For my Halloween movie marathon this year, I’ve decided I’ll watch the ‘31 Spanish-language Dracula and The Fly. lol, that’s pretentious af, but whatever.
I haven’t seen The Fly since I was a little kid and it was way age-inappropriate for me. Arm wrestling scene absolutely fucked me up for life, looking forward to revisiting that experience.
Holy shit guys, Barbarian
+1 on Barbarian being good (I hadn’t been that hyped for a movie in a long time…not sure it fully lived up to it but still)
I knew almost nothing going in except this
which kept me on the edge of my seat for the first 40 mins lol. The tension building up to that moment is so good ! On the one hand I was relieved that it calmed down after that, on the other hand they never quite managed to get back to that level. There were still plenty of good ideas up to the end though.
Lol’d when it turns out that in the scary basement there is… an even deeper and scarier one ?
I immediately followed it up with X which sadly didn’t manage to keep me interested (I especially felt that all the kills were rather mechanical/unsurprising).
Reminded me a bit of Shyamalan’s The visit which has a similar theme of scary old people, which I saw recently, and was much better than I expected. (although it has the cringiest rapping character ever put on film).
Ouch
Don’t get the barbarian love. Verrrry standard stuff. First act pretty good, everything post skarsgard zzz.
Nah…I actually like his movies a lot (“the village” is one of my all time favourites), and think that he has extremely good visual instincts. He also seems to have a naive belief in the strength of his stories, which is mostly a good thing, but also often leads him to go way beyond the “ridiculousness” line. (his last movie “old” is a pretty good example, as something that has really many good ideas, much more so than your usual movie, but with a plot so badly written that it’s almost unbearable at times.)
The Skarssgard stuff is incredibly well done though.
I know the movie intends for us to think hes the bad guy in all of this, but dman if they don’t do exactly that even though I know thats what they are going for. When she tells him about the room and he refuses to let her leave I was head in my hands nervous for whatever happened next. Skarssgard plays an absolutely incredible creep.
The reveal being awful rapist ended up producing incest supermonster who wants a baby was pretty meh, but the creature design was well done, and Justin Long proving to be a fucking monster by tossing the girl off the tower was wonderful, as was him getting his just deserts.
I dunno, there was a ton of great stuff. Both scary night with lead and Justin Long coming into the house when it was dark and having them both sleep til morning with no issues was pretty inspired.
The only thing Im confused about, there had to be somebody on the outside working with old rapist man, right? How on earth would he or the monster open the stone door without pulling the rope in the basement? And was the double booking really just a coincidence?
And who the fuck doesnt google maps an airbnb before they book it? The reveal of the completely dead neighborhood in the morning was pretty great.
Sold
AFI 100 not challenging enough? Can I interest you in the “Carter 400”?
man 1980 was a banger year for comedies. he watched caddyshack, airplane!, and blues brothers essentially when they released.
I think @beetlejuice posted something that said that movie might have something to do with the high value sports trading card market. Just give us another Uncut Gems with that as the background instead of diamonds please.
Criterion’s November Noir lineup looks pretty tight.
Well, for our scary movie, I let MrsWookie pick between Hereditary and Barbarian without telling her any more about them than that, and me not knowing much more than what’s been posted here without spoiler tags. She went with Hereditary, and I wasn’t all that impressed. It was a movie where a bunch of scary stuff happened, but that stuff didn’t really fit together into a coherent story end to end so as to have a particularly unsettling thesis or outcome.
Right off the bat in the movie, we get a couple things that would seem to the viewer to be important, but that aren’t really. There’s the diorama that the mom is working on that’s featured so prominently in the first shot, and then we see the first scene with people happen as if it were in there. Oh, does that mean we’ll see some more freaky foreshadowing in the diorama? Nope. Mom just sorta puts scary things we’ve already seen into it instead. The whole thing seems to exist only as an odd answer to the question “What does Annie do for a living?” and as an overly elaborate substitute for the smashing plates trope to show she’s at her wits end and has snapped.
Then we have the apparition of grandma. Oh, are we going to see more of her in dark corners and such? Nope, we’re going to ignore that for 95% of the movie.
But then we’re into the Charlie plot, which was a real gut punch and when the movie was actually making some sense. Like, if the grandma apparition thing had been there strictly as a Psycho-esque setup, a ruse to make you think you were getting one kind of movie before a shocking turn of events sets the plot on a completely different course, and then is completely forgotten, I feel like it might have been a better movie. The completely non-supernatural haunting of the family in the wake of the tragedy was compelling and scary, and it made me think for a while that we were done with anything supernatural. Turns out I was wrong, we get the seances, but I was still on board. We’re still focused on Charlie, how her death impacted the family, and haunting spirits, which have been established at this point.
But then as we race towards the end, the whole thing just falls apart. Dad getting burned by mom burning the sketchbook makes no sense and is in violation of the prior scene. Peter bashing his head at school makes no sense. Oh, apparently there’s a devil we’re worshipping that no one has ever heard of before? Uh, sure thing bro, wtf? Oh, now mom is dead and a ghost? If she died, where’s her body? Or if that’s her body, then we just get to fly now? Why? Does dad get to be a flying ghost? Oh, here’s a bunch of naked people telling you Peter is now a devil. The end. Oh come on. It’s just a mess that the movie just throws at you rather than having any of it motivated by anything else in the story line. I get that surprises are a good part of horror, but there’s just too much that appears out of nowhere without setup or foreshadowing that it ruins the suspension of disbelief.
I can’t call it a bad movie, because the middle was too good, but it’s about a 5/10 for me.
Barbarian is good about subverting expectations. The trailer did good in not giving away too much.
You summed it up perfectly and I felt pretty much the same way. No matter what genre a movie is: horror, fantasy, sci-fi, etc., there needs to be some logic to the way the world works, and I feel like there is basically none here. On top of that, I don’t think it was scary either. My gf and I watched in a dark room, volume up, etc., but it didn’t really do anything for me. I guess I’m just wired differently. It’s not that I dislike this genre, I really loved Get Out and Nope and feel they’re somewhat similar, but I couldn’t get into Hereditary at all.
Awwww man, really bummed you didn’t pick Barbarian. I want to know what MrsWookie thought
Well… that’s one way to view Hereditary I suppose.
Hereditary
I felt the same and wished it would have at least been ambiguous if this was all in the heads of the mother and the son where mental illness runs in the family. Annie has been losing it for a long time (tried to burn her children) and Peter gets triggered by the trauma of Charlie‘s death. The first seance could be the work of charlatans and the second the work of Annie to convince her husband. She might not even be aware what she is doing („sleepwalking“).
As it played out I agree the ending is a mess.