Kuroneko is astoundingly beautiful. Its use of stark contrasts in black and white, locations, fog, and wirework make for a beautiful and sublime story about a pair of women who sell their souls to become vengeful ghosts after their rape and murder by a group of samurai but are then confronted by their lost son/husband, who has become a samurai. As a lover of chanbara, I had been looking forward to this film for a while, and I was not disappointed by my decision to end the month on an elegant and dramatic high point. This film is more tragic than frightening, but still quite enchanting. I highly recommend this to lovers of Japanese cinema and to those who don't mind a horror movie that has strong emotional depth.
Total: 31
Here's the list of everything I watched. I'm a bit horrored-out now. I rented Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure to cleanse my mind.
Anguish At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul Basket Case The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms The Beyond Black Sunday The Boogens The Burning Children of the Corn C.H.U.D. Creepshow Demons The Descent Dracula Evil Dead (remake) Fright Night (remake) The Gate Halloween H20 The Innkeepers The Killer Shrews Kuroneko The Lords of Salem Maniac Maniac Cop The Screaming Skull The Slender Man Stake Land The Tingler Trick 'r Treat Viy Zombi 2
With Moira we couldn't be taking her out to go trick-or-treating, so we stayed home, answered the door in costume (with a medical mask), and decorated cookies!! We had lots of fun.
Charlotte was Dr. Rapunzel, Moira was Cinderella, Mom was "Some bunny ears make a costume, right?", Dad was grumpy 34-year-old, and Ella was asleep.
Let strength be granted, so the world might be mended...so the world might be mended.
Psycho II: Maybe kinda sorta worth watching for the surreal experience of seeing all the iconic settings and Bates revisited. A mess of a movie/story, though.
Cube: One of my favorites, and I hadn't watched it in years. Fun to revisit.
Trick R' Treat: One of the best Halloween night movies ever made.
Oh, and Slenderman: The Eight Pages is pretty dumb.
Thanks for a good month all!
Oct 2013 Films 1. The Reef (2010) 2. V/H/S (2012) 3. The Thing (2011) 4. The Island of Lost Souls (1932) 5. The Screaming Skull (1958) 6. Rubber (2010) 7. Trollhunter (2010) 8. Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) 9. Black Christmas (1974) 10. Videodrome (1983) 11. Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) 12. Pumpkinhead (1988) 13. Return of the Living Dead (1985) 14. Lords of Salem (2012) 15. Ju-On: the Grudge (2002) 16. Maniac (2012) 17. Psycho II (1983) 18. Cube (1997) 19. Trick R' Treat (2007)
Oct 2013 horror-related games 1. Tales From Space: Mutant Blobs Attack (done) 2. Little Inferno (done) 3. Darkstalkers Chronicle: The Chaos Tower (done) 4. Device 6 (done) 5. Plants vs Zombies (done) Dead Space 3 (played a few hours) Cry of Fear (played an hour or so) Slenderman: The Eight Pages (played an hour)
Oh, I almost forgot. I carved my pumpkin tonight. We got two a couple weeks ago and I told my Mom she had to carve one. She tried to get out of it by saying that if she did she'd just carve a peace sign.
I was like, "I can work with that."
Groovy.
I think I love my Hippie Zombie.
Collaborated efforts.
Lollipop Chainsaw! Love the pumpkins.
And someone recognized it right off the bat! You, TSTR get an internet cookie.
The final movie of the month! (Or last month now. Whatever.)
Scream 4
Yes. Freakin’ finally.
Scream 4 picks up 10 years after Scream 3 ends. Sidney returns to her hometown for the final stop on her new book tour and – surprise, surprise! – Ghostface shows up to terrorize her, Gale, Dewy and a host of other new, hip teens. There is blood, there is death, and there is many a lost cell phone.
Don’t laugh. I hear it was a new iPhone. You’d look like this too if you just dropped that much dough and misplaced it.
