What movies are you watching?

[VinylGuy]

-In the Mouth of Madness (rewatch): Boy did this hit hard this time. Feels like it has some kind of depressing new relevance for America in 2025. The feeling of society somehow losing its grip all around you, the feeling of being alienated from everyone you live among, the absurdity of the human condition run amok - not knowing whether to laugh, cry, or scream in terror. Some of the greatest Carpenter doom vibes ever. Side note: Sam Neill is inspired casting.

Nice.

I haven't seen this movie since its original release. I had the poster on my wall for a long time. The details of the film are lost to me now but I do remember that I really loved it at the time (which my friends absolutely did not!). Thanks for inspiring me to revisit the film, which I'll try to do this weekend.

are those friends a part of The Shitty Taste Brigade? or this is another group?

[epilogue]

-In the Mouth of Madness (rewatch): Boy did this hit hard this time. Feels like it has some kind of depressing new relevance for America in 2025. The feeling of society somehow losing its grip all around you, the feeling of being alienated from everyone you live among, the absurdity of the human condition run amok - not knowing whether to laugh, cry, or scream in terror. Some of the greatest Carpenter doom vibes ever. Side note: Sam Neill is inspired casting.

Nice.

I haven't seen this movie since its original release. I had the poster on my wall for a long time. The details of the film are lost to me now but I do remember that I really loved it at the time (which my friends absolutely did not!). Thanks for inspiring me to revisit the film, which I'll try to do this weekend.

are those friends a part of The Shitty Taste Brigade? or this is another group?

Well, they disagree with me so I'd call their taste pretty shitty!

[VinylGuy]

May God Save Us.

Sorogoyen oh my god. What a fucking amazing and intense thriller. Way better than seven or even True Detective.
Guys this is the real shit.

Another masterclass.

[oasisfan35]

May God Save Us.

Sorogoyen oh my god. What a fucking amazing and intense thriller. Way better than seven or even True Detective.
Guys this is the real shit.

Another masterclass.

That is a very bold statement...

[epilogue]

May God Save Us.

Sorogoyen oh my god. What a fucking amazing and intense thriller. Way better than seven or even True Detective.
Guys this is the real shit.

Another masterclass.

That is a very bold statement...

Right? True Detective doesn't belong in the same sentence as Seven. Unless the sentence is "Seven is great and True Detective doesn't hold a candle to it." Or "True Detective doesn't belong in the same sentence as Seven."

[oasisfan35]

May God Save Us.

Sorogoyen oh my god. What a fucking amazing and intense thriller. Way better than seven or even True Detective.
Guys this is the real shit.

Another masterclass.

That is a very bold statement...

Right? True Detective doesn't belong in the same sentence as Seven. Unless the sentence is "Seven is great and True Detective doesn't hold a candle to it." Or "True Detective doesn't belong in the same sentence as Seven."

Never really thought of the two 'together' before but this is a fair example of long form (series) v short form (film), such different beasts.

[LoathedVermin72]

May God Save Us.

Sorogoyen oh my god. What a fucking amazing and intense thriller. Way better than seven or even True Detective.
Guys this is the real shit.

Another masterclass.

That is a very bold statement...

Right? True Detective doesn't belong in the same sentence as Seven. Unless the sentence is "Seven is great and True Detective doesn't hold a candle to it." Or "True Detective doesn't belong in the same sentence as Seven."

Thank you

[VinylGuy]

May God Save Us.

Sorogoyen oh my god. What a fucking amazing and intense thriller. Way better than seven or even True Detective.
Guys this is the real shit.

Another masterclass.

That is a very bold statement...

Right? True Detective doesn't belong in the same sentence as Seven. Unless the sentence is "Seven is great and True Detective doesn't hold a candle to it." Or "True Detective doesn't belong in the same sentence as Seven."

The important part of the post was that this movie is better than both joe, for once you could be happy with that notion but no, you gotta shit onto the marvellous S1 of True Detective again.

Lets not forget you actually ¨loved¨ S4.

[epilogue]

May God Save Us.

Sorogoyen oh my god. What a fucking amazing and intense thriller. Way better than seven or even True Detective.
Guys this is the real shit.

Another masterclass.

That is a very bold statement...

Right? True Detective doesn't belong in the same sentence as Seven. Unless the sentence is "Seven is great and True Detective doesn't hold a candle to it." Or "True Detective doesn't belong in the same sentence as Seven."

