :wag
The perfect spooky show for the season, it reminds me of the Stephen King miniseries from the 90's. The Stand, The Tommyknockers, Storm of the Century, even The Langoliers, they always felt kinda special to me as a kid and this feels the same way. Is it perfect? No. Did it really need to be 7 hours long and have more soliloquys than Hamlet? Maybe not. But I really enjoyed it. Special shoutout to Samantha Sloyan who plays the evil self-righteous bitch Bev all the way to the hilt.
Why I felt betrayed by Netflix’s Midnight Mass
Horror is a natural refuge for atheists and sinners. But Netflix’s Midnight Mass made me feel erased.
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Even though Midnight Mass does still contain plenty of overt horror elements, I think the series actually pushes Flanagan quite far outside the horror genre. If anything, I felt baited by this story, which plays within the modern horror sandbox while undercutting much of the ethos of modern horror via its embrace of Christianity as a source of hope and nourishment for lost souls facing an incomprehensible crisis. Many critics have found that to be a good thing, praising the series’ emphasis on the less sordid aspects of horror. Yet while Flanagan has every right to keep writing relentlessly hopeful stories, for horror fans like me, the effect of his optimism is frustration over feeling shunned as a non-believer — by the very genre that usually protects non-believers from feeling shunned.
This story is so religious it’s almost insulting
As a queer, genderqueer atheist who was raised as an evangelical, I’m drawn to horror in part because horror stories fundamentally offer a counter-narrative to mainstream Christianity’s most toxic ideas. Through tropes that tend to celebrate villainy, sinfulness, deviance, queerness, and defiance, horror embraces and empowers all that conservative religion rejects as immoral and unholy. Think, for example, of the many queer horror icons that have helped shape queer identity into a reclamation of villainy. Or of The Witch’s Black Phillip famously inviting Anya Taylor-Joy’s colonial Final Girl to “live deliciously.”
Horror at its best teaches us how to live within, and how to find ourselves within, society’s morally gray areas. In a post-9/11 world, horror as a genre has grown blacker, bleaker, sharper, but also perhaps more comforting in its bleakness. Horror validates our fears of climate crisis, social meltdown, existential collapse. It reminds us we’re not alone in being afraid — and crucially, it doesn’t bother with false comfort. This is why the combination of horror and religion has so often made for such terrifically powerful drama throughout the history of cinema, from Haxan to The Exorcist to The Witch: Religion is all about offering people comfort, and horror is all about stripping it away.
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As I watched Midnight Madness, I was frequently reminded of Mississippi governor Tate Reeves, who recently defended his leadership of the state with the worst pandemic death toll in the US by claiming that people who believe in the afterlife “don’t have to be so scared of things.” Even relatively mainstream Christian voices have questioned whether the pandemic is God’s judgment.
Flanagan uses the plot of Midnight Mass as an allegorical stand-in for a broad range of extreme conservative reactions to the pandemic. On that theme, the series’ scathing reproach of Christianity’s enablement of hysteria, apocalypse mania, and survivalist extremism couldn’t be clearer. But if Flanagan wanted to condemn religious zeal more generally, he failed.
Midnight Mass makes several attempts to critique organized religion, yet the impression it leaves is that faith in God, and explicitly Christian faith in particular, is the ultimate pandemic comfort. The series almost entirely erases atheists, agnostics, and people of other religions by emphasizing its Christian worldview. “I choose God,” Hassan’s rebellious teen son, Ali, declares when he joins Paul and Bev’s new cult, as if Allah, the god he grew up worshiping, was never real.
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Is all this really horror? Midnight Mass was certainly marketed as horror. And Flanagan loves to slowly weave tonal qualities like atmospheric dread into a soft cocoon of meditations on life, love, and the human experience. He typically seems more concerned with the latter than the former, however, and his work nearly always rejects the fundamental core of most modern horror: the paradoxically comforting assertion that all hope is lost.
...
But the best horror should ideally confront its audience. Midnight Mass instead offers up a convenient villain while sidestepping most of the difficult questions about the consequences of religion unchecked by rationality, or the way organized religion can become a system of abuse or a tool of control.
