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HumongousChungus
Rest in peace to those people I love, respect, and/or admire: Alexander Shulgin, Albert Hoffman, Walter Becker, and my Dad.
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Man Vs. (2015)
"Good until the CGI" part deux
I don't know how to be fair to this movie. How much does a bad ending affect the whole movie, when everything else was on track? A lot.
In what was shaping up to be a funny, tense, paranoid horror-thriller, a Survivorman style show is sabotaged by an unseen stalker whose motives and intentions remain mysterious. (For the uninitiated, Les Stroud's Survivorman saw him go out into the wilderness alone to survive for five days, handling all his cameras and such himself. In those respects, the show inside this movie was much closer to that than Man vs. Wild.) He's stranded in the middle of the Canadian Shield with no working communication and a potential psychopath watching him while he sleeps. Spooky!
The main character basically carries the whole movie. He's very personable, funny, and he looks the part; it also really feels like he's actually shooting a survival show -- the movie was very well done in that aspect. I was really into this thing! I was so tense I was like a piano wire.
But then it completely dissipated when the CGI showed up. Literally laughed away my tension. I have never had a movie come to such a compete stop on me before. I wish I never saw the third act. I don't want to be too harsh, because my expectations were exceeded for most of it, but the great acting and script and camerawork make the downfall even more devastating.
This review has also come to an abrupt ending, so I'll just sum up: if you usually watch and are expecting SciFy channel fare, you will be pleasantly surprised with the quality of this; if you're going into this expecting a "real movie" (sorry SciFy), you'll like 2/3 of it. I'm not ready to say skip it.
V/H/S/2 (2013)
Intense, Fun, Horrific
I had low expectations going into this and the movie hurdled over them by a leap and a bound. I won't explain the plot(s), because I think it'd be better to go in blind, and I can't think of a way to do it well, more importantly. In any case: this was a fun ride. I definitely wasn't expecting it to be funny, but it was; but never in a way that broke the flow of the horror -- I feel like some horror movies take breaks to crack jokes.
And there was a lot to be scared of here. The violence was shocking and stunning (and disgusting); the plots were very clever; the acting was a lot better than most horror fare; and the camera work was clever and convincing. The shorts had a feel that many found footage movies don't have; I never questioned why something was being filmed and people mostly acted realistically.
I liked some of the entries in the anthology better than others, which is to be expected, but none of them were complete misfires. I heartily recommend this one. The movie made me feel bad in the pit of my stomach, which is the highest praise I think I can give.
Population 436 (2006)
Just Okay
Everything in the movie ranges from slightly below average to just competent during its run time. The acting is mostly FINE, the shots are mostly FINE -- albeit many times quite conspicuous and distracting --, the script is mosty... well, that's the weakest part, anyway. There are no surprises to be found anywhere here. You can probably extrapolate the exact events of the plot from the first 20 minutes. It's not very good and it's too boring to be funny.
Terrifier (2016)
Mostly Successful
This was a low budget (but pretty good looking) throwback to 80's horror. (If there was any doubt, look for 3 special dedications in the credits.) More so than myself, horror fans seem to forgive a lot of things in these movies and really just care about whether or not the damned thing is actually scary -- and I have to say that, despite all its flaws, it made me uneasy when I went to bed after the viewing.
You can't start reviewing this without talking about the clown. He's exceptionally uncomfortable and disconcerting. The costume design is killer, and mostly I thought the actor was doing a fine job. At times I thought his performance was lacking something, but I can't really put my finger on what it was -- sometimes it didn't feel clown-y enough to me, but I didn't hear that complaint from my movie partner. Maybe I'm being too harsh!
Speaking of the acting, it was mostly on point, although there are two actors who can't really hold it together. The first is the Cat Lady who just didn't convince me and was kind of superfluous anyway; the second is the older sister upon whose shoulders rests the latter act(s). She was a convincing older sister: a cool, self-assured attitude and guardianship. But she was not great at playing a young woman who was scared for her life. Clearly she's not a bad actor but this didn't really play to her strengths.
Final thoughts: The movie runs a little long and could have benefited from more discipline in writing and editing. The gore effects ranged from really fun to stomach churning. It didn't really play with the formula of the genre at all.
Bigfoot the Movie (2015)
Fun if you're from Pennsylvania, maybe
Looking for terrible horror movies on Amazon late one night, I was surprised to find this suitable looking candidate mention Ellwood City, PA in its description -- only a few hours away from me. (There is another Pennsylvania bigfoot movie, Suburban Sasquatch, that has begun to gather some an audience and some acclaim -- or rather, notoriety.) Encourage by this fateful serendipity, the night's film was chosen. It wasn't very good.
In an interview with a local paper, the director said he tried to capture the character of Western PA. By my account he succeeded; the people, the undulated streets, the woods, well, it all feels like home. But other than that there isn't a whole lot going for this movie. Although this is a "horror-comedy" by some classifications, there is zero focus on the horror element. There are some horror tropes, and people get murdered, but there's no attempt to make it scary. Which is fine. But what is not fine is that basically any scene that's not meant to be comedy per se is terrible. The bigfoot attacks and dramatic scenes are devoid of tension. That's the kind of thing that's not easily forgiven for lack of budget or being a B-movie spoof.
