12/18/09 Drowning Man- Favorite horror movie moments #5

"Let Sleeping Corpses Lie" is a underwatched but highly rated Spanish-Italian film. It's the rare type of zombie movie that does not double as a siege movie, but rather is more free-roaming, going from location to location. It is also the rare type of zombie movie that features only a few zombies which, rather than toppling over with a slight shove, are rather hard to kill. This is a rare slow-burn type of zombie film, directed and paced beautifully by Jorge Grau. The first apearance by a zombie stands out as one of the creepiest in the movie.

Edna is left by George to watch her car as he asks for directions from some farmers. As they talk, Edna stares at the river beside her. The musical score shifts into low key and we hear the sounds of someone drowning. Edna becomes visibly nervous, and the sounds of the person splashing in the water get faster. When the noises of drowning finally cease, Edna suddenly spots a man with red eyes approaching the car. She runs away and when she turns her head back, he has vanished.

This creepy build-up and delivery stands out as being very effective and memorable, even long after seeing the movie. It just works on so many levels. They could have shown clips of the man drowning in the river, but instead they raised the tension incredibly by just playing splashing sounds over a long take of the river. The fact that this all plays out during the day and that it still works is incredible. It's a good example of how innovative film-making always works better than lazy film-making.

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12/11/09 *ring-ring-ring* *ring-ring-ring*- Favorite horror movie moments #4

SPOILER

It's the last minute of Bob Clark's masterwork of Christmas cinema. Oh, no it's not Ralphie's Christmas story, it's "Black Christmas", and the killer has been put down, the police have sorted everything out, and our final girl is laying down for some well deserved rest. She'd been receiving calls all night from some lunatic. Then her friends started to go missing. When she found one of them dead, her suspicion of the increasingly perverse calls grew. Then a policeman traced the calls to inside her own sorority house and it was time to freak out. But now everything's calm now and not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse...

And that's when the phone rings. And within the span of a second, and with no jump scares, broken windows, suddenly opening eyes, hands shooting out of rubble, or even a word spoken your previous calm vanishes and panic rises. He's still in the house! God d*mn, he's still in the house!



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12/9/09 Deathbed- Favorite horror movie moment #3

"Phantasm" is a movie which, all things considered, probably isn't a good movie. This doesn't stop it from being one of my favorite movies, though.

Dream sequences in horror movies have always been used to annoyingly pull the wool over the eyes of the audience and needlessly pad out movies, or in worst-case scenarios to explain p*ss poor plots that would, and often still do, make no sense without the dream sequence. In "Phantasm" the dream sequence is turned into something of an art. My favorite dream in "Phantasm" has to be when Michael goes to sleep in his oddly decorated, very 70's room.

The camera zooms into his face and it seems like he goes to sleep. Then his eyes pop open and the camera suddenly pulls back. Mike's bed is now in the middle of a graveyard, The Tall Man now leaning over his bed menacingly, but not in a ********** sort of way, more in a "I'd cut out your heart, but I'd rather hear you scream first" sort of way. Corpses suddenly lunge out of the ground near the bed and grab Michael. Can anyone say "worst nightmare EVER"?



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12/8/09 WAIT! What the heck was THAT!?- Favorite horror movie moment #2

By the way, these aren't in any sort of order. Deal with it.

"Inside" is a french horror movie that became something of a cult favorite due to its disturbing plot centered around a pregnant woman and her be-scissored stalker as well as its overwhelming gore. But my favorite moment from the movie has absolutely no blood in it.



The main character, the pregnant woman, sits in a chair watching television. The camera, rather than focus at the tv its self, focuses instead on her face. Behind her, in the background, is a brownish, drab wall and a doorway. You, the viewer, focus either on her face to calculate her reactions to the shocking news story, on the subtitles to hear (or read, as the case may be) the atrocities being committed, or on the prominent baby bump at the bottom of the screen. Then the phone rings. Your eyes instinctively search the background for a phone and HOLY SH*T, there's someone's face in the doorway! Just as quickly the face is gone. So you rewind the movie to see if it was there the whole time.

It was more than just there the whole time. That face first appears when she begins watching the news at the very start of this brilliant one minute-long shot. Then a woman's figure, dressed in almost the same shade of brownish grey as the background, slowly creeps into the doorway. She advances noiselessly and slowly until her figure takes up the whole entire background. Then, just before the phone rings, she quickly recedes back into the doorway, leaving only her face visible, until she cloaks that in darkness as well.

