Trick 'r Treat is ending up on a few year end best of lists for '09 and I figured I'd check it out. This one's totally worth it as far as fun cheesy horror flicks go. Following a sort of Creepshow format but with 5 inter connected stories all happening on Halloween night this is a fun gory fright fest where the laughs are mostly tongue in cheek and the scares not very scary. There's a girl who hates Halloween, a group of 5 kids who go to the lake to pay respect to the spirits of 8 children who drowned there years ago, there's Ana Paquin who's looking for some action on Halloween night, the local school principal who's burying some bodies in his backyard and a grouchy old man who gets into a fist fight with the spirit of Halloween. All in all, great fun movie.

Also saw Sherlock Holmes which was decent timepass but like Loki said could have just been a buddy cop movie with no real need for the Sherlock Holmes name. Also, Downey Jr. comes across as a bit of a clown at times. Predictable and only worth the one watch but decent fun for what it is.

Madeo aka Mother by Bong Joon Ho. The first half of this movie, the quest of a mother to clear her retarded son of a murder rap, is like a very watered down humorless version of Memories of Murder. The story picks up in the second half and it is all things considered a pretty well-orchestrated movie. But I can't swallow the amount of hype this one got in the reviews.

Saw this 1988 dutch-french movie called Spoorloos. A man's wife goes missing during a euro trip and he spends the next few years searching obsessively for her. The movie does not hide the main suspect, but builds on the premise as to why the person did it and if it all the wife is still alive or dead. A very well made creepy thriller.

Saw Fantastic Mr. Fox last night and this is awesome. Mr. Fox played by Clooney is a reformed bird thief who's given up his criminal ways to work for a newspaper. Till, that is he plans one last great hurrah and decides on a triple header taking on three of the meanest most dangerous farmers ever. Great voice cast, great story and all round awesome fun.

Also saw half of House of the Devil and it was very engaging in spite of nothing happening and the whole look is very 80s. Hopefully, this'll have a kickass last 30 minutes.

Saw Brat by depressing Russian director Alexander Balbanov. Compared to some of his other films, this one is downright jaunty but its still depressing by normal standards. An ex-army guy decides to join his (significantly elder) brother in the city only to find his bro is a hitman of sorts for the underworld. There's several layers of intrigue and backstabbing at the end of which the hero walks away having not got the girl and desperately trying to offload the loot he scored. Pretty good though not really a keeper.

Also saw Haunting in Connecticut a LULZ inducing film about a family in an Amityvillesque house. They later find it was used for seances and the archmage psychic whatsisname forgot to clear out a whole bunch of corpses before dying. This film has just about everything that's wrong with contemporary horror - idiotic overloud sound effects and CGI that bleeds the film dry of anything close to genuine scares or suspense. For my money, the absolute best film of this sort is the second Amityville film (which is actually a prequel) with its mixture of a brutally dysfunctional family along with the more standard order demonic elements. I remember the scene where Ronald DeFeo seduces his sister being probably one of the most creepy sequences ever with boobs in it. Track that one down and avoid this piece of crap like the plague.

Commando- Wrong Time,Wrong Place

I just finished watching Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977). Definitely a worthwhile watch. Let me start with the bad. The acting and dubbing is shitty throughout, but this is no biggy. The visuals seemed to have been cooked up by some kindergarteners on a sugar high. I can see how coloured glass and red lighting everywhere may have seemed scary in someones head, but on film, it just looks dumb and gimmicky. The makeup is crappy, and I don't exactly have any high expectations on this front, but fuck, that's the fakest blood I've ever seen! Has the makeup fucker ever seen real blood? A bottle of Heinz would have seriously done a better job than what these fuckers were using here. All the shit I've mentioned thus far I'm not even sure are real criticisms. It's fodder for the peanut gallery, and it definitely is a large part of the reason why I prefer watching these movies to Halloween remake number 256 from the year 2011.

