Not watched these, but The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is hilarious.
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My favourite movie of all time is RoboCop (1987). It’s a campy action/sci-fi movie on the surface, but it handles its theme with such care and attention. It’s shocking, violent, gross, serious and over the top. I remember being completely freaked out by the ED-209 robot when I first saw it and the RoboCop costume is still unequaled to this day. It looks so bad-ass and how Peter Weller decided to move with the suit made the performance even better. There’s something so cool with how he turns his head and then twists his torso around when walking. And the social commentary is still great to this day.
Your move, creep. 
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Ah ha! Goonies! (This sounds like trying to pick a movie with me around - this film, that film, Goonies, there film. Goonies! Forever!)
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I saw The Black Phone which was good and full-on Stephen King vibes (based on a story by King’s son Joe Hill) which really takes advantage of it’s 1978 time period. Adapted by the same guy who wrote Sinister although it’s not nearly as scary as that movie. This is more an escape thriller that dips a foot into the supernatural as one character has psychic abilities helping the police locate a kidnapper/killer of teenage boys. There are a couple of moderate jump scares but it concentrates more on mood and vibe.
If you loved IT or Stand by Me or Stranger Things - the vibe of traumatized Gen X kids playing outside and behaving in non-sanitized fashion, you’ll like this.
My one issue...
Ethan Hawke plays against type as “The Grabber”: the villain who is a kids’ birthday magician with a terrifying black van. Apparently in the book he’s actually an obese clown styled along the lines of John Wayne Gacy and not DILF Ethan Hawke, but they changed it for the movie to avoid comparisons with Pennywise from IT. His performance is good, but I had the most absolutely inappropriate reaction to a scene where he’s sitting in the kitchen shirtless wearing a minotaur mask. This scene is absolutely nauseating in context, but since it’s Ethan Hawke, my first reaction was “Woof…” 
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Thanks for mentioning Sinister. I’ve heard about it here and there, but never made an effort to watch it. Sinister sounds like it could be at the level of Hereditary. That film is embedded in my mind forever.
A fantastic TV show is The Haunting of Hill House. It was unsettling, scary, horrific and all while being very high quality. If you love high calibre, serious horror films, this show has you covered. There’s this one scene where a kid is being lowered into the basement in a dumbwaiter and… it still freaks me out!
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It doesn’t do this to everyone, but Sinister freaked me out like little else. Not on the same level as Hereditary - which is a slow burn you can’t stop thinking about afterward. With Sinister I was like “So glad that’s over!”
Sinister felt like a horror movie full of effective jump scares, where Hereditary felt like a raw drama that doesn’t release the tension until it finally plunges into supernatural horror.
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I thought Hereditary was at its most horrifying before the end stuff-- the complete aloneness of the characters was horrifying. No cops, no teachers, no shrinks, no neighbors, no help at all for anyone. Horror is at its best for me when it tackles issues like that-- of being a kid without allies, alone and grappling with terrible things. In that way, Hereditary was as successful for me as Let the Right One In, which was also about the fearsome loneliness of childhood. Likewise, one of the most successful horror moves of all time for me was The Babadook, not because of the actual horror stuff, but because of the real life horror of being a single parent to an impossibly difficult child.
I liked Sinister, and The Black Phone, but neither of them rose to the level of horror that I truly dig.
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Oh my god, yeah. Basically Act 2 after that poor kid is given more trauma than he should ever have to deal with, the argument at the table, her blithely being like "yeah, I just don’t understand why he won’t forgive me when I sleepwalk and unconsciously prepare to set him on fire." It’s emotional Grand Guignol.
Sinister is more of a regular horror movie, but tone wise - the sound design and the main character being compelled to basically watch snuff films thinking he’s doing a good thing. I still can’t watch the “Lawn Care” segment in its entirety even though I know what’s going to happen, and “Pool Party” tweaks specific drowning fears I have. Plus the scene where he’s looking at the picture at arm’s length and lowers it and it’s still there… It falls apart a bit at the end because it starts showing too much but it had me good.
My absolute kryptonite that will make me shut off a movie or flee the room is the thing - I guess it’s like a reverse jumpscare - the terrible thing doesn’t jump out, but it’s in the back of the shot wiggling in the dark like a WHEN YOU SEE IT! photo and it’s uncanny like OMG wtf am I EVEN LOOKING AT? Hereditary did this well. Smile - I didn’t even watch this movie, but was side-eyeing a reaction video but had to turn it off because it was so much that.
A classic example of not overdoing that - the end of ALIEN when the alien’s head-shell is in the shot, like it’s sleeping in the machinery before she or the audience has noticed it - the more you look at it you realize…then it moves.
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Oh, yes, yes. I Seeing other people’s reactions is what really gets me. Like that scene in The Silence of the Lambs when the warden shows Clarice the photo of what Lecter did to a nurse. You don’t see the photo at all, just her reaction. If you ever read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, it was a masterful way of not showing horror (“Oh God-- whose hand was I holding?”) The TV series, while truly great in some ways, never reached that level. I think this may also be why I love IF so much-- what my mind can do is so much better/worse than anything a graphic can do.
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One of the things about The Silence of the Lambs that I appreciate and laud it for is how it manages to not step over the “camp” line. There are so many things in that movie that would have been ridiculous in lesser hands, but especially the autopsy scene.