What you get in this movie is mostly people standing around cracking jokes that sometimes hit and mostly miss. The actors are passable; I don't recall anyone being particularly incompetent. Oh, and the creature is surprisingly good looking, not at all what I was expecting. Come to think of it, there was a gore scene that also had
a disgusting effect. Maybe that's where most of the budget went?
Anyway -- this isn't offensively bad. I can see people with a less uptight sense of humor enjoying this, probably with drinks and friends. Personally it's not for me.
Fishy Stones (1990)
Piece of History
First, some history: FISHY STONES and other Zulu B-Movies were created during apartheid in South Africa. The B-Scheme was a subsidy system set up by white South Africans to create movies with black crews and black audiences. In this particular case, the director, Tonie van der Merwe, never actually opposed apartheid (and was upset by it's eventual outcome). He was simply tapping into an unexploited market: "You didn't have to be a rocket scientist to know that was the market of the future." But it was a rare thing for these audiences to see movies that portrayed black South Africans as heroes, or even as normal people and not something other.
The movie itself is not very good. It's a fairly lighthearted affair, a comic "thriller" with two bumbling criminals. Camera work is uninspired and although the locations are beautiful, they aren't used much. The writing is hamfisted; every character says out loud what he is thinking, and then he repeats it. Certain scenes seem entirely ad-libbed, and one scene in particular sees one of the criminals apparently stalling for time to remember what he's supposed to do (the finger snapping part, if you've seen it -- of course, I can't be certain that's really what was going on). It's wonderfully goofy -- so is the music: jazz-rock/disco muzak completely unrelated to what's happening on screen throughout all of the film. The low budget that the film was made with pervades it; see the interior of the criminals' car early on -- reminiscent of the plane's cockpit from Ed Wood's PLAN 9.
Expect something asinine if you watch it. Go into it with the same mindset that you'd watch a cheesy 80's action flick with. It's not good but it's not boring.
See: ONISHI, NORIMITSU. "Honoring a Filmmaker in the Shadow of Apartheid". New York Times.
Blair Witch (2016)
Recommended, but with reservations.
Disclaimer: 1) I'm not a huge fan of the original. I liked it, but I only saw it once and never really thought about it. 2) I missed the first 5 minutes of this movie. I won't comment on how Heather could still be alive after so many years or anything like that since I don't think it would be strictly fair. So without further ado here's the review! The film follows a group of friends (+2 the people guiding them) as they descend into the dark woods allegedly haunted by the terrible Blair Witch. Things go awry when the group is affected by strange goings-on at the campsite. Are their minds playing tricks? Perhaps the alleged witch is more than alleged! Will the gang make it out alive? (Will anyone care?)
As you might expect, the cast are horror movie stock characters, never developed in any real way. Characters who only serve as monster fodder is a poor show of genre conventions, but it's to be expected. You'll never really feel yourself caring about them.
It seemed like the editor cared about the movie as much as I did. Found footage is a love it-or-hate it kind of style, but there are better and worse ways of doing it. The movie is shot from the perspective of the characters head mounted cameras and handhelds. There are random shots of the floor and car doors and moving scenery that I would not have missed. They could have left a lot of this movie on the out and it would have been better for it. (Edit: There are also so many angles and so much cutting that you start to wonder why it's not just filmed as a conventional movie... perhaps just because it's a Blair Witch movie?) It also just didn't feel genuine to me -- it never felt like they were filming with head mounted cameras. It was something to do with the way things were framed and the movements. This could be entirely subjective; maybe you'll be completely sucked in and immersed. (Quick Edit: I'll be embarrassed if I find out that it really was filmed on head-mounted cameras, but I'd keep this criticism either way.)
The sound design was another big immersion breaker for me. If you're doing a found footage movie, don't add any non-diegetic sounds! It's cheap. And speaking of cheap...
BOO! This movie is chock full of jump-scares. Horror movies are truly effective when there is a slowly built atmosphere of dread and confusion, until the air is practically thick. ("Something bad is going to happen, but not quite yet...") The filmmakers never let any tension build because they feel as if there has to be jump-scare every 5 minutes. It's lame. There is a difference between being startled and being scared, and I found myself becoming more frustrated than anything else. The scares are so telegraphed I started calling them 10 seconds before anything happened, and so will any other person who's ever seen a horror movie.
I thought that the movie was really strong for the last quarter. It became gross and claustrophobic and, for me, actually scary. (But I scare easily.) I had a blast at the end even though Blair Witch purists have their (fair) gripes.
I think I would recommend this to people who know what to expect already. It's conventional horror. You know what's coming but you can enjoy the ride anyway. I also think people who watch movies casually would enjoy this (i.e. people who aren't going to be critical of the filmmaking -- "These are very clearly actors pretending to be interviewed"; "That is a really clunky interface for controlling a drone"; "That camera angle doesn't look right considering where the camera is supposed to be"). It wasn't bad. I had fun. But it could have been better.
Your Choice! (2000)
Surrealism for Kids
My score is largely personal (like all review scores to some extent, I guess) because the short reminds me of the things I saw on Japanese television. Nostalgia might be artificially inflating my grading.
This is a surreal short apparently made, in part, by children. A strange, infectious song plays throughout the main character's quest: go to either the barber or the dentist. The film is largely plot less. The characters are bizarre but benign, cutesy animals and personified half moons and a barbershop trio(although they might be butchers).
Watch it if you have a few minutes. Have you ever accidentally tuned to PBS or a kids TV station and been engrossed by the colors and sounds and general nonsense? You'll enjoy this if you have.