Yet another classic that Hollywood felt the urge to needlessly remake. The original is no longer shocking of course; in the wake of the likes of Jonestown and the Order of the Solar Temple people have become accustomed to such depravities.
Berberian Sound Studio - I'm still kinda trying to process this one. I really liked the tone of the film, the premise and the presentation. Toby Jones plays timid British sound engineer Gilderoy, plunged into the unfamiliar, unsettling and slightly seedy world of Italian giallo films. Jones does a wonderful job, I really enjoyed watching his character attempt to cope with a situation so at odds with both his professional and personal natures, and the film does very well in creating a thick and claustrophobic atmosphere that hints at menace and highlights the paranoia of the main character. But, for all its foreboding tone, its nods to 70's Italian horror and its wry sense of humour, the film turns in on itself in perplexing manner and, ultimately, runs to an unsatisfactory and somewhat bewildering conclusion. Despite that, I enjoyed the ride and would definitely like to revisit this one in the future.
Sinister - true crime writer Ellison (Ethan Hawke) moves his family to a house where a brutal murder was committed in order to write about the case. But when he finds a box of strange footage in the attic, detailing not only the murder of the previous inhabitants, but many more killings since the late 60's, things start to go awry and Ellison has unwittingly put him and his family in mortal danger. I enjoyed this one for the most part, Hawke does well as the struggling writer weighing his fear against his desire to succeed in writing his best novel yet, and as things start to unravel his fear, at first more of a sick uneasiness at the brutal nature of the footage he is witnessing, and then later the terror of the films supernatural elements, rubs off on the viewer and helps create the unsettling tone that pervades almost every scene. Ultimately, while I very much approved of the way the film ends, I thought it gave up too much, too soon when the supernatural manifested itself more and more outside of the found footage.
Saw Black Death the other day. Purty good movie. Its left pretty wide open for interpretation, and overall, it seems to pretty much say nobody is right in the end.
It tells the story of a group of religious men, one of them a monk, traveling to a village where a supposed necromancer lives. They run into trouble and the plague along the way, and come to the village, where things are worse than they thought.
The Judas figure in this movie is glaringly obvious to me.
Source Code
Man, I loved this movie. It had a clever premise, a tense setting, and great performances (Jake Gyllenhaal is great at emoting, he's not just a very, very, very pretty face). I'm always surprised that no one ever remembers this movie.