But I do have one serious bone to pick with Suspiria. What the FUCK is up with the soundtrack? This is some of the shittiest stuff my ears have ever experienced, musically or otherwise. I mean the shitty production values and crap acting are charming and cute, but the soundtrack is some seriously fucked up shit. One of the tracks they use just boggles my mind. It involves, I presume, a chimpanzee randomly banging away on a percussive instrument of some kind, and Anu Malik and some mental patients are howling and bleating in the background. Anu Malik is not credited anywhere, but considering how fucking annoying it sounds, I have to assume it's him. This track is used during a kill scene, and it sounds EXACTLY as I described. Pure cacophony. It's mental and not even remotely creepy. It's just annoying. The other track which is more prominently used involves a half decent melody which is looped endlessly. It's somewhat effective and mildly creepy at first, but Anu Malik and co. decide to show up and hiss the melody. Absolutely mental. I abandoned watching this film on 3 or 4 occassions because of the soundtrack. Since the movie itself is very enjoyable, the soundtrack leaves you with a feeling of having been date-raped.

The script, though, is great. A ballet house that's a front for a secret coven of murderous witches? That shit sells itself. You don't need a chainsaw wielding lunatic to make that shit creepy. As a concept, it really works. I think it's a good candidate for a remake. I think it could be made quite creepy in a non-B movie sort of way. Hmm... but then again, I would have said the same about The Wickerman, and that didn't turn out too great. Never mind. Leave this movie the fuck alone, Hollywood.

Read
Terry Pratchett's Mort which was about Death and his apprentice and all the usual fuck-ups that happen when one is being Death's apprentice- i.e. not killing someone when it needs to be done and changing the fabric of history forever. It's a fantastic read with a totally wtf ending.

Amit Varma's My Friend Sancho turned out to be a complete turd of a novel wherein a journalist falls in love with his source, who is the daughter of a murder victim. He says nothing new about the underworld-police nexus in Mumbai (this became public information in Suketu Mehta's Maximum City). The worst is when the author pimps own weblog (Anyone have any views on indiauncut.com? Morbid curiosity to check it out is not working this time).

Watched
Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes for which I thought I'll write a review with "Alimentary, my dear Watson" as its tagline. Unfortunately, it turned out to be decent timepass once you divorce the idea of Holmes from Conan-Doyle's classic. Sorely missed Vinnie Jones but thoroughly enjoyed the credits sequence. Recommended viewing conditions: a cheap, possibly single-screen theatre or morning show in a multiplex, far away from the snogging couples.

The police underworld nexus was public knowledge LONG before Suketu Mehta was even born *-)

Terrific review of Suspiria there, though I seriously thought the soundtrack was among the better things about the movie.

Saw Victim, a Thai horror movie that was moderately engaging even if a little hard to follow and self consciously baffling. Ting, a struggling actress, is hired by the cops to re-enact crimes (this is apparently something that the Thai police do to brag about criminals they've caught to the press. Weird!). Ting is a method actress and puts a lot into these roles and even begins to attain a certain amount of celebrity. She's finally called on to play the role of a murdered model Meen. Halfway through there's a hugeass twist (that I have spoilerised) and that's when the film could have really taken off but IMO it flounders horribly.

A couple of excellent classic comedies - The General , starring Buster Keaton, and Duck Soup starring the Marx Brothers. Also A Matter Of Life And Death, which I enjoyed quite a bit despite the ending increasingly being a foregone conclusion.

So I got around to rewatching Amityville II after realising that I'd been giving it props for many years without actually having seen the film recently. And some parts of it were slightly less impressive than I remember them being and there's some regrettably cheesy sequences like the possessed guy flashing a 'help me' message on his arm, but for the most part this is a terrific film. You can trust the Italians to do a great job with horror and the awesomely named Damiano Damiani does way better than most reviews of this film would lead you to believe. The Montellis are a fucked up family even before they move in with a piggish abusive dad who is all too free with his fists, a godbothering neurotic mom and way too many children.

