Yes, I do. It's kind of a weird one, like for a sweet hearted retard child with a heart of gold but also halitosis. The way that they seemed eager to revive the lush, gothic horror of the early Universal and Hammer films was very exciting, and between the great production value and cinematography you got a real visual feast. I even liked some of the updated story beats, like the theme park owner angle in Hill.
Unfortunately the bad scripts, casting and acting really messed up just about all those movies, making them really hard to enjoy as a whole. It's like getting a perfect baked potato, but your steak is a hockey puck.
You're really hitting the nail on the head, they're all flawed movies but not the type that make you angry and feel like you wasted your time as there are upsides.
And yeah, an attempt to bring back the gothic horror of the early Universal and Hammer films is exactly what the connecting tissue is between this run of films, very observant.
And you have to respect them really going for it in certain edgy stuff, like one of the ghosts in Thirteen Ghosts being a naked woman with slashes all over her body or the nudity in Ghost Ship, "hard R but with a big budget" is something that is vanishingly rare these days.
I forgot to mention another one that's arguably part of this cycle, Dead Silence from 2007, which I re-watched last year and thought was actually pretty dang underrated (the lead actor is very bland though), but that's also a bit different because it's the SAW guys specifically trying to meld the post SAW era with the whole gothic horror of the early Universal and Hammer films, but that also makes for something pretty cool to look at (never seen any of the SAWs, but I do like Dead Silence)
Orphan is also a bit different because it's an attempt to do gothic horror but on a smaller scale and budget, it still has some cool visuals though, it's just the setting is a typical bland modern generic rich people house, but maybe that works for the story, gothic horror crashes into the bland present day.
But it seems like the trend after that was for horror to go very, very cheap, that fucking cycle of Paranormal Activity movies and it's wannabees has got to be the worst cycle of horror film ever, so bland, so generic, so boring (and I'm not just saying that, I saw the first Paranormal Activity in theaters in fact and was amazed at how boring and pointless it was)
That's where I have some respect for Peele because he's been at least trying to bring back big budget horror and the whole "the director is one of the stars" ala Hitchcock vibe back to the genre, it's just a shame he's Woke.
