The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

[swo17]

an even more disturbing burger-based video.

Still a better option than either party can produce

[colinr0380]

I need to know more about President Burger's stance on the fries versus carrot sticks issues which have ripped the nation apart over the last few years, turning family member against delicious family member. And let's not get into the whole 'dipping sauce' debate!

[therewillbeblus]

When Evil Lurks (Demián Rugna, 2023): An objectively well-made and paced downbeat horror, that just can't escape the bombastic New Extremity repulsions which sets a ruthless mood muting any impact of thematic nuance. Even if it's appropriate to treat the infectious Satanic terror with committed sincerity, these self-serious extreme horrors often fail to ascend their visual and narrative provocations in establishing a pronounced, more interesting tone. This was more narratively compelling than most, organically revealing necessary information as we go, and amidst the noise returning to Western ideas of family, faith, community. It felt like a New Extremity flick attempting to be something more traditional, and I think it half-works but fights a tough battle to get there.

There is one moment that feels primed for implicit horror allegory, but dismisses this reading almost as soon as it's set up:

SpoilerShow

When Pedro shows up at the ex wife’s home, carelessly shedding his clothes and infecting the dog (despite ostensibly knowing the 'rules' and certainly aware of the severity of the situation), he creates the domino effect of death targeting his 'resented threats' first, even as he desperately, defiantly declares himself matured and disinterested in resentment. Significantly, the dog first attacks his ex's one child that’s not his, and then her new husband and then her, but not his biological kids. With the restraining order and physical and financial neglect mentioned and such, the film seemed to be posturing at a commentary on how we can ruin peoples lives even when we have positive intentions, and the idea of true growth being the ability to yield repair of a relationship because to attempt to make amends or reconnect would be selfish and harmful. But then.. the film just affirms his actions as objectively 'right' in self-preservation terms, and the possessed wife admits to relentlessly cheating on him, making him heroic and pitiable again, rather than a vehicle of harm in sheep's clothing. [I believe that what the possessed wife says is true, because there’s never been cause to assume the Evil lies. It is always open and honest about what’s goin on. Even if it’s likely adding unreal context to why she was cheating in it's deliberately mean-spirited taunts of his pathetic qualities, the actual infidelity would be weird to assume as a lie (it’s also mentioned casually as if known, before she goes into the low blows to his character). Anyways, doesn’t feel like it helps that ‘toxic men’ reading - it kinda erases it.

Oh yeah, and there's a fair amount of animal violence in this. It's not a pleasant experience, but it's involving in its propulsive, survivalist and exploratory narrative trajectory.

[yoloswegmaster]

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936)

What a chore this was to sit through, especially with it being 67 minutes! It goes to show how suffocating and damaging the British censorship board can be for these types of films, especially when you look at the horror films being produced by their American counterparts at the same time. For example, the film barely alludes to the true horror of what Mrs. Lovett’s infamous meat pies are comprised of, or how very few murders are shown (and even then, it isn’t terrifying at all). Tod Slaughter may be the only good thing about the film with his entertaining and over-the-top performance as titular villain, though it’s sadly misplaced as it looks like everyone else was correctly told that they were doing melodramatic picture. Normally I dislike using saying “these characters are too stupid” as a form of criticism but my god, the characters in this film are way too stupid. There’s certainly nothing suspicious about a man who has “mysteriously” lost 7 child workers in 7 weeks, so it’s probably best to give him another child worker. There’s also nothing wrong about him constantly referring to murder and repeating totally innocent phrases such as "you have a beautiful throat for a razor” or talking about “polishing people off.” If this is what is considered to be one of the better films in the Slaughter boxset, then my expectations for the rest of the titles are very low.

[Mr Sausage]

My Halloween Viewings


Pontypool (Bruce MacDonald, 2008)

For the non-Canadians who might mistake this for taking place in the remote wilds of Canada, Pontypool is only 30 minutes outside of the GTA and an hour from Toronto proper. It’s rural, but not isolated. The ideas behind the movie, tho’ they work more generally, are rooted in something specific to Canadian society: the fraught relationship between its two official languages. There are passing references to it: the BBC anchor who mentions violent Quebec separatists, the intrusive French broadcasts (with instructions not to translate them into English), the Quebecois troops who quarantine the area, and our lead characters’ need to rely on their limited French late in the movie. It’s hard not to read Pontypool’s idea of English words as an infectious virus within this context, as happening in a country whose Francophone province has a so-called language police charged with fending off English loan words in order to maintain the purity of Quebecois French. This is not a parochial movie, so it can easily be read in the larger context of English’s ascendancy as the world’s lingua franca. But it gains force and immediacy when seen from a Canadian point of view.