Horror is the genre that many look to when they want to see society stripped of its false narratives. The myth that technology is only benevolent. The myth that civilization can protect us. The myth that any long-term earthly consequences for humanity’s short-term greed don’t matter because God has a mysterious plan and will reward us in the afterlife.
Flanagan does express skepticism over the human-created idea of “God’s plan” early on in Midnight Mass. If he’d leaned harder into that skepticism, perhaps the series’ premise would have more heft. But it seems he would rather pay less attention to what scares and disillusions us (even though in 2021 there’s so much to scare and disillusion us) and spend more time on what connects and unites us.
#5. Village of the Damned - Dir. John Carpenter, 1995 (Blu-ray) *
Bit of a stinker, innit? This is the first time I've seen this movie and I have no knowledge of the original film or the story it's based on, but there was no reason for this movie to be that bad. I thought it started off interestingly enough, with the mass blackout followed by mass pregnancies, but then the movie just jumps ahead until they're all several years old and everyone just accepts that a group of creepy kids lives in town. And Kirstie Alley just gets to run her weirdo science experiment on them with no oversight or security? It's stupid and since there's not much character development to speak of, I don't really care what happens to any of these people once they start dying. Eventually the kids fuck off to go live in a barn and the adults are like "Noooooooooo, you can't just live in a barn!" and the kids kill them for telling them not to live in a barn and then Superman is like "Fuck them kids" and kills them all, except one so there can be a sequel (j/k). What a turd.
#6. Return of the Living Dead, Part II - Dir. Ken Wiederhorn, 1988 (Blu-ray) **
They kill the zombies by electrocuting them. I repeat, they kill the zombies BY ELECTROCUTING THEM. Did they even seen the first movie? Or any movie?? Well, apparently it did start out as an unrelated script. And even though it features returning actors James Karen and Thom Matthews (who also played Tommy Jarvis in Jason Lives, wooo!) they're not playing the same characters. It's not a terrible movie, but it's a far cry from the first one or the third.
#7. Wax Mask - Dir. Sergio Stivaletti, 1997 (Shudder) ***
Originally produced by Dario Argento to be directed by Lucio Fulci, Fulci died before production began and Argento handed it off to one of the SFX guys from his previous movies. Stivaletti rewrote the script to play to his strengths, special effects, and the results is a stylish and gory, effects-laden remake of House of Wax. The mystery at the center of the movie is not much a mystery, we know that the proprietor of the wax museum is killing people and turning them into wax sculptures, despite some giallo nods, depicting him a cloaked, faceless killer. Even so, it was fun and really cool looking movie.
21. Halloween (1978, 4k cut): The GOAT for a reason. It's about as close to perfect as can be. :popcorn
#20. Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday - Dir. Adam Marcus, 1993 (Vudu) ***
I think I'm starting to come around on this movie, it's aggressive dumbness is charming. All the Jason DEEP LORE, the Daggers of Meggido and shit, Creighton Duke, even the "ingrown toenail" mask is kinda cool. Too bad we only see it at the beginning and the end in lieu of the Jason Worm.
Shout out to my physical media homies. I bought a big stack of (mostly) horror blu-rays a few weeks ago on sale for Halloween, and I've watched almost all them already.watched this too, just way too hokey execution for the subject matter. couldn't decide if it wanted to be horror or a soap opera.
Kill Count:
6x Shout Factory
3x Vestron Video
2x Arrow Video
1x Hen's Tooth Video
1x Synapse
1x Vinegar Syndrome
I watched Firestarter last night, first time watch. I can't decide if this is low budget X-Men or a big budget Scanners. It definately doesn't have an antagonist as strong as Michael Ironside from Scanners. Villain duties are split between Martin Sheen as the evil bureaucrat and George C. Scott as a psychotic pedo, but neither of them are sufficiently menacing or have enough of an arc to give the movie much oomph. In the end, you just feel kinda bad for all the random Shop employees getting btfo when Drew Barrymore turns on godmode and starts torching everyone.
#22. Inferno - Dir. Dario Argento, 1980 (Blu-ray) ****
Underrated follow-up to Suspiria. If you like crazy 70/80's euro horror, this is the good stuff.