/horror/ general megathread - Let's talk about movies and shit.

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A docu on the infamously unmade Romero adaptation of Resident Evil. The docu is in the style of others about famously unmade movies like the Tim Burton Superman starring Nicolas Cage.

I assume they'll treat Romero's decline with kids gloves but it should be interesting because I never read the original script. If I had to make a guess; Constantin Films (same company behind those two awful Fantastic 4 movies) bought the rights and kicked out Romero because they didn't want to pay him or they wanted something more mainstream and kid friendly and went with Paul W.S. Anderson.
 
Ugh I can't imagine how bad Romero's RE would've been. I guess it would've staved off the Land/Diary of the dead horseshit for a while. Or subsumed it. Like Tim Burton or Kevin Smith I get for Superman, Jodorowsky I get for Dune, but Romero and RE go together like niggers and civilization.

Anyway, I saw Ben Wheatley's In The Earth the other night. I can't help but think he has just lost his mojo or something. Or maybe he is another Guy Ritchie - someone who starts off with 3-4 amazing ideas and makes amazing films out of them, and then just peters out and does junk after that. I know In the Earth was wrecked by wu-flu, but it just seems like it wouldn't have been any good anyway. The two leads were...not good. The guy was OK, I guess, he was supposed to be bland and passive, but Jesus Christ, there's a limit to how bland and passive someone can be if you want me to give a shit about them. The Park Ranger girl was utterly terrible. Reece Shearsmith was fine; easily the best part of the movie. He was more grounded than usual (for a crazy guy), and his scenes were all the better for it. It had a really promising first 10-15 minutes, where you're thinking the movie could go in 50 directions, any of them good.

And then the leads get alone and have to carry the movie, and are just utterly incapable of it. Then the ending is a big let down.

It's kind of the opposite of Kill List, where the lead is charismatic and interesting enough that you want to know what happens, and then BAM the ending makes the movie a billion times better. In this one, by the time shit starts coming together, you've lost what little empathy you had with the leads, and the 'reveal' has about zero impact.

I guess relative to a random, generic Blumhouse movie, it is (loads) better, but for a Ben Wheatley film, it is severely disappointing...a trend that has been going since High-Rise in (jesus has it been that long) 2015. Although, to be fair, I haven't seen Rebecca, but it isn't reviewed well (by people I trust).

His next film is, inexplicably, Meg 2: The Trench, so I guess we'll see how that goes. He's only like 50, so hopefully he has time to get shit back on track and make a few more good movies, but something is wrong. I used to talk to him on Twitter a bit, until like 2014 when I left. So honestly, it's probably my fault.
 
Romero only made like, four or five movies that range from really good to excellent. The Dead trilogy, Martin and the Crazies. And the latter is more of a cult classic than a really good movie, really. Everything else he's done is from kinda good to really trash.

He's really overrated as a director, which is a shame because Day of the Dead is by far one of the greatest horror movies of all time and imo the quintessential Zombie movie.
 
I saw Dark Half when it came out, and that was the last time I did. I don't remember anything about it.

I didn't include Creepshow because the screenplay was written by Stephen King when he was still at the peak of his career, and I don't feel like Romero's direction did anything so special that you could tell it was directed by Romero and only he could have given it that specific taste and flavor. It really feels like it could have been directed by about just anyone at the time.
 
Calandrino said:
How many directors have their names on four excellent horror movies? Even if he just did NotLD and fucked off back to his home planet, that'd be better than we deserve.
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Terence Fisher made the following
The Curse of Frankenstein
Dracula
The Revenge of Frankenstein
The Mummy
The Stranglers of Bombay
and many other classic Hammer Horror movies
 
Horror is one of those genres where prolific directors who made great movies are actually more common due to cheaper budgets etc
 
Calandrino said:
How many directors have their names on four excellent horror movies? Even if he just did NotLD and fucked off back to his home planet, that'd be better than we deserve.
Click to expand...
You can say that again.

Calandrino said:
How many directors have their names on four excellent horror movies? Even if he just did NotLD and fucked off back to his home planet, that'd be better than we deserve.
Click to expand...

You can say that again.

Calandrino said:
How many directors have their names on four excellent horror movies? Even if he just did NotLD and fucked off back to his home planet, that'd be better than we deserve.
Click to expand...

You can say that again.
 
Pitbull Victim said:
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Poltergeist, The Funhouse for sure but what's the fourth?

Eaten Alive would probably be my pick.
TCM 2 is one I know a lot of people like.
Lifeforce is goofy as hell but pretty great.
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Well... That one's kind of disputed. I do think Hooper was there during production but as far as the main man running the show and literally directing his own weird personal energy into something then I'd say Spielberg is the director of Poltergeist with Hooper acting closer to an assistant director or 2nd unit director.

Eaten Alive is okay. Not amazing but not that bad. It tries desperately to recapture the energy of TCM but it doesn't reach it. The Funhouse is another "okay" one but it does have fans. TCM 2 is fun but it pails compared to the original. It's funny, I am the audience for something like Lifeforce and I love Cannon films but I never got into it.
 
I thought the original Crazies was okay, I feel like it tried to do too much with what little budget it had.

The remake, imo, while scaled down from the original, was incredibly fun and I thought it was better than the original.

First three Living Dead films are masterpieces. Night I even saw a re-release of it (I guess kinda easy to do since it's public domain), Dawn is almost close to perfect, Day I didn't like originally because it was too nihilistic, but I love it now specifically because Romero went in that direction.

Martin was good.
Creepshow, while I like it, for whatever reason I see it more as a product of Stephen King than Romero. Still, fun stuff.


Monkey Shines is a guilty pleasure.

The last three Living Dead films might be the biggest fall from grace I've ever seen. @BrunoMattei knows how much I fucking hate these last three films, like I went into almost an hour long rant on how much I hate them.
 
The Cunting Death said:
I thought the original Crazies was okay, I feel like it tried to do too much with what little budget it had.

The remake, imo, while scaled down from the original, was incredibly fun and I thought it was better than the original.
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The Cunting Death said:
Creepshow, while I like it, for whatever reason I see it more as a product of Stephen King than Romero.
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Couldn't agree more
The Cunting Death said:
The last three Living Dead films might be the biggest fall from grace I've ever seen
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I suppose I could agree more, but that's because I fully noped after Land and never bothered with the last two.
 
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