The scariest part about this shot is that you don't notice it until that phone rings, and even then you might not have seen her. It's this shot that sets the mood for the rest of the movie, this calm before the storm (and oh, what a storm it is) is such a creepy home invasion that feels so real, and plays out in such a manner that you probably won't be able to help but check downstairs and make sure you really did lock that door tightly.

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12/7/09 Favorite horror movie moment #1

Okay, my first favorite horror movie moment comes from my favorite horror movie, and probably my favorite movie of all time. Big surprise, right? "Don't Look Now" is a movie you wouldn't really suspect of being a horror movie were it not for the odd supernatural themes and the sense of dread created by the excellent direction. Oh yeah, and then there's the ending. If you haven't seen it, you need to. If you don't want to see it, you're a jerk. It's both the most obvious, yet the most unexpected ending possible for the movie, and deep on more levels than one. All I can say is that it stands out to me, even among the twist-ending era of horror film we're seeing now, as the best ending in any horror movie ever.



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11/30/09 All I Do Is Whine

I spend way too much time whining on this main page. So next time I post something I figured it would be a list of my favorite horror movie moments or something fun. Alright? Alright.

I really don't know who I'm talking to though... Has anyone found this site yet? Give me a shout out if you have!

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11/20/09 A Lost Art

Remember when people would try to sell you movies using cool cover and poster art? Remember, sometime in the 90's, when people got lazy and just would replace their cover/poster art with photoshopped pictures of their cast and crew staring at you vacantly? I miss good cover art...



This one's just pure art, no actor's faces here.



This does both, but the art is the the forefront, as opposed to...



Why are they posed together like this? Why does their clothing match? How is this poster supposed to convey ANY sense of horror, excepting the horror just oozing from that guy on the right's terribly thin mustache? I like how Scream is just printed under this posse of hipsters, like it's what they're ordering us to do, rather than it being the movie's title. At one point film-makers just got lazy and were like, "I'm not paying no stinking artist, I know how to use photoshop!" Same thing happened with album art.

Surprisingly, though, a lot of really horrible new movies have the best cover art... Guess they need it to sell.



See. Well done cover, good tag-line, fairly horrible movie. It was probably pretty cheap to make too. Why get lazy, movie people? Make your posters interesting.

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11/17/09 They're Called IPods For a Reason

What is with people? Are all people, in general, just inconsiderate and rude, or just the ones at my high-school? I've noticed an annoying trend that's becoming increasingly popular. It's obnoxious, at best.

People with Ipods will, instead of putting the headphones in/on their ears, will now just pump the volume ridiculously and hang their headphones around their neck. Yeah, cause I guess putting them in your ears is way too hard or something. So now, instead of just sitting around like an autistic narcoleptic playing with their Ipod, you, the passerby, can enjoy their music too, through tinny headphones not meant to ever blast at that decibel level.

Look people, I know louder is often better, but there is a point where this becomes irritating. See, things like the Ipod were designed so that others would not have to be subjected to your musical tastes, which I must say are rather poor (She's got that Poker Face, Pa-Pa-Poker Face.) It is completely defeating the purpose to blast them at passerby. No one cares about how sick that beat is. You're just annoying. Have some class and get a boom-box.

In fact that's what I should do, get a boom-box and blast it through the halls of my school. When questioned, I'll just say it's my portable music player. After all, I KNOW everyone's just dying to hear the entire discography of Strapping Young Lad. And if they don't seem enthused enough, I'll just get a sub-woofer for the boom-box and then they'd HAVE to like it!

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11/9/09 Short Attention Spans

People blame a lot of things for teenagers' short attention spans, video games, television, the Internet, but no one can say for sure what's causing this problem, if, indeed, a problem it is. I believe I have exactly the cause of this short-attention span problem and it comes out of left-field. I blame the modern high-school for these issues. Any adult reading this will instantly recoil. "That rapscallion," they'd say, "how could he possibly blame institutions of education for what is so obviously an entertainment driven problem." I'd have to say to this adult, whose manner of speaking I find quite frankly to be odd, that I can blame the school system quite easily. In fact the school system can be blamed for more than just attention spans, but I'll get to that later.