Bride of Reanimator (Brian Yuzna, 1990)

A strained and unsuccessful retread. The splatstick comedy the original helped pioneer is amped up into arch, wacky scenes that go on for too long, while the splatter is less crazy and inventive. The movie is grotesque without being gleeful, and comedic without being funny. Even at 90 minutes, the movie struggles to fill its run time, incorporating plenty of throat-clearing and pointless subplots to distract from how threadbare its central concept it: Herbert West and co. go all Dr. Frankenstein and create their own human from cobbled together parts. Why this instead of reanimating the dead? Who knows. But it’s not a promising development for a series that’s already about the living dead. Hence the movie needs a romance subplot, a South American Civil War subplot, an uxoricidal police inspector subplot, and subplot about the villain from the last movie being reanimated by a rival doctor seeking to understand West’s reagent. The subplots get more screen time than the main plot because, given West and Daniel already have a reagent, access to bodies, and modern medical knowledge, they ought to be able to make and revivify the titular Bride with ease. So the movie has to delay it with all these threads that don’t have much to do with anything. A sequel without ideas.

Maniac (William Lustig, 1980)

A grim New York exploitation film. It’s uninterested in exploring the psychology of its sleazy villain. Mostly it figures him as the embodiment of everything women most fear in men: gross, predatory, infantile, woman hating, monstrously violent, and obsessed with their own mothers. When women conjure their own worst nightmares, it’s something like this guy. The film isn’t misogynist, it wants to scare women with misogyny. Not that the movie is a high-minded critique or anything. It’s exploitation, but it’s exploiting women’s vulnerabilities to create fear and disgust rather than indulging the viewer’s enjoyment of these vulnerabilities like, say, New York Ripper. And it certainly doesn’t implicate any of the victims in their own demise. Joe Spinell gives an intense performance as the maniac, but the real star is Savini’s makeup effects, which are remarkable even today. I liked this more than I thought I would. One of the better 80s slashers.

Who Can Kill a Child (Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, 1976)

I was immediately annoyed at the movie using footage of real life atrocities to contextualize itself. What a cynical exploitation of real human misery, and for nothing more than to lend a ridiculous horror film a bit of seriousness. At least it gets the narrative structure right, with the couple arriving in a town mysteriously empty of all adults and piecing together the mystery through the slow accumulation of disturbing details as the dread mounts. It’s a weird and unpleasant film, but it knows what it’s doing. Where the film fails, and where it feels inauthentic, is when it reaches for larger socio-political concepts that it’s in no position to explore.

The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001)

A movie like this is built to be enjoyed twice. I can tell, because I had the movie spoiled for me and it in no way dimmed my enjoyment. So I had in effect all the pleasures of a second watch on this, my first viewing. The movie is all careful dramatic irony as you watch the characters at first refuse and then come to believe what you the viewer can see to be the case. A fine, old fashioned gothic horror film that is less gimmicky than its twist would have you believe.

Two Evil Eyes (George Romero and Dario Argento, 1990)

People seem to hate Romero’s segment. I liked the first two-thirds as a mid-tier Tales From the Crypt episode, but the thing falls apart after that. The best part of the segment is Savini’s makeup effects work. Argento, on the other hand, astounded me with this last flourish of brilliance before his long creative decline. He makes a wonderfully stylish Poe pastiche, full of visual energy and macabre ideas.

[The Curious Sofa]

My Halloween Viewings

Who Can Kill a Child (Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, 1976)

I was immediately annoyed at the movie using footage of real life atrocities to contextualize itself. What a cynical exploitation of real human misery, and for nothing more than to lend a ridiculous horror film a bit of seriousness. At least it gets the narrative structure right, with the couple arriving in a town mysteriously empty of all adults and piecing together the mystery through the slow accumulation of disturbing details as the dread mounts. It’s a weird and unpleasant film, but it knows what it’s doing. Where the film fails, and where it feels inauthentic, is when it reaches for larger socio-political concepts that it’s in no position to explore.

I love the movie but that prologue/title sequence is inexcusable. On the Mondo Macabro Blu-ray you can choose between the original and the shorter US title sequence, which omits the atrocity footage and is the version to opt for.