The important part of the post was that this movie is better than both joe, for once you could be happy with that notion but no, you gotta shit onto the marvellous S1 of True Detective again.

Lets not forget you actually ¨loved¨ S4.

S4 was so good.

Nowhere near as good as Seven tho

[LoathedVermin72]

The Spooky Season festivities have begun:

Spoiler: show

-The Deadly Spawn: Disappointing. The special effects are very impressive but they are all this movie has going for it. It has the worst symptom of incompetent amateur filmmaking: being drastically under-edited and dragging on interminably. This thing is sooooo sloooow.

-Forbidden World (rewatch): This movie absolutely fuckin’ rips and I can’t believe it doesn’t have a huge cult following. Definitely the best Alien knockoff ever. Gnarly gore effects. So entertaining from beginning to end.

-Nightmares in a Damaged Brain: Good lord, this movie is DEPRAVED. And viciously violent. Reminds me of Maniac and Angst in its downbeat, unsettling, uncompromising portrayal of a serial killer. Good stuff right here.

-Dark Places (1973): Enjoyable, lowkey Brit horror elevated by a great cast (Christopher Lee, Joan Collins, Herbert Lom, Jane Birkin, etc.).

-Night of the Demon (1980): Has its moments (mostly the inserted death scenes), but when it comes to wacko no-budget Bigfoot horror, I’ll take Shriek of the Mutilated all day every day.

Continuing:

Spoiler: show

-The Blair Witch Project (rewatch): I've always been kinda lukewarm on this one but it finally clicked this time. Totally effective, thanks largely to the deeply convincing performances by the three leads (the immersive, experimental way they filmed this has a lot to do with that, I imagine). The new-ish restoration by Second Sight is terrific.

-Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror (rewatch): Absolute classic. One of the most batshit wacko of all the '80s Italian horror movies, and that's saying something.

-The Ice House: Total dud. Such an annoying script and directed just as annoyingly, with every line of bafflingly obtuse dialogue delivered with an aggressively sly tone as if each word is loaded with some kind of sinister double meaning. Exhausting, obnoxious, silly, and dull. I love a lot of the old BBC Christmas Ghost Stories but this is probably the worst of the lot.

-Dawn of the Dead (1978) (rewatch): Really nothing left to be said about this. An immortal classic. A movie I watched so much in high school that I kinda feel like it doesn't have many surprises left to offer me anymore, but that's okay.

-Horror Hospital: Never quite finds the right tone. It seems like it was going for comedy, but it only rarely establishes that vibe. Fun and ridiculous Michael Gough performance and one delightfully out-of-left-field scene, but I wish this were better.

-Night of the Living Dead (1990) (rewatch): Didn't like this when I first saw it, but I was ready to embrace it this time. Nope. Still kinda sucks, unfortunately. Too straightforward of a remake but drained of all the original's surreal, nightmarish magic. With Savini at the helm, you'd think there'd at least be a hefty dose of gore to bring something new this time, but you don't even get that. Just a shrug of a movie.

-Return of the Evil Dead (rewatch): A few nice gore moments, one wonderfully shocking sequence, and a lot of boring filler shots. I want to like these Blind Dead movies more than I do.

-The Ghost Galleon: Good fucking lord what a snoozefest. ONE kill scene?! In this whole slog?!

-The Dunwich Horror (rewatch): Another one I was hoping would improve this time. It did not. Fun to see Talia Shire pop up.

-The Dead Next Door (rewatch): Some nice splatter FX here and there, but kind of cloying overall. Worse than I remembered it being.

-The Cell (rewatch): Yet another dud that was even worse than I remembered. The mind-fantasy stuff is nothing but empty visuals with no punch, and the real-world scenes are utterly inert. No juice here at all. Tarsem Singh sucks.

-I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) (rewatch): Finally, something that hits! Absolutely loved this this time around (and Sony's 4K disc is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen). Great cast (Jennifer Love Hewitt and Anne Heche are particularly good), great vibes, with excellent direction and editing - this thing hums along so smoothly.

Continuing:

Spoiler: show

-I Still Know What Did Last Summer: Well, this has precisely zero of the qualities that made the original good. Plainly a rushed cash grab that turns FPJ's character into an asshole for some reason and does nothing well. I swear they "discover" the same four corpses like three times. That's all you got?