Now here’s a movie that had a lot of fan expectation attached to it. In order to work after a 10-year hiatus, it was going to have to re-invent itself while simultaneously clinging to the ideals that made its predecessors so beloved in the first place. And I think along those lines, it succeeded. This movie still contains the same level of banter and wit, but it’s also much gorier that the other films as well.
And this was just a deleted scene? Damn.
After a very clever opening (bravo, guys) all the new characters are introduced along with the old ones and the ‘whodunit’ part of the storyline kicks in. Is it the publicist? The creepy-a$$ ex-boyfriend? The not quite with it aunt? As before it could be anyone except for the poor cop shlubs that end up guarding the house because those guys are just cannon fodder (and they know it.)
And that knowledge makes some of them very trigger happy.
Along with the new characters we get to see some of the development that’s happened with the old ones. Some are good, some not so much. For instance, Sidney now not only knows to arm herself, but when the need arises will actually run into danger to try to save someone.
I’m not sure if that’s really a good development or not, honestly.
Dewy on the other hand, still can’t shoot for sh*t.
Ten years and you still shoot wide? Aren’t there practice ranges for that?
And speaking of weapons, this does bring up a question: After all this time, why doesn’t Sidney, or even Gale, carry a gun? I know that if any of that previous crap had happened to me I would have dropped some cash on a nice pistol by now. Considering the killer likes to screw with people before killing them, I have faith that I’d at least get one good shot in before he got to me. At the very least it might save me from having to make this face…
Ah, a nice visual aid of why I don’t like parking garages.
Of course, while the returning characters are all well and good, the other half of the film focuses on the new, young faces. Many fall into the ranks of series regulars: the movie buffs, the annoying ex, the snarky best friend, the pretty girl that probably won’t last long…If you’ve seen one Scream you’ve seen them before.
Surprisingly, the standout was probably Hayden Panettiere, who delivered a hell of a performance towards the end of the movie. I’ll admit I have a soft spot for the snarky, friend role, but in that one scene she lost snarky real quick and became totally committed to the reality of the situation she was it.
I also liked her haircut, but its performance in that scene was sub par at best.
And the ending actually wound up being a genuine surprise. Maybe not so much for whom it ended up being, but more for the motives and the scenes following it.
There were a couple of things the film introduced and then failed to properly follow through on. For instance, it is continually mentioned that Ghostface is following the pattern of a re-boot, by taking the events of the first film and making it his own. But they don’t really do a good job of really expressing that. Some kills are reminiscent of ones from the earlier movies (garage door squishing someone), but others…? They seem completely new and unrelated. I might be able to draw similarities if I watched it a couple more times, but I didn’t see it on the initial viewing.
You know where I saw it? The freaking deleted scenes. This movie is an example of how those little extras really come in handy, because without a lot of those you end up losing quite a bit of what the story was originally going for. Only a couple of the cuts scenes were unimportant. The others either made the plot more cohesive, added more to characters and their relationships, or added weight to the setting. I don’t know why they were cut (probably some lame a$$ excuse like “for time” as the film clocks in at 111 min.), but most of them seemed incredibly relevant to me and I’m glad I watched them as they filled in a lot of question marks.
I’m not saying that Scream 4 is a bad film without those cuts. It isn’t. It’s a great slasher and I probably haven’t enjoyed the series so much since I first saw the original film. All I’m saying is that after watching them that the movie could greatly benefit from a Directors Cut.
Other than that though, it exceeded my expectations.
Moral of the story: When it comes to a reboot, always remember the cardinal rule: Don’t f*&k with the original.
Here's some pictures and a video of Halloween at my house this year. We live in a house behind another house, so I dressed up as a creepy caretaker to guide trick-or-treaters from the street back to where I live.
We watched Paranormal Activity 2 last night. I liked how the sequel tied in the events of the first movie, but I thought the original was better and scarier.
Hey guys, I just watched Maniac. That's the right one, right?
On a side happy accident, now I know where the samples 3 minutes into Meat Beat Manifesto - God OD Part 1 come from. Sadly that's a different Phyllis Diller in the movie, that would have been really amusing as well.