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah omitting that piece allows the strengths to speak for themselves - the queasy powerlessness of the fetal rebellion in the climax speaks more to a relatable discomfort with social-mystery, exacerbated by the insecurities that accompany a charge to be a responsible adult on behalf of other conscious beings in a social world. Brilliant film, that needs to trim the title sequence to contain and harness that impact where it belongs. It didn’t spoil my first viewing, but this is a movie that should caution itself not to spread themes thin across a range of macro and micro projections, when the latter provides more than enough riches

[Mr Sausage]

I have to admit I found the fetal rebellion one of the sillier parts of the film. Not that I'd be without it--it does add to the general unhinged lack of decorum that makes for such a memorable experience. But for me it deflated the power built up by the scenes just prior to it.

One of the best things in the movie is how a child's vulnerability becomes exactly the source of its power. I can't think of another movie involving children that makes this point. It attacks you at the very core of what we consider to be basic humanness: the need to safeguard the vulnerable and ensure the survival of the young. It's a movie where all victories are Pyrrhic.

[colinr0380]

I wonder if that is a particularly Spanish cultural thing. Two 1986 films have credit sequences that are quite similarly transgressively blunt about the themes of their upcoming stories: Almodovar's Matador has the main character climaxing watching over a VHS collection of death scenes from horror movies (including many from Jess Franco's Bloody Moon!), and In A Glass Cage begins with a montage of Nazi atrocities before getting into its present day story.

[brundlefly]

My heart may be hard and soft in all the wrong places, but as ponderous as that opening is, it's *so* long that by the end of it I was willing to grant Serrador slack to think he was less trying to imbue his work with borrowed seriousness than explain it as his way to process his outrage. I'd still vote it as unnecessary, and I've thought about revisiting the shorter cuts, because the nods to the inherent violence in games and to domestic child abuse are certainly enough to make the point that the world needs remaking.

For me, the biggest weakness of the movie isn't that it's just-a-movie in comparison to the atrocity footage, it's that it's just-a-movie very consciously borrowing big chunks of movieness from NotLD and The Birds while refusing to acknowledge that Creepy Movie Children are a completely different species well known to be inherently threatening and, if amended, the titular query should inspire a full room of raised hands. And while there's plenty bold and effective about the movie, siding the audience with a couple who are meant to be unlikable from the start and are *also* slow on the uptake makes a lot of the run time unbearable in the wrong way. The movie never works as revenge fantasy and NotLD managed more shock and complex feeling in a single matricidal cellar scene.

One of the best things in the movie is how a child's vulnerability becomes exactly the source of its power. I can't think of another movie involving children that makes this point.

Call me a jive turkey, but maybe every movie where there's a bad seed? The whole run of Dennis the Menace?

[Mr Sausage]

Yeah, Bad Seeds are weaponizing their vulnerability, but in order to disguise their crimes. People just can’t believe a child could ever do it.

The kids in Who Could Kill a Child? are relying on people’s inborn aversion to harming or even being aggressive with them, in addition to the other one, and that I don’t recall seeing before.

[colinr0380]

This seems as good a time as any to link to the fixer sketch of Jam (NSFW).

[TechnicolorAcid]

This seems as good a time as any to link to the fixer sketch of Jam (NSFW).

Only discovered Jam a bit while but this will forever be engrained in my brain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krsj2bcnRlM

[colinr0380]

So many great, darkly comic, sketches in that series that its hard to choose favourites, though one slight criticism is that they did fall back on going to the 'dead baby' well a few too many times. I would still stand by my old comment that it feels dangerous to watch Jam, because just getting the joke means that you are going insane!

I love how there is a great ear for how poetic the language is and how that along with the timing and inflection more often creates the comedy than the action does. Whilst it is a restaging of some of the sketches from the Blue Jam radio show, the hyper-stylised visuals as well being able to see the performers and their expressions add so much to the experience as well, and I particularly like that the longer sketches have great little moments of acting in them such as suicide with an escape clause (which tells a silly joke in an extremely moving way - "... clearly he didn't"), or the weirdly sad 'living outside as a lifestyle choice' one (the timing and delivery of "I never lock up at night, you know" never fails to make me a bit tearful). Or the wonderfully flirty cleaner who manages to, not walk but vacuum, all over her spineless employer: "I must use ma leetle 'oover", indeed!