-The Conjuring (rewatch): Still very effective (this and Insidious are two of the few horror movies that actually scare me). Well-directed and well-cast - Wilson, Farmiga, Taylor, and Livingston are all inspired choices. Unfortunately, all the Warren hagiography and weird Christian propaganda still keep me from fully embracing it, but a very strong horror movie regardless. Easy to see why this spawned so many sequels and spinoffs.

-Event Horizon (rewatch): Love this movie forever. Still rips. Though I will say it kinda loses steam in the last 15 minutes. Ultimately a minor complaint considering how much ass this movie kicks overall.

-Demons 2 (rewatch): The first half hour of this is amazing. Gorgeous production design and cinematography assist some of the most fascinating use of dream logic in all of Italian horror as the film's narrative progresses because characters are, essentially, watching their own film on TV. The movie bleeds into itself in a surreal, brain-twisting ouroboros. But, sadly, once the demons arrive and start wreaking havoc, everything becomes routine and the pace slows to a crawl. Too bad. That first 30 is probably better than the first Demons (which is a classic), but the last hour is much worse.

Continuing:

Spoiler: show

-The Perfume of the Lady in Black: Not what I expected! Always thought this was a ghost story, but it's something much darker, much more psychological. Mimsy Farmer carries this - she's been great in everything I've ever seen her in. It actually reminds me a bit of another of her movies, La traque (which is a masterpiece). Both are very sad films that deal with a woman who is failed by - and destroyed by - the people around her. This is nowhere near as good as that film, but still solid.

-The Resurrected: Immaculate Spooky Season vibes here: set on the East Coast during October, with constant overcast skies, wind, and rain. I enjoyed this a lot despite some of the FX payoff being sorta awkward; the designs are cool, but the weirdly juttery execution is odd. Chris Sarandon is always fun to watch.

-The Haunting of Rosalind: Deadly dull shot-on-tape TV movie with a young Susan Sarandon. It was cool to see so many behind-the-scenes roles here being filled by women (extremely uncommon in the '70s), but I wish the results were more interesting.

-The Horrible Dr. Hichcock: Another deadly dull movie. Gothic horror with no sense of atmosphere, which means it's pretty much worthless. It's filmed almost entirely in one house, but you never get any sense of the geography of the place or the surrounding property. It feels like they were trying to pass off an urban building as a rural mansion and it doesn't work at all.

-End of Days (rewatch): Silly fun. Gabriel Byrne plays a pitch-perfect Satan. Peter Hyams's cinematography is stunningly gorgeous and Kevin Pollak is fun and offbeat casting, but I think they went way too big with some of the action set-pieces, leaving the movie struggling to find an identity somewhere between a gritty supernatural thriller and a big-budget action movie. Doesn't really work but I enjoyed it anyway.

-I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025): Absolutely godawful. Script feels like it was generated by AI. The young cast is uniformly horrendous. Zero vibes at all. Painfully lame kills; clearly directed by someone with no love for the genre. Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. both still look great and it's nice to see them again, but it's not enough. Really scraping the bottom of the barrel of nostalgia-bait here.

-The Curse of Frankenstein (rewatch): My favorite Hammer film and one of my all-time favorite films, full stop. I never tire of it. Flawless script, all-timer Peter Cushing performance. I love everything about it. A deeply evil movie. So much fun every time.

-Horror of Dracula (rewatch): Another Hammer classic. What can you say?

-Rasputin: The Mad Monk (rewatch): Christopher Lee's greatest performance, and maybe an all-time top 10 performance by anyone. He transforms his entire physicality and crashes through every scene like a wrecking ball. Barbara Shelley keeps up, though - she's always great too.

-Rape Squad: The kind of brain-twisting relic that could only come out of '70s exploitation: a genuinely sympathetic look at rape culture in the women's lib era that takes the audience through the trauma and humiliation of how sexual assault and harassment is treated...but one that also indulges in titillation and uncomfortable sleaze at the same time. This kind of semi-contradictory, uneasy stuff is what I love about exploitation, and while its Movie-of-the-Week-esque direction keeps me from ranking it among the very best of the genre (Cannibal Holocaust, Thriller: A Cruel Picture, I Spit on Your Grave, etc.), it's still a compelling work nonetheless.

-In the Mouth of Madness (rewatch): Boy did this hit hard this time. Feels like it has some kind of depressing new relevance for America in 2025. The feeling of society somehow losing its grip all around you, the feeling of being alienated from everyone you live among, the absurdity of the human condition run amok - not knowing whether to laugh, cry, or scream in terror. Some of the greatest Carpenter doom vibes ever. Side note: Sam Neill is inspired casting.

