20.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
Great movie. Terrific writing, acting, and tension. Of course, everyone knows how amazing the exchanges with Lector and Clarice are. Even knowing what they were going in, they were still great to me. The pain that Jodie Foster displays when recounting the lamb story was able to shake me to my core.
5 / 5
21.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
Decent sequel. It's unfortunate Jodie Foster didn't return, the movie would have felt quite a bit different with her as Clarice. But Julianne Moore does a good job. Anothony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter is great as expected, but something feels off here. It might be because he's shown walking around more, or maybe because he's older, but something felt a little off to me. Just a small thing for me personally. His speech is fantastically on-point and it was great hearing him talk as Lecter some more.
What I appreciated is the movie took its time showing Lecter at all. He's built up and then introduced right when he should be. And then it takes even longer for him to interact with Clarice, and it's over a phone call. The movie nailed the build up to their reunion.
One thing that really dates the movie is the crappy half-assed "slow-mo." But it's not actually filmed in slow motion, it's just a normal camera and when played back the frames are left on screen for longer than 24 a second. This gives it a very choppy and amateur effect, which is a shame because the production design otherwise is great and has a very grand, operatic feel.
The gore was... wow. This movie is famous for one scene in particular, but from the gunfight with a baby five minutes into the movie you know it's going to show the real shit. I originally blamed the original director Jonathan Demme for stepping away, but after watching the movie I understand his given problems with the gore factor.
Verner was an interesting villain. Absolutely disgusting on every level, a foe so irredeemable that you root for his demise from his first introduction. And when it comes, it's amazing.
The movie succeeds most at the interplay between Clarice and Hannibal, but some of the other elements feel a little sloppy. Still, a worthy sequel to The Silence of the Lambs.
4 / 5
22.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
I should have researched this movie as it's not horror or suspenseful at all. It feels like a less-actiony, less cerebral, more mystery-ish Total Recall. I didn't mind Charlie Sheen here, although him portraying an obsessed nerd is funny in retrospect. The effects are... bad. Bad bad bad. About as bad as 90's CG aliens can be, and that's pretty bad. The practical effects for explosions and mini black holes and what not are serviceable.
The plot is decently structured, and it feels like a pretty fresh take on the alien invasion formula. There's shades of Invasion of the Body Snatchers combined with a contemporary worry of global warming. The movie didn't waste my time, but I'm not thrilled having watching it either. It also felt a bit too long (almost 2 hours.)
2 / 5
23.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
But seriously, I knew it was going to be weird, but... wow. I need to rewatch this like 8 more times, I feel. The movie is touching and hopeful and finally crushingly depressing. The direction is way above what I feel comfortable commenting on, it's on another plane that I recognize as good but can't yet verbalize why it is so at this point in my life. The editing, the writing, it's all fantastic. And on top of all that, the acting sells the entire thing. This is easily Naomi Watts' best roll (that I've seen) and she nails every aspect to her character. The movie wouldn't be nearly as effective if Watts was just 1% off, but she isn't. She's perfect.
But yeah...
5 / 5
24.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
What a waste of time. If The Blair Witch Project is how to do found footage right, V/H/S as a series (and Viral especially) show how to do it very, very wrong.
Let me back up. I was very excited by V/H/S when I found out about it two years ago. However, it let me down. The idea of an anthology series is something that the horror genre keep coming back to (Creepshow, Tales from the Crypt, The Twilight Zone, American Horror Story, ABC's of Death, etc.) so when I heard it was being combined with my beloved found footage subgenre, I was ecstatic. The trailer was also very interesting and hinted at a blend of grim exploitation and supernatural snuff.
But in watching the original V/H/S I realized a fundamental problem with this idea: the "build up, tear down" of found footage just doesn't work when compacted to 15-20 minutes. Let alone that many of the shorts in the series are stretching credibility with why they're all found footage. But introducing an all new cast of characters every 15 minutes, knowing we'll only know them for 15 minutes, and after introductions happen only having 5 minutes before the obligatory big, bombastic "finale" of the short leaves... well, only 5 minutes for tension and world building. And that leads to shitty, non-scary, schlocky horror. My final indictment of the original was that the "wraparound story" was filled with some of the most dislikable characters ever - which was the point, but that just meant I was rooting for their deaths which sucked the horror out of what could have been an otherwise eerie (if cliche) setup.
Many consider V/H/S 2 worse than the original, but I actually liked it more. The wraparound story was far better, and in general I think the shorts did a slightly better job of building things up and adding actual tension. The standout short (Safe Haven) is generally recognized as the best short of the first two movies, and I agree with that. But it also had an obligatory bombastic finale, which I don't recognize as being necessary (or preferable) for a horror movie.
Enter V/H/S: Viral. The previous movies had over-the-top, explosive endings (almost entirely contrary to the very idea of "horror"), but this movie has that in basically every minute of every short. I hesitate to even call this "horror." It's just blood-coated schlock (okay, that describes many many many actual horror movies too, haha.) But every short is noisy and frenetic and over the top. Some people might like that. The problem is that the shorts themselves aren't even good excluding that.
The nadir of this series so far has to be the skateboard short Bonestorm, the ending of which rehashes Safe Haven and the rest of which is just... stupid. On top of all that, the acting is absolutely putrid (actual line, delivered in a monotone at the end: "Wow, we just killed a bunch of fools" after the main characters have killed like 30 people.) The editing is possibly the worst I've ever seen in a movie, and that's including online one-off shorts. If you can understand what the fuck is happening in the last 10 minutes and who's doing what, you deserve an award. Shove in a bunch of nonsensical bullshit ("oh hey why don't I just whip out a gun that I didn't mention before now and turn this game into a bad ripoff of Resident Evil") and I was just waiting for it all to end. No real payoff other than the hoof of some demon. Oh wow, so glad we waited 20 minutes for that.
The other two shorts are decent, but not scary. The first (Dante the Great) is actually really enjoyable, but it's more like an action thriller than horror. Yeah, the cape is occult, but the movie felt like a low-budget ripoff of Now You See Me. The second short (Parallel Monsters) is a neat idea, and the editing was pretty neat, but the premise is something a seventh grader would come up with and it devolves into laughable schlock by the end.
Apparently there was a fourth short, Gorgeous Vortex, about an organization that hunts serial killers, but it's been cut from all the non-festival showings of the movie. While I'm not really hopeful of its quality, especially since the description makes it seem action-y, I'm disappointed it was cut since the movie ends really abruptly without it.
Finally, the wraparound story here is 100% noisy, frenetic, action-y, and nonsensical. I feel like the wraparound story for this series should be a "reprieve." The shorts all end on such bombastic notes that when you cut from that to a bombastic wraparound your brain has trouble realizing you've switched. At least, mine did. On top of that, the movie ends on a fart. Oooh, let's be mysterious. Give me a break.
1 / 5
7 more to go.