Then there are just the brilliantly upsetting ones such as the the woodchipper one ("I'm coming back, Martina!") that outdoes anything the Coen Brothers did in Fargo! Or the overly casual parents sketch ("Well, you can tell him I'm pretty pissed off as well"). Or symptomless coma one (""If he felt anything, I'm afraid it would only have been excruciating pain"), etc, etc.

[The Curious Sofa]

I wonder if that is a particularly Spanish cultural thing. Two 1986 films have credit sequences that are quite similarly transgressively blunt about the themes of their upcoming stories: Almodovar's Matador has the main character climaxing watching over a VHS collection of death scenes from horror movies (including many from Jess Franco's Bloody Moon!), and In A Glass Cage begins with a montage of Nazi atrocities before getting into its present day story.

Apart from the Mondo-tastelessness, what's jarring about the epilogue of Who Can Kill a Child? is that it appears to set up a revenge story, where children strike back after centuries of abuse. It's a flat literalness, which the movie doesn't support, as the cause of homicidal impulse appears to be a psychic infection, which gets passed on. These don't appear to be abused children and the British couple have done nothing to deserve this. The prologue has all the signs of having been tacked on at the last moment, because someone got cold feet about not providing an explicit explanation.

I always thought of the movie as a sun drenched companion piece to Don't Look Now, in both a British couple abroad get lured to their doom by malevolent "children". The arid heat and sun bleached houses of the Spanish island feel as tangible to me as Roeg's wintry, off-season Venice, leads of Who Can Kill a Child, even resemble their more famous counterparts.

With In a Glass Cage the reverberations of concentration camp atrocities are at the center of the movie, further based on the historic fact that after WWII, Nazis found a safe refuge in Franco's Spain. I haven't seen Matador in many years, but as far as I remember, its retired bull fighter has become a killer because he gets a kinky kick out of violence.

[brundlefly]

I wonder if that is a particularly Spanish cultural thing. Two 1986 films have credit sequences that are quite similarly transgressively blunt about the themes of their upcoming stories: Almodovar's Matador has the main character climaxing watching over a VHS collection of death scenes from horror movies (including many from Jess Franco's Bloody Moon!), and In A Glass Cage begins with a montage of Nazi atrocities before getting into its present day story.

Apart from the Mono-tastelessness, what's jarring about the epilogue of Who Can Kill a Child? is that it appears to set up a revenge story, where children strike back after centuries of abuse. It's a flat literalness, which the movie doesn't support, as the cause of homicidal impulse appears to be a psychic infection, which gets passed on. These don't appear to be abused children and the British couple have done nothing to deserve this. It has all the signs of something tacked on at the last moment, because someone got cold feet about not providing an explicit explanation.

I always thought of the movie as a sun drenched companion piece to Don't Look Now, in both a British couple abroad get lured to their doom by malevolent "children". The arid heat and sun bleached houses of the Spanish island feel as tangible to me as Roeg's wintry, off-season Venice, leads of Who Can Kill a Child, even resemble their more famous counterparts.

With In a Glass Cage the reverberations of concentration camp atrocities are at the center of the movie, further based on the historic fact that after WWII, Nazis found a safe refuge in Franco's Spain. I haven't seen Matador in many years, but as far as I remember, its retired bull fighter has become a killer because he gets a kinky kick out of violence.

Not a revenge story, a change of guard. The opening, however you feel about it, is clearly saying that this is political, not personal; the post-Vietnam, failed student rebellion world into which it was released suggests change would have to come from a source less focused and less compromised. The British couple are horrible people in both an oblivious, obnoxious tourist kind of way and a domineering parent kind of way (with the kid on the dock), but their Britishness and their entitled approach to the residents and their language makes them easy avatars for neocolonialism. (Given the way the atrocity footage is snarkily laced with anti-Americanness, I was surprised they weren't ours.) I don't see an analogue to the couple in Don't Look Now, who may be in a foreign land (and not as tourists), but are drawn as very particular people, going through very personal struggles. I don't think a couple mourning a child parallels well with one debating whether or not they want to have one. (The killer there is not a child, either.)

But what the opening footage does accomplish -- and perhaps it had to be as long and ponderous as it is, to beat those who don't offhanded scoff at its use into depressive submission -- is establish an inescapable global campaign of helplessness. As long as adults have power, children will suffer. So in a somethings-gotta-give move, a global mutiny burbles up on an isolated island.

SpoilerShow

And as much as the ending apes (again) NotLD, it's also doing the same thing as the previous year's Shivers -- sending a corrective virus out into the world.

