Horror Movie Talk

Saw may have dulled over time, but it is still a good horror movie and was definitely influential during the 2000s. The simple premise of catch-22 torture traps is an effective hook, but sometimes the twisty turny plot is a bit forced.

Synopsis

Saw is mainly about two strangers trapped in a High School boys bathroom with a mysterious dead body. They are both chained to pipes just out of reach of each other and the dead body in the middle of the room.

They find that they are being toyed with by a villain named Jigsaw, who set up a trap to pit them against each other in a race against time.

They are both left with the tool to escape, a saw blade too dull to saw through metal chains/pipes, but just the right sharpness to saw through an ankle. Wacky hijinks ensue.

Review of Saw

Saw has dulled over time, but it’s still a good horror movie. It was the first film of the now well established horror director/writers James Wan and Leigh Whannel. It feels like a short film stretched to fill a feature length film, and Wan and Whannel did make a short before this movie, but it was originally written as a feature length script and the short was an excerpt from it.

It’s undeniable that this movie and it’s sequels have made a mark in the pantheon of horror movies based off of the simple concept of catch-22 torture traps.

The problem that the franchise faces and has from the beginning is the need to stretch out the simple premise with overly complicated labyrinthian plots and character motives.

The original Saw is well constructed and has an engaging plot that unravels nicely, but it’s still at its heart, a cheap exploitational premise.

Score

7/10

Saw

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Se7en is one of the most enthralling and horrific crime thrillers ever made, right up there with Silence of the Lambs. With an all-star cast all delivering incredible performances and some of the most depraved imagery and ideas ever to make it into a big budget box office movie, Se7en is a work of art.

Synopsis

Se7en is the darkest buddy cop story you will ever find. It is directed by David Fincher, and is one of his best movies, which is saying something. 

It’s the story of detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman), a disillusioned PI at the end of his career, and Mills (Brad Pitt), a baby-faced newbie who has something to prove. 

They arrive on the scene of a grizzly and totally strange murder of a man who was tied up and force fed until death. As they find more murder scenes they begin to realize that there is a pattern emerging – the seven deadly sins:

• Lust 
• Gluttony
• Greed
• Sloth
• Wrath
• Envy
• Pride

We are taken through the lives of these detectives and learn how they cope with the total depravity that they see on a daily basis. We are given a look into the incredibly perverted and seamy underbelly of a big city with huge crime problems.

Mills and Somerset end up getting more serial murder than they bargained for.

Review

Se7en stars Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kevin Spacey and all of them give career topping performances.

The storytelling in Se7en is beyond compare and the twist is one that will leave you gasping for air. The idea that a human could do these things to others in the name of God is simultaneously vile and extremely true to life. The story isn’t exactly a detective story, even though it involves detectives. It’s very formulaic, while holding the audience’s interest through the sheer depravity of the murders and backdrops.

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Se7en is, at its core, a character study of a young man who wants to be a real detective and his older counterpart who helps guide him through the most insane settings that any city could offer.

I’m going to quote Roger Ebert who I think explained this movie best:

“What’s being used here is the same sort of approach William Friedkin employed in “The Exorcist” and Jonathan Demme in “The Silence of the Lambs.” What could become a routine cop movie is elevated by the evocation of dread mythology and symbolism. “Seven” is not really a very deep or profound film, but it provides the convincing illusion of one. Almost all mainstream thrillers seek first to provide entertainment; this one intends to fascinate and appall.”

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-seven-1995

Spacey’s performance is one only he and very few other actors I can think of could pull off. He is the embodiment of evil, almost the devil in the flesh.

The end of this movie could have gone a few different ways, and I think the way it went was, by far, the best version that could have possibly been told. It’s shocking, and cruel, and the perfect end to one of the most twisted mainstream movies you will ever see. 

Se7en contains some of the darkest subject matter that I can think of and it has stuck with me since I saw it as a young teen. This is storytelling at it’s finest.

Score

10/10

Final Recommendation

Everyone who can handle some serious imagery should see this. It’s a fabulous and dark story that will leave a mark on you for as long as you live.

This week we review the 2012 horror hot, Sinister. A film with properly disturbing imagery, but improperly matched script. Later on we check our voicemail and answer questions from listeners.

Synopsis

Sinister is the story of author Ellison Oswalt moving to a new town to research for his next true crime novel. His wife, son, and daughter make up the most passive aggressively unsupportive family in the world. Unbeknownst to Ellison’s family, they have moved into the house of that family whose deaths his book will be based on.

