I’ve seen a ton of 'em, and I thought Nosferatu was great!
Part of me wants to rebut the negativity in this comment and explain why I loved the movie, but I’m also pretty blue at the moment and can’t summon the strength to write much. I’ll just settle for saying that, for probably the first time in my adult life, it made me feel like a vampire was truly dangerous.
That’s easy for me to appreciate that response. Scary or dangerous vampires have been incredibly thin on the ground. Scariness is in the Dracula model. It’s the social vampires / Twilight, or zombie-ish models of vampires, that have made them feel undangerous to me for a long time.
-Wade
I hope his character is named Milch just so we can hear characters saluting him with “Heil Milch!” 
Don’t know if it’s been mentioned before, but I found the Netflix mini-series Dracula (2020) to be very well done and very interesting to watch play out. I don’t know how it rates among vampire aficionados though.
I should add that though I’m not a huge vampire buff, I really enjoyed James Woods in Vampires (1998). Super fun! Super gory!
My exposure to modern Vampire media is mostly limited to manga series like Vampire Knight or Rosario Vampire and the Castlevania series(and even then, Symphony of the Night is the only Castlevania I’ve actuallyplayed to completion or close too), but yeah, Vampires haven’t really scared me since I was a kid… and honestly, even reading Stoker’s novel for the first time did little to scare me(Though to be honest, I also didn’t find Frankenstein or what I’ve read of Lovecraft all that scary either).
Stoker’s novel is… not great, in my opinion. Dry prose. Dull characters. Awkward plot structure. One of the things that I appreciated about this new Nosferatu movie is that it harnessed those elements, funnily enough. The plot remains awkward, most of the characters aren’t what I’d call gripping, but there’s a rightness to this wrongness. A sort of respect for the source material – couched, ironically, in disrespect, since the movie is willing to change whatever it wants. It’s Nosferatu, not Dracula; in other words, it’s already semi-bastardized. But it takes its own bastardization seriously.
Anyway. Yeah. This movie got to me much more than the book.
Based on my own experience, simply choosing the see the film on the basis of a curious whim is the best possible pathway.
I walked in with no expectations, and left in tears. Good tears.
Just watched Late Night with the Devil. Actually scared the heck out of me. Despite the purpposeful '80s style horror (looks like from a b-movie) it’s done really well and is cleverly put together. Not actually sure what happened and what was in his head only at the end of the film, but I loved the eerieness nonetheless and it was pretty cleverly done.
Also, for those who may not like some bits of horror, you may be glad to know that although to me it was creepy and there’s definitely gore (cw: body horror) and a scene where hundreds of worms start falling out of tearing skin, all very b-movie so you can tell it’s a mannequin but still squeamish, one thing it does pretty well is that there are no real jumpscares. All the scary things are designed so you actually have a good idea of what’s gonna happen next, even if it still scared me a lot. Just a note.
I saw that a few months ago and thought it was interesting. It sure had the longest bit of exposition at the start of any movie I can think of.
Oh yeah, the intro was long but personally it worked well. Like it felt … not annoying and worth it, despite the voice which may or nay not have sounded like those over-the-top film trailer voices.
I enjoyed this so much! It’s like someone wrote this movie for me: slight minor spoiler for the first twist of many - robotlovepartymurder.
This is an intense, violent, occasionally gory, hilarious and serious relationship thriller with great characters and dialogue. There are twists and turns, don’t watch any trailers for best first impression.
CW: Attempted SA; consent issues which are thematic and intrinsic to the plot.
I did like Companion a lot (gave it 7/10). I think thematically it ended up weaker than it could have been.
Spoiler discussion:
The money-stealing plot potentially was getting in the way a bit (of the sexbot manipulation and sexuality in general ideas) but its implications properly got in the way at the end when it’s revealed the protagonist had pretty much always been an out and out psycho crim. This diminished questions about ‘Who would do this to their sexbot / a woman, or in which circumstances, or in what manner of compartmentalisation?’ Because we’d expect this behaviour from any psycho, that pretty much threw out those questions.
This is why I couldn’t go to the 8/10 zone. I still think overall a really good thriller with many surprises.
-Wade
A while ago I watched the 1916 silent film Shoes.
A young woman lives in poverty and works for her family, and they take every penny she earns. And her shoes are falling apart badly. She later sleeps with a man (who at first seems to be courting her) for money to get the shoes that she desperately wants and needs.
The film doesn’t condemn her choosing to sleep with the man for money — it portrays it as something she didn’t want to do on a personal level and as representation of her broken dreams. The movie doesn’t really put a moral spin on it beyond that.
It does condemn poverty. In fact, in one scene, there’s literally a giant hand labelled ‘poverty’. This criticism kind of falls flat in context – the problem isn’t precisely poverty. The problem is that her family is frittering away money on things like her unemployed father’s magazine addiction and the younger sisters’ totally unearned allowances. If her family was rich, they could still take all her money for themselves and spend it on costlier luxuries.
Also … this story has to be a deliberate subversion of Cinderella, right? A woman serves her ungrateful family and is courted by a man socially and economically above her.
And the plot resolution hinges on her obtaining shoes that are literally perfect for her (the intertitles make a point of this). Except this time, there’s no one to recognize it … the shoes are just an object even though she needed them more than anyone. A sad ending.
Apparently it’s based on various things, though, so who knows?
I watched Roman Holiday. The movie was fine and certainly fun, but I think the ending was vital to holding it together. Especially since it was released in the 1950s, so I have a feeling it may have been an unusual ending to audiences at the time - I could be wrong though! Either way, it had some clever touches in the ending and I enjoyed the film overall.
Sounds good. I think my favourite Audrey Hepburn film is Charade. That movie wouldn’t be half as good without Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant’s sarcastic bantering, lol.
And thanks to a goof in the opening titles, it’s in the public domain. XD
One of my absolute favourites is The Odd Couple (1968). This one has aged well. Still very watchable by today’s standards.
It’s free here → https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8oa227