Even the sun-drenched atmosphere you mention, which is one of the things I did love about it, suggests this is not some dark, hidden revenge plot. It's something happening out in the open, under glare of God's eye. (Though of course some scenes happen at night. And practically, of course, you can't keep these kids up past their bedtimes.)

There is a single instance of child abuse depicted in the film, and I thought the quick shock of that the most violent moment in it.

[The Curious Sofa]

My bar for what constitutes horrible people is probably set a little higher than yours'. Where you see neo-colonialist monsters, I see a naive and out-of-their-depth couple, fairly typical for tourists in the 70s. The way they conduct themselves abroad is not much different from my parents on holiday back then (actually the couple in the movie behave a little better) and my parents weren't British. I'm not good with holding movies from half a century ago up to current political discourse and values, so I won't argue along those lines.

EDIT:

I ended up re-watching the movie because its been a while and the claim that the two protagonists are "horrible people " now strikes me as even more absurd. They are unfailingly polite in a self-effacing British way, the husband does his best to communicate in Spanish (not common for Brits holidaying in Spain) and and the only horrible thing he does is to not figure out earlier that they need to get off the island after witnessing the first murder but that's horror movie logic. To project some colonial subtext onto them you have to do some major interpretive gymnastics and they are after all in Spain, a country with its own inglorious colonial past.

The "Island of Death" cut definitely is the version to watch if you have the Mondo Macabro Blu-ray, not only does it lose the mondo prologue but also the first scene where after the corpse of a woman gets washed up on shore, two ambulance drivers discuss her injuries. It works better with just the shot of the corpse as a small child looks on, the foreshadowing in the longer cut is clumsy. Otherwise it's the version where everyone get to speak in their own language (there also is a Spanish dub and another one where they dubbed all the important dialogue by Spanish characters into English.

I watched the interview with director Narciso Ibáñez Serrador. He says the title sequence was a mistake, because he should have put it at the end. While it shouldn't be there ate all, at least it wouldn't had the WTF quality of being up front and 8 minutes long with its preachy and solemn narration it stops the movie dead before it has started.

Otherwise this still works for me, where most killer-kids movies fail, the way groups of children are choreographed is very effective.

[Mr Sausage]

Calling them horrible people, let alone neo-colonialists(!), is a big stretch that I'm not convinced the movie supports. And there lies the problem: collocating a pair of clueless but well-meaning tourists with the architects of the holocaust(!!) is ridiculous, an absurd failure to discriminate. They in no way bear the comparison. So an apologist kinda has to call the couple neo-colonialists or whatever, because only by pretending they, too, are agents of world-historical evil can you even begin to defend the film's prologue. The need to square that prologue with basic ethics drives the reading, not the movie as it actually plays out.

I think people should probably abandon the idea that the prologue is saying anything interesting (I see it as the filmmakers' attempt to brute force their way into a significance their story doesn't otherwise have). The filmmakers were doing something more interesting (and defensible) when they were juxtaposing seemingly innocent childhood games with the violence from the second half. The movie ought've done more with that.

[brundlefly]

Calling them horrible people, let alone neo-colonialists(!), is a big stretch that I'm not convinced the movie supports. And there lies the problem: collocating a pair of clueless but well-meaning tourists with the architects of the holocaust(!!) is ridiculous, an absurd failure to discriminate. They in no way bear the comparison. So an apologist kinda has to call the couple neo-colonialists or whatever, because only by pretending they, too, are agents of world-historical evil can you even begin to defend the film's prologue. The need to square that prologue with basic ethics drives the reading, not the movie as it actually plays out.

I'll buy this diagnosis and cop to marrying it to a state of frustration with the main couple, who clearly aren't actively horrible in comparison to, say, Pol Pot. (Perhaps the atrocity footage both damns them by proximity and redeems them in comparison!) I will walk that back drastically and say again I found them horrible company and resented being stuck with them as they walked about in a very dim, entitled way. The person with whom I identified most was the serious kid on the dock on whom the man decided to suddenly practice his paternal instincts via unwanted badgering and poking at his property; later he sees that same kid and demands he stop to talk and chases him when he does not. Like, dude, I live here and I am working because now someone needs to feed all these little freaks and I have had a long day and I am tired. Go back to stealing stuff from our gift shop and leave me be.

Serrador says in an interview that he only considered the placement of the footage a mistake. Thought it should come at the end, as some sort of testimonial explanation. Which may have been an even bigger fail, sending your audience out with a spanking.