Review of Sinister

Sinister is a serviceable, average horror movie. It heavily forecasts it’s twists from the very beginning in a “whatever you do, do not push that button” sort of way.

I can see why people like this movie and keep bringing it up to us. It’s got a distinctive dark tone while still being very approachable for mainstream audiences.

It’s like if The Crow had a baby with The Nun from The Conjuring.

There were a couple effective jump scares and attempts to create believable relationships and stakes, but never has any moment that will keep this movie from melding with countless other horror movies in your head. That being said, Ethan Hawke offers up an excellent performance, and the ending was slightly better than expected.

Score

6/10

Sinister

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We watched Host on Shudder because everyone has been talking about it and found out that you can make a pretty effective movie that impresses everyone as long as theaters are closed and there is a global pandemic. Host doesn’t do anything new, but it doesn’t waste your time and it delivers fairly well compared to many found footage movies.

Synopsis

Six friends decide to cure their Corona-19 blues by hiring a medium to hold a seance over a Zoom conference call.

One of the friends doesn’t take the whole thing seriously and decides to make a joke at the expense of the seance – this angers the spirits who are also probably pretty bored of being on lockdown. 

The friends get more evil spirits than they bargained for

Watch Host

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Review

Host brings literally nothing new to the table at all. Everything I saw during my watching of this movie is stolen whole cloth from another found footage movie of varying title. 

The most obvious borrowing is the  movie’s format from titles like Unfriended, but I caught stuff from the Paranormal Activity series, Blair Witch, and about twenty other very common scares and tropes.

That doesn’t make Host bad, it just makes it pretty common. The thing that I really appreciated from this movie was that it was less than an hour in length. 

Nothing about this movie will stick with me for very long, mostly because I didn’t feel empathy for any of the characters. With these computer screen found footage formats the characters need to be really strong in order for them the break through to the audience and build empathy. Instead what you have with Host is a bunch of Friday the 13th camp counselors who you barely know and don’t care about. 

The scares work to a middling extent and I wasn’t upset with this movie in any way. I will say that I had heard a lot of positive reviews and opinions of this movie before watching it and it just didn’t have enough substance for me to recommend

Score

4/10

Final Recommendation

Bryce seems to love this movie if you listen to the podcast attached to this episode but for me it falls pretty flat. I think those who love the found footage genre will appreciate this, but mostly it’s a bunch of used up tropes and scares.

Event Horizon is the best movie that Paul Anderson ever made and ever will make. It’s one of the most late 90’s movies you will ever see and has very Hellraiser aesthetic. Actually, now that I think of it, this movie is a mashup of Hellraiser and Alien mixed with a gimmicky action movie. It’s beloved by many, which makes it hard for me to do what I’m about to do.

Synopsis

Event Horizon starts with a very strong intro describing the far-flung future of 2015 and beyond! By 2015 we have already set up a colony on the moon. By present-day in the movie (2047), we have launched and lost a spaceship called Event Horizon that was meant to explore the boundaries of the solar system.

The Event Horizon was lost around Neptune in order to avoid jokes about your butthole, and our ill-fated crew has been sent to determine what happened to the missing ship.

Onboard the rescue vessel is Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne) and Dr. William Weir (Sam Neill), who was the creator of the Event Horizon ship. Apart from them, you have a crew of stereotypical, disposable clods.

Everyone is soon told by Dr. Weir that the Event Horizon vessel that he created was not a vessel made to explore the outer regions of the solar system, but a faster-than-light vessel meant to catapult humans around the universe.

Everyone ends up with more existential terror than they bargained for…

Event Horizon Review

This is the first time that I’ve sat down and watched this movie from beginning to end, and I must say, I am not impressed. Granted, this movie is talked about lovingly by only the people who love it, and is almost never talked about at all by anyone who doesn’t like it. It seems to fly under the radar of movie hatred that other, more controversial movies are stuck with.

I’m not saying that Event Horizon is bad – it’s not. It’s just that I heard so much praise for it from so many people that it probably inflated my expectations a bit.

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The main thing that this movie does well is borrow from other films that are quite successful at what they do, like Alien and Hellraiser. The aesthetic and setting of this are like a Warhammer 40k gothic sci-fi meets real-world futuristic scenario. The visuals are graphic and disturbing. The story is of a man gone mad by the invention he created, almost like Frankenstein.

Everything else is not for me. The action is very run-of-the-mill fast cut bologna. The disturbing imagery, while disturbing, does absolutely nothing to amp up the tension or frighten. The concept is cool enough, but without great execution, it just falls flat.