Unlike the traditional slowburn horror crap that so many of these films suffer from, the house spits on its hands and gives the family its best on the first night itself - with blasphemous paintings in the kids room, smashed cutlery and mirrors and taps that spew blood. It's to the movie's credit that it manages to get even more weird and fucked up as it progresses into incest and a full blown family massacre, foreshadowed rather well I thought by a Jim Morrison poster in the possessed son, Sonny's room. There's tons of great blink and you'll miss them touches to this film - like a doll in the room of Patricia, the daughter of the house, that's grown large breasts and is dressed like a prostitute. And the voices that overlay an argument husband and wife are having about sex. It ends with some truly fantastic special effects and in a very convincingly bleak way. At the risk of sounding idiotically atavistic though, there are some films that just worked better on fucked up VHS tapes with lots of lines and dodgy sound and this is one of them.

I too saw Fantastic Mr. Fox and it was quite a delight. Most of the script was great in that typically quirky Wes Anderson way - in fact, it's probably the sharpest he's had in a while. Except that 'over my dead body!' joke - that's usually the recourse of OTT 80s action movies. The animation wasn't all neat and clean, but that seemed to enhance the humour actually, by keeping the focus on the script and expressions. Good idea to have Wes Anderson cover Roald Dahl - modifying an existing story seems to have stripped the movie of the meandering feel his films usually have. 2009 was a good year for animated films, looks like.

After watching Stingray Sam, it seemed like a decent idea to track down Cory McAbee's previous feature length, The American Astronaut. After watching it, the general impression I get is that he was able to tighten his game for SS. Even his music got better. Anyway, the premise is sort of convoluted - McAbee the space cowboy has to do Job A, but needs to get Job B done to facilitate that, which itself requires Job C to be completed first. During the course of these jobs, he runs into weird characters, and songs are sung. Plus, he's being chased by a psychotic professor. It's flimsy, and moves in a quiet, lethargic fashion but somehow ends up being sort of fun. Stingray Sam is better, though.

133T4dip wrote:
Since the movie itself is very enjoyable, the soundtrack leaves you with a feeling of having been date-raped.
Heehee!

And now I think about it, I like slow burn horror, but most of them screw up the part where the stuff is supposed to actually start burning.

Been watching the first season of 30 Rock and its pretty consistently funny apart from Tinay Fey's girlie problems. Alec Baldwin and that black guy are totally brilliant. Saw The Big Doll House a classic women in prison movie with Pam Grier. The story's the same as always with a bunch of super hot women in prison for various crimes. They're all mostly nasty pieces of work with a jail and warden who are far nastier. Girls hook up with Sid Haig and plan an escape from the prison. Watch it if you like Grier but be warned she also sings on the soundtrack and is pretty grating. For hardcore fans only. Also saw The Men Who Stare at Goats with George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey. The movie's about a secret division of the army headed by Bridges which specialises in training psychics for combat purposes. McGregor is the journalist who finds out about this secret unit and then randomly bumps into George Clooney who tells him the story of that secret unit in flashback as the two have an adventure in present day Iraq. Turned out to be a bit boring and meandering till it redeemed it self with a super ending. The awesome cast was mostly wasted though.

Read Vernor Vinge's The Peace War, a Hugo nominee from '85, and the first installment in the three-part series that comprises Across Realtime. It's standard, sci-fi pulp based fifty years in a future controlled by a global dictatorship called The Peace Authority. Originally a group of petty bureacrats and scientists, the Authority chanced upon the discovery of the ultimate weapon - a bobble, an impenetrable electromagnetic field with the useful property of stopping time for whatever it encloses - that was used to gain control over the world's governments in the face of an outbreak of biologically engineered plagues. They outlawed all scientific study under the ruse of preserving the peace, a plan that worked favourably save for isolated pockets of renegades and free thinkers. The book is essentially the story of these rebels' struggles against the tyranny. I expected a bit more from it after being introduced to the intriguing premise behind the bobble but there are no deep insights to be had - scientific or philosophical - and it devolves steadily into rather hollow action-oriented fare.

My roommate bought the whole Planet Earth DVD set. We blaze and watch it everyday. Good times!