They talk about the body and you only see their professional reactions at first. They talk about her respectfully and about what they’re seeing as they work outside-frame for a while before the audience is shown anything. You then get small details and the cinematography and editing brings you into the scene with the proper gravitas, so by the time you get a wide shot it’s not the expected exploitive jump cut to “ew fat naked dead girl!” that would illicit tension-breaking inappropriate laughter.
(with no judgement intended: the victim being overweight is a plot point)
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Just watched Evil Dead Rise. I’m a huge Evil Dead fan, so I have mixed feelings about it. While it was a perfectly serviceable horror movie in many ways, it lacked that goofy joie de la mort that Bruce brought to the original movies (and the TV show). It had so many homage scenes to other horror movies that, although it vibes me to recognize them, it didn’t seem as if it was paying much homage to the movie franchise it’s part of. Also, there were legit family dynamics and lifelike characters in it, which is so not Evil Deadish. Anyway, wondering if anyone else has an opinion on it.
TMI story about my relationship with The Evil Dead:
When I was 17 and a senior in boarding high school (in 1988) I went home with a VERY rich friend to her gigantic mansion in the woods for Thanksgiving. Her parents were overseas, so we just had a long party weekend in this big house. We took mushrooms, and when her boyfriend came over and they disappeared, I went to the cavernous TV room with huge windows showing the dark woods all around, and popped a tape into the VCR to watch a movie I’d heard of but never seen: The Evil Dead. And so, while tripping balls in this location, I watched it alone and it terrified me. It was only many years later when I saw it sober that I realized-- Hey, this is a comedy!
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Groovy.
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Just watched the absolutely delightful horror movie Anything for Jackson. I just loved it. Do yourself a favor and don’t read anything about it beforehand. 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, quite deservedly.
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Yeah, I saw it at the cinema a couple of months ago. It just didn’t energise me. Shortly after I saw Robert Rodriguez’s thriller Hypnotic, which has many bad reviews with many good points, but did energise me a lot compared to Evil Dead Rise.
On the topic of Evil Dead though, I saw a really good film on Shudder the other day called Deadstream with a few Evil Dead vibes. People have described it as a found footage / Youtube / Evil Dead combo.
It’s about a famous Youtuber who, having been banned from Youtube (which is called LivVid in the film) stages a livestream comeback from a haunted house. I’ve seen a ton of films where they’ve had to recreate comment streams on livestreams, and this one did it better than any I’ve seen so far. The monsters that there are have the gonzo hysterics of the Evil Dead demons, and there’s a bit of gore. And almost zero swearing (perhaps because it was made in Utah?..) Anyway, it was a good surprise. But you have to like found footage style. Every shot comes from the cameras strapped to the guy, or that he sets up.
-Wade
PS There was a cute comment about it in Shudder’s review section that said ‘How can you strap a Go Pro to a ghost?’
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Weeeell, they became unabashedly comedic from Evil Dead 2 onwards. The first one has comedic elements but I think they were a minor percentage of the intent.
I think people retro-see the original film as more comedic now because they can’t help it. The mind’s fogged by a prism of cult comedic sequels and spinoffs starring Bruce Campbell over decades, plus he’s become a cult of his own.
The context of the original film, too, is that it kind of snuck into people’s homes at the very beginning of the arrival of VHS. It was like a guerilla terrorist. People weren’t used to being able to see anything this intense at home on their TV, but VHS brought this (the posterboy for Video Nasties in the UK) and a zillion other films trying to exploit this new window for shock directly to them. People were definitely not used to it.
-Wade
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This feel’s like the title of an IFComp entry.
Or at least part of it.
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I thought it was “a good one of those” that tried something different: they followed the franchise tropes and setups experimentally taking it out of the cabin in the woods setting where it’s been locked since inception. I feel like they wanted to leave a lot of reference breadcrumbs for series fans while also conveying both the gory body horror and dark humor for completely new audiences not experienced with Evil Dead. I thought the mom/lead Deadite gave an amazing performance and understood the tone.
I have not seen the series and I’m not someone who feels Bruce Campbell must be involved. I thought the reboot with the addiction plot line was a good way to make a relatively serious version and Rise was a return to the dark comedy that first reboot minimized. But I also appreciate the Evil Dead musical which does the same thing recreating the films as a satirical Grand Guignol puppet show.
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Totally agree. That’s an actress to watch, I think. She’s going places.
This is where it kinda fell down for me. Because the family was so relatable, the humor didn’t really land for me. Putting little children in grave peril is a horror movie staple, and I’m fine with it, but it makes the dark humor a little awkward. I think the filmmakers knew this and that’s why it was toned down. In previous incarnations, I never really got the sense that any of the characters were real people that I should worry about-- they were just grist for the mill.
But I did think all the performances were great, and the locale, etc. Hence my mixed feelings.
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Kung Fury (2015)
“Before I could pull the trigger, I was hit by lightning… and bitten by a cobra.”
This movie sums up 80s action movies perfectly. David Hasselhoff does a great job with the signature song. It’s full of graphic violence, but comical in it’s delivery. Synthesized music, laser beams, martial arts, mullets, ghettoblasters, robots and dinosaurs. Highly recommended and it’s free to watch.
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The other side of Oppenheimer:
An old anime. I read the manga, too.
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