I want to like Event Horizon; it just doesn’t do a damn thing for me except remind me of a bunch of actually good things that were probably going through Paul Anderson’s dull head while he was creating this.

Score

4/10

Paul Anderson’s Horrible Career

Even though he married Mila Jovovich, I think Paul should be a little embarrassed about the life he leads. It’s based on the shoddiest of work on the most braindead of all projects. Event Horizon is his best work.

Here are his biggest ventures to date.

Directing:

• Mortal Kombat
• Soldier
• Resident Evil
• Alien vs. Predator
• Drift
• Death Race
• Resident Evil: Afterlife
• Resident Evil: Retribution
• Resident Evil: The Final Chapter

Writing:

• Resident Evil
• Alien vs Predator
• Resident Evil: Apocalypse
• Resident Evil: Extinction
• Death Race
• Resident Evil: Afterlife
• Death Race 2
• Resident Evil: Retribution
• Death Race: Inferno
• Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
• Death Race 4: Beyond Anarchy

Kids – follow your dreams. This is America; if Paul Anderson can be a multimillionaire married to Mila Jovovich for writing and directing all these gigantic steaming piles of zombie shit and Hotwheels wet dreams, you can make it doing anything!

Final Recommendation

If you remember this movie fondly, by all means, love it. I just can’t recommend seeing this to anyone who doesn’t get off on sci-fi and horror combos. It’s not great at what it does.

Patrons voted last month, and now we’re reviewing Ghost Ship, and it’s… from the early 2000’s. If you are in the mood for some modern schlock, then maybe it’s worth the $3 to watch the whole movie. But really, this movie’s opening scene sets expectations way too high for itself.

Synopsis

Ghost Ship is about a Ghost Ship filled with Ship Ghosts that’s discovered by a salvage crew that eventually become Ship Ghosts on the Ghost Ship.

The salvage crew aboard the tugboat HMS Whogivesafuck, are given a lead on an abandoned ship in the Bering Strait. The information is brought to them by Jack Ferriman, a Canadian Air Force pilot who insists on coming along with them on their salvage operation because he looks too handsome to be in just one scene.

The crew sails out to the ship and discovers it’s a missing 1960’s Italian ocean liner called the Antonia Graza, which suffered a tragic boating accident that bifurcated most of it’s passengers. 

As they lazily wander around the corridors talking about working, they find out that this SHIP has more GHOST than they bargained for.

Review of Ghost Ship (2002)

Ghost Ship is described by Roger Ebert as “It’s better than you expect but not as good as you hope.” Which is pretty accurate, but still pretty generous considering expectations going in are scraping the bottom of the barrel.

The movie starts out with one of the best schlocky gory sequences in all of horror. Really, If you watched the opening scene and just walked away, you wouldn’t be missing much.

The rest of the film is a pretty standard slow burn haunted house story set on a boat. The problem with that set up is that it requires the supposed professional salvage workers to do exactly zero work for an hour and 4 minutes of the 91 minute runtime. There is a little bit of mystery unraveling going on during that first hour, but most of the action happens in the last 20 minutes.

It’s not a good movie, but it has a good cast, and it is salvaged by the bookends of it’s ridiculous beginning and ending.

If you would like to watch something better from the same time, check out Dead End, which could easily have been called ghost car.

Score

3/10

Ghost Ship

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This week we follow up David’s favorite “horror” movie of all time, with my favorite horror movie of all time: The Exorcist. Every time I revisit it, I’m reminded that it truly is a masterpiece.

Synopsis

The Exorcist, if you don’t know, is about an exorcism of a little girl. Regan, played by Linda Blair, is the 12 year old daughter of single mother Chris MacNiel played by Ellen Burstyn. Regan starts complaining about her bed shaking at night, and then as days pass, her personality slowly changes and she starts behaving erratically.

Chris exhausts every medical and psychological avenue, and is still left hopeless as her daughter continues to get worse. Some doctors reluctantly mention Exorcism as an option.

Father Karras, played by Jason Miller, is a reluctant skeptic, but is recruited to perform an exorcism. With the help of an older more experienced exorcist, Father Merrin, played by Max von Sydow, they struggle to expel the demon or demons that are tormenting Regan.

Review of The Exorcist

The Exorcist is the center tentpole of the horror genre for me, and probably for a lot of people. It’s often at the top of best horror movies of all time lists, and for good reason. Some of the themes and scenes from this movie are still genuinely disturbing nearly 50 years after it’s release. It deals with a lot of conscience and subconscious fears about life, reality, and little girls.

