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

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Kovachs said:
I'm aware of many of the problems people have. I don't think they should have included Ripley at all, either. But the film is appealing to me from the standpoint of being entertaining. It's not a serious movie. I don't get the impression it was trying to be. I don't think there is a way that an alien movie is "supposed to be", because I think Aliens, which is very highly regarded, deviates significantly from the original, and most of the franchise also deviates from the same formula. This is especially true of Prometheus/Covenant.
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I don't necessarily disagree, but if the movie's not supposed to be serious, why is much of the movie so serious? Most of the goofy scenes feel completely out of place when they happen. Of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's movies, I've only seen Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, but judging from those movies I think he's very talented at creating certain kinds of visuals and atmosphere, which is definitely evident in Resurrection, but his penchant for black comedy created a tonally inconsistent movie with Resurrection. As I recall, Joss Whedon had said that he didn't write the movie as a comedy and thought Jeunet's direction was bizarre.

Alien and Alien 3 are survival horror, Aliens is an action-horror flick, Prometheus and Covenant have a more adventurous tone overall, but Resurrection goes for horror-comedy and it doesn't work at all, in my opinion.
 
Saw a cool short, The Mezzotint, 30 minutes from BBC. (I saw it on Amazon Prime.) Adapted by Mark Gatiss from story by MR James. No gore, no jump scares, etc but the feeling of dread and terror kept growing and man I caught the heebie-jeebies

The gist is that a dude gets the titular picture, and its scene unfolds further each time he looks at it. This version adds a subplot that leads to a spicy conclusion because the original story doesn't really have one.

Warning for minor wokeness (it's Gatiss, it's BBC)
 
TV's Adam West said:
"Aliens is an action movie!"
>Half the fucking action hero types get murdered within 10 minutes of an encounter
>Action hero soldier dude has mental breakdown
Nice fucking shitty opinion, a bread tuber give it to you?
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Action Horror is not really talked about enough as a Horror subgenre in and of itself despite a whole lot of extremely good movies falling under its admittedly loosely defined umbrella of "Horror scenario/setting/story where the characters are able and willing to consistently fight back effectively".

Personally I think the best example is the OG Terminator which I genuinely think is one of the best horror movies ever made, and the contrast between it and Terminator 2 serves to illustrate the difference between Action Horror and straight up Action
 
Judge Holden said:
Personally I think the best example is the OG Terminator which I genuinely think is one of the best horror movies ever made, and the contrast between it and Terminator 2 serves to illustrate the difference between Action Horror and straight up Action
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The ending when the crushed Terminator is still crawling trying to get Sarah still gives me goosebumps. It perfectly illustrates that this thing is an unfeeling machine whose whole purpose is to kill you. Very nicely done.
 
I always wanted to see a Terminator sequel return to the slasher with guns horror motif of the original. We'll probably never see it at this point until fan films made with ai happen.
 
Cnut said:
Saw a cool short, The Mezzotint, 30 minutes from BBC. (I saw it on Amazon Prime.) Adapted by Mark Gatiss from story by MR James. No gore, no jump scares, etc but the feeling of dread and terror kept growing and man I caught the heebie-jeebies

The gist is that a dude gets the titular picture, and its scene unfolds further each time he looks at it. This version adds a subplot that leads to a spicy conclusion because the original story doesn't really have one.

Warning for minor wokeness (it's Gatiss, it's BBC)
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Which reminds me of another story James, in a version I saw in one anthology, apologized for its similarity to "The Mezzotint", "The Haunted Dolls' House". I recall reading it before "Mezzotint" in some anthology of horror stories.

So in 2012 a very low-budget short film adaption was made, featuring some stop-motion work.

 
BrunoMattei said:
I always wanted to see a Terminator sequel return to the slasher with guns horror motif of the original. We'll probably never see it at this point until fan films made with ai happen.
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I would not mind seeing a prequel that is just the future war from the original timeline instead of the war that was in Salvation. Kyle Reese and John Connor could be the main characters and it ends with the destruction of Skynet, the two Terminators being sent to the past, and Kyle and the reprogrammed Terminator following not long after. You get the bleakness and terror from the dream sequences in the first movie and no further deviation of the timelines.
 