Think of how your average school is set up. The day is divided into periods. Each period has a subject attached to it, and, if you aren't devoted to honors classes, maybe you have a study hall as well. There is a short lunch in the middle of this as well. I, as a high school student myself, have eight periods in a day, though some schools have more. At the end of each period bell rings and it's off to your next class. I really shouldn't have to explain how this can easily create short attention-span, but let me spell it out for you.

The periods aren't long enough to generate any genuine interest in the subjects, any real student teacher interactions, or allow any real sort of teachings to pass through, only sound bites. The proliferation of so many periods through the day also melds the subjects together making each one unmemorable and indistinct and insuring that there will be extreme repetition of key ideas, much to the chagrin of the smarter students. This sort of stop and go school day, this accelerated rush hour of rapid unpacking books, taking notes, repacking books, getting to class, repeat is so numbing and repetitive, dull, and impersonal that it is a small wonder to me that no one before has thought that this sort of school day could create an attention span problem. But the real problem lies in what happens after school.

Because of their mind numbing, eight subjects in six hours sort of school day, teens are often exhausted when they get home. This causes them to, rather than spend time on the homework assigned by eight separate teachers, each with unique goals and techniques, procrastinate by either watching television, use the computer, or play a video game. People saying that these are the cause of teen's short attention spans are confusing the symptoms with the disease. This means that by the time they're done playing, eating, and discussing the many happenings at school with their parents, it will be fairly late. Which means it will finally be time to do the homework. The homework assigned by eight separate teachers, all of which don't know or care whether any of the other seven assigned homework as well.

So the student, afraid of failure, or even mediocrity, will bear the full load of homework until it is rather late. This work schedule doesn't even include the student who is in any way involved with extra-curricular activities, they work much later and crash much harder. So the student will get their five or six hours of sleep, wake up bright and early the next morning, plug through the daily grind of a school day completely exhausted, crash even harder at home, work even later after procrastinating even harder, and repeat three more times to get your average school week.

And yet no one looks to the school system when searching out blame for poor attention spans, sleep deprivation, increasingly disturbing consumer trends, and lack of interest in academic pursuits. It's as if high school is some sort of hazing ritual, once your out and sworn into adulthood you never mention it again, except to nag your kids and tell them how you had it worse and nuns beat you and all that other stuff. Well at least those nuns respected your potential as a student enough to beat you, here we're just casually being thrown from subject to subject, each teacher being a passing face, as memorable as last year's Grammy nominees.

So I propose, to anyone out there willing to listen, a new way. Why not have only two classes a day, each clocking in at around two and a half hours each, with an hour long lunch and break in between. No time is spent walking between classes except the necessary lunch break walk, less time is spent packing and unpacking, and the teachers get time to know their students. Homework would come from only two classes at a given time allowing students to devote their time and studies to those two subjects. Students would no longer forget homework, no longer crash, and would not feel as pummeled as after the comparatively complicated aforementioned school day. Take this type of day, divide the school year into sixths, starting a new two classes every sixth, and you could easily fit twelve comprehensive subjects into a school year.

I've done the math and, assuming you lose only five minutes (in actuality it is far greater) out of every class taking attendance, packing and unpacking, using the current system you lose one hundred and twenty hours of your time from this inconvenience, caused by the amount of classes taken every day. Don't believe me? 1/12 (fraction of an hour, five minutes) X 180 (average number of days in a school year) X 8 (number of classes a day) = 120 hours. My proposed system cuts that monstrous number far lower to thirty hours in a school year, a quarter the old figure. How do the numbers look for actual time spent teaching? Old system gets nine hundred sixty real teaching hours, as each of my classes get approximately forty minutes devoted to them. That also means one ninth of the whole entire year is spent taking attendance, which is abominable. My system gives nine hundred hours of complete teaching a year not including study time, and this is admittedly less than the old system, but the up-side is that there will be far less down time, a thirtieth of the entire year. Factor in that approximately forty minutes every day was spent changing classes in the old system and that doubles the down time to two ninths of the entire year. That's two hundred and forty hours the current school system is draining from my life every year and I, for one, won't stand for it.

This system would also reduce the size of the average class so that teachers could teach more easily and could teach each student more personally. Each group would meet every day for two and a half hours allowing questions to be answered and discussions to break out among students, much like graduate school and college. Not to mention that with a singular large study period during lunch, less of teachers' time would have to be spent attending study halls.