A lot of the notoriety about the film comes from it’s marketing and stories of people fainting or leaving the theater. However, it doesn’t owe it’s longevity to these gimmicks, it is still held as one of the best critical and commercial successes in horror.

The special effects might not hold up to modern audiences, but everything else is timeless. The acting is great, the themes are handled maturely, and the director had an unhealthy conviction to get his vision of the story. All of these work together to create a film that has spun off a whole subgenre of exorcism and demonic children.

Score

10/10

The Exorcist

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Final Recommendation

If you are a horror fan, and want to see the original “elevated” horror movie The Exorcist is a must see.

Alien is an incredible movie that did amazing things for horror, sci-fi, and cinema as a whole. It imagined an incredible amount of very real-seeming possibilities for space travel and contact with other life forms that impresses me to this day despite being 41 years old.

Synopsis

Alien is the story of a deep-space commercial towing vehicle, named Nostromo, and it’s crew who are bringing a tremendous amount of ore back to earth. 

There are seven crewmembers and they seem to be mostly blue collar folk, with the exception of the Chief Science Officer, Ash.

They are awoken from stasis following receiving a transmission from a nearby planet and are bound by their contract with “the company” to check it out. 

They discover some eggs near a spaceship crash-site and end up with more alien than they bargained for!

Watch Alien Now

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Review

Alien is one of the most impressive pieces of cinema in history. It set the bar so high for horror and sci-fi that I think it’s still the apex of both. 

Every single aspect of this movie is carefully thought-out and crafted to the highest of standards.

The setting is bleak and cold, very much unlike how space is typically portrayed today, with Guardians galavanting around galaxies and such. It’s completely unforgiving and inhospitable in almost every single way. 

With Dan O’Bannon writing the story and screenplay and Ridley Scott at the helm as the director, this is one of the most accurate and impressive imaginings of the far-flung future as I can find, with much of the tech they dreamed about being in use today. 

The xenomorph is, without a doubt, the coolest and most insane diabolic biological lifeform ever dreamed up. While everyone is very familiar with the xenomorphs at this point, you don’t get to see it almost at all in this movie, even though it seems like you do.

This may be my favorite movie of all time, and is definitely the best horror movie in my book. 

Score

10/10

Final Recommendation

If you don’t have a massive boner during your viewing of Alien, I don’t want to know you. This is a classic that trumps most classics, and should be seen by everyone within the sound of my voice and beyond.

This is a different kind of episode. You can’t see this movie yet, well at least not with some difficulty. This is a feature that I saw at the Portland Horror Film Festival, and it was by far my favorite. This will be available for streaming probably at the end of the year. It’s making the festival run right now, so if you can catch it at one, definitely do.

Synopsis

The Brain That Wouldn’t Die tells the story of mad scientist/surgeon Bill Cortner as he tries to defy the laws of nature and resurrect the dead. In a tragic car accident, Bill’s wife Jan is decapitated and he rushes to save her head with science!

While Jan’s disembodied head begs to die, Bill and his lab assistant Kurt search far and wide for the perfect replacement body for his wife. Preferably one with big’ole titties.

Review of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (2020)

The Brain that Wouldn’t Die is a loving remake to the 1962 film of the same name. You might recognise it from Mystery Science Theater 3000, when they lambasted the original reanimated head-on-a-table film. 

This film is surprisingly faithful to the original with a lot of the original dialogue, but with a distinctly more humorous tone. It’s in the realm of B-Movie homage comedy/horror films like Re-Animator and Young Frankenstein. That may sound like hyperbole, but this film is very similar to those two, and really funny.

Most impressive is how well they pulled off this film with an estimated $80,000 budget. To give you a sense of how little that is, the original that was actually filmed in 1959 had a budget of an estimated $62,000, which would be over half of a million in 2020 dollars.

The lead played by Patrick Green is pitch perfect, and the acting from the rest of the cast really sells the serious, but not serious tone of the movie.

If you would like a more modern take on brains and how they work, check out our review of Possessor Uncut.

Score

8/10

MST3K The Brain That Wouldn’t Die

Since you can’t watch this version, let the MST3k episode tide you over.

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Final Recommendation

Definitely go see it if you can. If you are a fan of Mel Brooks style humor, this is well worth your time to seek out.

Look for it at film festivals near you, and on streaming services later this year.