The Nothingness said:
I would not mind seeing a prequel that is just the future war from the original timeline instead of the war that was in Salvation. Kyle Reese and John Connor could be the main characters and it ends with the destruction of Skynet, the two Terminators being sent to the past, and Kyle and the reprogrammed Terminator following not long after. You get the bleakness and terror from the dream sequences in the first movie and no further deviation of the timelines.
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Everyone wants this. But the series has been fucked with so severely that I don't see it happening.
 
Vampirella said:
The ending when the crushed Terminator is still crawling trying to get Sarah still gives me goosebumps. It perfectly illustrates that this thing is an unfeeling machine whose whole purpose is to kill you. Very nicely done.
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I was fortunate enough to see it on VHS as a kid entirely unspoiled, and the fake-out happy ending when the truck explodes seemingly killing the terminator, only for it to return as a semi stop-motion skeleton nightmare was downright unfairly terrifying to watch

Also the police station massacre proves without a shadow of a doubt you can make gunfights fucking horrifying even without any over the top gore
 
I saw Terminator 2 first and then the original. I preferred the original. I have this weird habit of watching movie series backwards. It happened with Alien 3, Predator 2, Godfather 3, Friday the 13th (started with 9), Elm Street (started with 5), and if there's a gun to my head I'd prefer to watch LOTR backwards as well.
 
BrunoMattei said:
I always wanted to see a Terminator sequel return to the slasher with guns horror motif of the original. We'll probably never see it at this point until fan films made with ai happen.
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Or at least do something different with the framework.

Cameron has always known what he's doing with sequels: he takes the same DNA as the original film but adds in a big twist that makes the sequel feel fresh and not pointless. Aliens is a different take on the same themes of Alien. T2 is an action thriller with the same basic setup of T1, which, as sometimes earlier in the thread said, is an action horror film. (I never saw Avatar or Avatar 2, so I can't speak to those.)

Nobody making Terminator sequels seems to know what the fuck they're doing. They're all trying to mimick T2 instead of doing something new and interesting with the same themes. McG (LOL, what a douche) is not a great director, but Salvation, as middling as it was, at least wasn't another T2 "re-imagining."

It's sad to say that, at this point, another action-horror Terminator would feel refreshing. But it's true. Maybe the studio will recognize they've so thoroughly destroyed the IP it has no value left and they can take a "chance" on it.
 
Calandrino said:
Yo dawg if a xeno lays an egg in another xeno, what does the resulting xeno look like
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Sweet Home Xeno-bama
Judge Holden said:
Action Horror is not really talked about enough as a Horror subgenre in and of itself despite a whole lot of extremely good movies falling under its admittedly loosely defined umbrella of "Horror scenario/setting/story where the characters are able and willing to consistently fight back effectively".

Personally I think the best example is the OG Terminator which I genuinely think is one of the best horror movies ever made, and the contrast between it and Terminator 2 serves to illustrate the difference between Action Horror and straight up Action
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In T1, everytime the Terminator and Kyle fight, the latter is always outmatched and always gets injured while fighting to just retreat. He knows the threat and all it does is make him understand how fucked he really is. Most of the times his strategy is to shoot and run, hoping the bullets will slow it down just enough so get can in a get away vehicle. The injuries kept piling up to the point he probably threw caution to the wind with the pipe bomb as a hail mary move and he never got to know if that even worked (it did destroy its lower half but its upper half was still very much still going).

In T2, everytime Uncle Bob and T-1000 fight, the former is still able to put some sort of a fight against the latter. It helps that the same way that the T-1000 can recover from anything, Uncle Bob can usually tank the damage it does to him. The closest it ever gets to "killing" Uncle Bob was at their final match where it destroys the main power source (apparently forgetting that T-800s have secondary power sources to get themselves back up). My point is that we never afraid for Uncle Bob's safety when he was duking out with that thing.