Continuing:

-Carnival of Souls (rewatch): Still an outsider masterwork. Surreal, beautiful - a very special movie. Herk Harvey's day job as a maker of industrial shorts brings a singular quality to this. Candace Hilligoss is so good; could not imagine a more perfect countenance for this role. The Criterion Blu-ray is still stunning; this negative must have been in pristine shape. Wish like hell Harvey had directed more movies.

-The Mystery of the Mary Celeste: VERY early Hammer sort-of-horror (1935!). Bela Lugosi is great as always, but this movie is stiff, awkward, and boring. Terrible script, stilted direction. Even the structure is a mess: this clearly should have started with its ending as a cold open before having the rest of the movie take place in flashback. At least it's short, I guess.

-Picture Mommy Dead: Bert I. Gordon is a bad director. The lead girl here is one of the most annoying characters I've ever seen in a movie. Could not imagine a dimmer bulb - it's as if every second she's on screen you can see her trying to squeeze together one single thought. Jimmy Sangster wrote a bunch of similar family-trying-to-drive-heir-insane thrillers in the '60s that were actually good. Just watch those instead because this sucks.

-Repulsion (rewatch): Roman Polanski is the best director who's ever lived. He's made exactly one bad movie: this one. I was a teenager the last time I saw this and my opinion has not improved. Clinical, showy, precious - all qualities I don't associate with Polanski but they're abundant here. It uses over-the-top visual allusions to portray the protagonist's alienation and mental breakdown instead of exploring the causes of her alienation. I gleaned nothing interesting from this. Catherine Deneuve is very good but this material is so thin.

-Near Dark (rewatch): This needs a fresh 4K remaster desperately. I think this movie might be great but it's hard to tell from this ancient DVD master, which really does its best to strangle what is clearly some primo '80s atmosphere. The bar scene is still great (and super nasty and mean-spirited). Rob Zombie definitely lifted the motel shootout for the opening of The Devil's Rejects.

-Countess Dracula: I was immediately deflated when I saw in the opening credits that Peter Sasdy directed this. A total limp hand and my least favorite Hammer director. My deflation was the correct response because this is a dud. Why isn't there a proper movie about Erzebet Bathory?

-Graveyard Shift (1990): Why are there so many theatrical Stephen King adaptations that feel like TV movies? What a weirdly consistent phenomenon. Anyway, this sucks. Maybe one of the worst casts of the '90s? Brad Dourif is only light here but he has limited screentime and seems like he's in a different movie than everyone else.

[Simple Torture]

Anemone, Ronan Day-Lewis's movie starring dear ol' dad, is available digitally now. I don't know much about it but am interested in checking it out.

[The Argonaut]

I liked it. Is Ronan Day-Lewis going to be the first great Gen Z director? lol no. But DDL is as fascinating as always and because Dad was on board, plenty of other people got on board, too. Sean Bean and Samantha Morton are two faces I'm always happy to see and I thought the cinematography was gorgeous. Very painterly. The story itself is nothing special and I'm not sure the pace needs to be so slow for what it's doing
This is not a great movie, but it has great elements. Maybe with a director who could match the greatness of his collaborators it could have been great

[BurtReynolds]

Holmes and Watson

They're having so much fun making it, but it is terribly unfunny. I chuckled a couple of times. Movie trivia: The weird looking girl from Last of Us has a bit part. Bad movie, but still, I'm just glad these likeable millionaires had a good time. 8 stars.

Career Opportunities (1991)

Only knew this movie as a meme. Really bad movie in every way, but Jennifer Connelly being absurdly hot is worth the watch. 12 stars.

[lennytheweedwhacker]

Hell yeah she is

[spike]

Hell yeah she is

I can’t believe she’s your sister.

[lennytheweedwhacker]

Hell yeah she is

I can’t believe she’s your sister.

2/10

[lennytheweedwhacker]

May watch An American Werewolf in London this evening, if I can focus. I ain't ever seen it.

[The Argonaut]

Cool movie

[lennytheweedwhacker]

Cool movie

Thank you.

[Farmer John]

Eden

I wouldn't call it a particularly good movie, which is too bad, because the story/subject matter is interesting enough.

Ana De Armas was a lot of fun. Sydney Sweeney seems like a pretty good actress, but getting her to do a German accent is a lot to ask.