Spoilers

Mentioned in The Episode

The Lodge is a movie that is heavy in tone and aesthetic, that went to great lengths to disguise the danger and keep the audience guessing as to what or who may be behind the nefarious details of the story.

Synopsis

The Lodge is a story of two families, both with a tragic past that meet to determine who has it worse.

We have the Hall family, who are a fractured family of four, father Richard (Richard Armitage), mother Laura (Alicia Silverstone), older son Aiden (Jaeden Martell), and younger daughter Mia (Lia McHugh). Laura and Richard have clearly been taking a long break from their marriage and this has treated Laura much worse than it has Richard.

We also have Grace (Riley Keough), who is the only surviving member of a now dead, death cult which just so happened to be led by her father. 

Needless to say, both of these families have their fair share of problems. 

As the story unravels, the audience is left guessing as to what and where the danger may be coming from, but the tension is undeniable.

Watch The Lodge

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Review

The Lodge is a very interesting movie for a lot of different reasons. The directors, Severin Fiala, and Veronika Franz made a lot of wonderful choices that put this squarely in my “favorite movies of 2019” box.

The framing and location choices were bleak, cold, and clinical. This is an easy movie to compare to Hereditary based on many of the filming and set styles used. Lots of the shots are on the pretentious side of artistic and that’s just fine by me.

The mood was mostly sad, and strangely dangerous, with the story constantly dangling danger at the periphery of the audiences vision but never quite letting it come fully into the light. 

Just when you think you have a good handle on what is going on, the rug is pulled out from under you, which happens several times in The Lodge.

There is lots of allusions to danger, and coincidences in this slow burn thriller to keep any hardcore thriller fan happy. 

While I had quite a good time with the movie I must say, the content is deadly serious and fairly heavy, which left me with a gross taste in my mouth at the end, but that’s part of the allure.

Here at Horror Movie Talk, we are family people, and have made it very clear that one of the horror elements that work best for us in movies is the breakdown of the family structure, and The Lodge has that in spades.

Score

9/10

The Lodge Spoilers

Click here to expand spoiler for The Lodge

Re-imagining of “The Turn of the Screw”

I didn’t know this going in, but after the 2/3 point I started to realize that I was familiar with this story. The Lodge is a re-imagining of “The Turn of the Screw“.

It’s much better than another “Turn of the Screw” based movie, The Turning, which was released at almost the same time as this movie.

While the characters all have vastly different pretenses for their being in the situation, the story is still very much the same. This story gives a much more contemporary and compelling reason for the caretaker character, who is Grace, and an alarming background to her and the children she is in charge of.

So let’s take a brief look at how The Lodge unfolds and compare that to it’s original counterpart.

The Kid’s Backstory

The movie starts with Laura Hall, the mom, dropping her kids off at their dads house. Richard asks Laura if they can finalize their divorce noting that it’s gone on long enough and heis going to marry Grace in several month. Laura storms out and, in a very shocking scene, commits suicide.

The movie jump-cuts to a “6 months later” screen and we get a sense of how distraught Aiden and Mia really are. They argue with their dad that they don’t want to go to their vacation lodge with Grace because she is crazy.

They are often shown playing with dolls in a playhouse built to look just like the vacation lodge that their family owns. With this playhouse they seem to act out scenes that come true, indicating they are somehow manipulating those around them.

Grace’s Backstory

Grace has an even darker past than the Hall kids. She is the only remaining member of a, now dead, death cult that was led by her father. There is footage shown early in the movie that is shot by a young Grace, finding all of her family and friends dead in this gruesome mass suicide.

How it Comes Together

As Grace and the remaining Hall family settle in to the lodge for Christmas, Richard gets called by work for something urgent, and leaves his fiance Grace in charge of the kids.

At this point we are ever so slowly dipped into hell as a series of inexplicable events turn this lodge into a purgatory of sorts. Everyone’s belongings go missing, the power goes out, even the characters who should die, don’t. The whole while the audience is left guessing at whether it’s the kids, Grace, or something more sinister at work.

Who Did It?

It’s finally revealed that the kids have been messing with Grace the whole time, but while they did, they took away her medication.

Remember, Grace has a seriously fucked up past, so she has some serious demons that she has had to conquer to make it to a seemingly normal life.

Grace is pushed over the edge and retaliates in the most extreme of ways.

Final Recommendations

The Lodge is one of the slowest burns I have seen since Gretel and Hansel, but I enjoyed this even more than that. If thrillers and extremely dark subject matter are your thing, this is a fabulous movie.

If you are squeamish when it comes to emotions or the family unit being torn apart, steer clear.