I love both movies for different reasons and they do compliment each other beautifully but I never felt any "dread" in T2, I was intimidated by the T-1000 (tho I attribute that a lot to the acting) but never "afraid" at any point.

In T1, the Terminator causes destruction and death wherever it goes and our hero makes it clear that he isnt sure if he can even stop it with current technology. It felt kind of hopeless.

Thats why T1 is horror and T2 aint (and thats ok).
 
Judge Holden said:
I could go on for hours, for literal hours about how much I fucking hate this series. I even fucking half considered doing a bulk series review on this very thread just to enunciate each and every way I fucking hate this shit and each and every fucking entry, but frankly I would rather rewatch all those shitty Zombi series entries I have been bitching about the past few weeks than do this.
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Judge Holden said:
Besides, we already have a movie that is effectively "First days of the Crossed outbreak but actually done halfway fucking competently without being utterly fucking insufferable" with The Sadness, which has the added bonus of not involving one of Ennis's precious "snarky britbong special forces badass who gloriously lectures everyone around him every fucking second" OCs.
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Picking up on this thread compelled me to go and read all of fucking Crossed on a scan site. What a wretched slog of poor narrative decisions. The Sadness is about as generic as a zombie movie can get, but at least it considers interesting scenarios and implications (such as the consideration that the infected are away of everything they are doing, they detest it, but they can’t help themselves).

But Crossed is a perpetual morass of repetitive decisions that are interesting only once. The issue of pregnancy, for instance, is so boring.
>woman gets pregnant
>woman remains pregnant despite traumatic circumstances
>Crossed doing horrible things to pregnant woman shortly before or after childbirth
How many pages are devoted to this conceit? It loses all horror quickly because, to the reader, they have fairly certain knowledge that it is a hopeless endeavor. And IMO, hope is the most crucial element of horror. It’s not even false hope, which is just as meaningful as true hope. It’s just cynical, ugly, and meaningless.

Crossed +100 is the redeeming point of reading all that shit. Future is an actual character, the post-apocalyptic worldbuilding is fun, the plot progression was well-paced right until the end.
Thank goodness they could get Moore to fix that shit.
 
Another film I was reminded about recently, Tobe Hooper's Spontaneous Combustion (1990).

Brad Dourif gives a rather restrained performance as a high strung college professor who doesn't realize his parents were subjects of Atomic Age experimentation, and something starts happening to him as his birthday is coming up, and said birthday rather ominously coincides with the opening of a local nuclear plant his students have been protesting. As more and more people start going up in flames and a sininster conspiracy starts to reveal itself around him, Dourif's character starts understandably becoming really unhinged. Also noted, features a certain notorious director in a small role, and the director André De Toth in an uncredited role as a scientist. Reviews on this are mixed, but while it has its flaws its far from unwatchable, it was like watching DePalma filtered through Cronenberg filtered through Hooper at his most lurid.
 
Commander X said:
Another film I was reminded about recently, Tobe Hooper's Spontaneous Combustion (1990).
https://youtube.com/watch?v=PcLzB9rk7Lc
Brad Dourif gives a rather restrained performance as a high strung college professor who doesn't realize his parents were subjects of Atomic Age experimentation, and something starts happening to him as his birthday is coming up, and said birthday rather ominously coincides with the opening of a local nuclear plant his students have been protesting. As more and more people start going up in flames and a sininster conspiracy starts to reveal itself around him, Dourif's character starts understandably becoming really unhinged. Also noted, features a certain notorious director in a small role, and the director André De Toth in an uncredited role as a scientist. Reviews on this are mixed, but while it has its flaws its far from unwatchable, it was like watching DePalma filtered through Cronenberg filtered through Hooper at his most lurid.
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I think Dourif and the special effects are the only thing of note. Sadly, Tobe Hooper ceased making anything decent in the 90's and onwards.

I hated that Toolbox Murders remake.
 
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