Has this system really never occurred to anyone before me, or is it just something everyone's thought about and dismissed as impossible? This can't be something only I've thought of, so what is it that I'm missing that is so good about the state of the current school system? Please leave your thoughts and comments below, and thanks for reading.

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11/6/09 The World Needs Less Uwe Bolls
A lot of people out there really disrespect horror movies. You wanna know why? People like Uwe Boll are the reason why. The horror movie is a very easy way to get a start in the industry and as a genre is one of the easiest ways to make cash. Horror movies can be made very easily and cheaply and need promise only one thing, horror. They don't need any high profile comedian, or team of computer engineers to be successful, at least in terms of box office. And People like Uwe Boll take advantage of this, pumping out $hitty movies that only gain viewers by licensing off lesser video game titles like Bloodrayne and Alone in the Dark. His movies often take little to no inspiration from the video games they're based on, and basically use the titles only as a means of suckering poor saps into spending money on this garbage.

To people like Uwe Boll movies are only one thing, a means of cash, a business. Not only do I believe this is profoundly wrong, I also believe it is a horrible way to treat a medium that was proved in a court of law to be an ART. Making movies should not be about trying to get people to watch them. While it is nice if your movie gets publicity, good movies are movies that are personal to the people making them. The only truly bad movie is the one with no inspiration behind it. None of Uwe Boll's movies have inspiration behind them. They are creations of people's investments, not of a man's artistic vision.

I really can't say which I find more disgusting, the fact Uwe sees film-making as nothing more than a get rich quick scheme, or the fact people keep throwing money at him and proving him right. Think, first, of what a waste of money his films are. What benefit do they provide to anyone? Now think about all the other places that money could have gone. Better film-makers, perhaps. I can name quite a few off the top of my head who need the money far more than Uwe needs it. Don Coscarelli, Dario Argento, Nicolas Roeg, and countless other small-name independent film-makers such as the people who made Cookers. Even outside of the film-making industry think of all the better endeavors that can be pursued with the money being thrown at wastes of space like Boll. Charity, vaccinations for new viruses, ANYTHING BUT A FILM ADAPTATION OF HOUSE OF THE DEAD! Honestly, are people losing their minds, or are they just incredibly greedy? It has to be one of the two because nothing else would explain why Uwe Boll is able to keep on producing movies year after year.

It used to be you either were going to A: be independently wealthy and could afford to make sh*tty movies year after year or B: make one bad movie and fade into obscurity, maybe to resurface years later as a cult favorite, but never to make a movie again. Now as long as you have enough name recognition you can keep making movies adnosium and MAKE MONEY AT IT. It sickens me to think film-making has sunk to this new low.

Now some of you may be thinking I'm being hard on the guy. But just watch one of his movies, I dare you. Try to make it through the whole thing. Then try to make it through his whole entire catalogue of bad movies. And even if you're hard-core enough to try to make it into a so-bad-it's-good experience, think to yourself, is so-bad-it's-good enough to make a career out of? Because it shouldn't be.

Oh, and one other thing. Uwe Boll is a complete and utter psychopath. Can you think of any other director with a standing challenge to take on his harshest critics in a boxing match? What the hell would a boxing match prove about his movies? Well Boll himself said after the matches, which he won lopsidedly as an amateur boxer, "See what happens when people get hit in the head? They like my movies." He summed it up pretty well if you ask me. Oh yeah, and he made fun of the September 11th attacks in the most unfunny way possible in his movie Postal.

So I have decided to make it a personal crusade of mine to watch and review every Uwe Boll movie to date, a Boll 'o' rama of sorts, just to personally recount to you everything that is wrong with him and his style of "money first, movie second" film-making. I'll announce the date later, but Boll 'o' rama is coming very soon.

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10/31/09 Horror Music
I was thinking about horror albums, like music dedicated to horror movies. As you may come to find out from the reviews posted here, horror is my favorite genre. As far as horror movies go they are abundant enough, but horror albums are few and far between. Besides the obvious, Goblin and other people who have worked often on horror soundtracks I can think of only two artists with horror albums to their names, the abysmal death metal band Mortician and the progressive metal outfit Iced Earth. Anyone know others?

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I've decided recently that this page will become a bloggish thing where I'll put down whatever I'm thinking about on the days I'm reviewing. I won't be deleting posts, so this page could get quite long.

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Hey everyone, I'm just starting around here, but sometime before Christmas I hope to go on a reviewing spree of my VHS collection. Check out what's here and tell me what you'd like to see.