Tremendously late, but I love this movie and think it's very underrated. If you like folk horror, forests and mushrooms, weirdness, and an aggressive portrayal of the unknowable/unthinkable, it is really an awesome film. Actors all did a great job, even Joel Fry (maybe it's the material not his skill that's the problem but I usually think he's ass).
Curious why it flopped so hard with the nature horror fans. I would have thought they'd be all over it? America explain!!!
Alright I'm going to bump it up in my playlist, I want to see why it's so divisive (well I want to watch a good movie, but now if I turn out to not enjoy it I'll have another reason to keep at it.)
In the mean time though, I watched a couple of movies over the weekend, a mixed bag as usual.
Creep (2014) is no doubt old hat to found footage fans, but I only got into the format recently, so it blew my mind seeing Pete from The League act like a lunatic. As a horror film goes it's too goofy imo, and too grounded, but part of the problem is also that I just didn't find Duplass intimidating. I read on Wikipedia that he was supposedly maintaining eye contact constantly to unsettle, but I just thought he was staring into the camera the way everyone does when addressing someone through a video. And the 'jump scares' are just fucking annoying. At no point did they scare, they were just aggravating. The cheapest of cheap emotional manipulation.
Annoyingly, I reckon they could have made a pretty good actual horror movie with a bit of tweaking. There's a bit where Aaron (the victim) is having dreams about being connected to Josef that imply Josef's madness is infecting Aaron too - if they leant into that, have Aaron feel compelled to start pretending to be his neighbours then work his way up to killing, until he gets his own mask and song - that would have been cool. And you could tell the sophisticates it's about csam.
I also watched Bloody Hell (2020), which I thought was brilliant, even though every single American accent in the film is constantly shifting into Australian. It's about a guy who gets kidnapped by a crazy Finnish family who cut off one of his legs, so he gets payback while bantering with himself (he started talking to himself in prison). It's full of that kind of detached comedy you see in the best horror comedies like Evil Dead, where the characters immediately accept the craziness and start riffing on it.