Agreed that time spent with the kids and their games would be the more interesting way to go. Though there could be concerns about falling off the innocence/sadism tightrope or erring into folk horror, which does a lot of that. It is a long movie already and perhaps a crisp shorter cut is the way to go.

[colinr0380]

Serrador says in an interview that he only considered the placement of the footage a mistake. Thought it should come at the end, as some sort of testimonial explanation. Which may have been an even bigger fail, sending your audience out with a spanking.

Maybe anticipating the "Young Americans" end credits of Dogville and Manderlay?

[The Curious Sofa]

As to the the fishing scene, it's implied that Tom saw that the scowly boy was using something unusual for bait and in retrospect that appears to have been human remains. That's why he wants to see what's in the basket (I read a couple of reviews, which interpret the scene the same). This wasn't just the "entitled" white cis man (as the kids say today) stopping the disadvantaged child from feeding the needy, it's the first time Tom notices something is wrong on the island.

About the apparent theft, when they try to get ice cream to cool down, Evelyn suggests they leave money, as nobody is around. When Tom gets things from the abandoned store soon after, it cuts before he leaves and it's not out of question that he left money for the things he took, as I believe, Tom and Evelyn are basically decent people. The reason why Tom doesn't leave as soon as he figures out that the children are killers, is because he is trying to find the German woman who kept calling for help. He eventually finds her, seconds after her murder, with a group boys about to molest her half naked corpse and he chases them away in disgust.

Spending more time with the kids and their games would be like spending time with the xenomorph in Alien pottering around the airducts of the Nostromo between kills or with the shark of Jaws flossing its teeth. This isn't Truffaut's Small Change, it's a horror film, the kids are the monsters.

[Mr Sausage]

I don’t necessarily think we should spend more time with the kids playing games, just that more explicit parallels like the two pinata scenes would be a stronger bit of social commentary than the moral hectoring we do get.

[The Curious Sofa]

I agree that the moralising is what lets the movie down (which I think is mostly solved by the shorter US cut). I responded to:

Agreed that time spent with the kids and their games would be the more interesting way to go.

[brundlefly]

I ended up re-watching the movie because its been a while and the claim that the two protagonists are "horrible people " now strikes me as even more absurd. They are unfailingly polite in a self-effacing British way, the husband does his best to communicate in Spanish (not common for Brits holidaying in Spain) and and the only horrible thing he does is to not figure out earlier that they need to get off the island after witnessing the first murder but that's horror movie logic. To project some colonial subtext onto them you have to do some major interpretive gymnastics and they are after all in Spain, a country with its own inglorious colonial past.

They certainly think they are decent people and I'm happy for you that you think they are as well! They don't do anything that makes them deserve to die! Very few people do! Except in horror movies, where characters are built expressly for that purpose. The couple could certainly be more boorish caricatures, tidily two-dimensional, instead of casually entitled creatures. It’s great that the wife decides once she gets to Spain that she should finally figure out how to say, “Thank you!” in Spanish. She’s so proud of herself when she does! And that the husband, so fond of the remote destination that won place in his heart after a stay a dozen years ago keeps anglicizing its name unless immediately corrected. (Until he gets to the pension, when for some reason he switches over. Maybe he’s figured out there’s something wrong with his island and doesn’t want it anymore. Or the actor was just having a good day.)

Is questioning why a fair-skinned English couple are cast as the main characters in a Spanish production a terrible thing to do? (I presume it was more a practical matter to do with international distribution. But still, it's there.) That a Spanish coastal town is declared overrun by foreigners; “Where are all the Spanish people?” the wife asks, finally agreeing (quite reasonably, no one likes tourists) to find a place their own. “Looks like a foreigner,” says an EMT as they examine the body that washes up on shore. Not worth considering there are feelings from newly post-Franco Spain working their way out, here?

As to the the fishing scene, it's implied that Tom saw that the scowly boy was using something unusual for bait and in retrospect that appears to have been human remains. That's why he wants to see what's in the basket (I read a couple of reviews, which interpret the scene the same). This wasn't just the "entitled" white cis man (as the kids say today) stopping the disadvantaged child from feeding the needy, it's the first time Tom notices something is wrong on the island.

Perhaps on-screen circumstances and details don't matter! Like that fishing scene, in which -- because there's never anything like an insert shot, and because the blocking is weird -- we never see the boy's hook leave the water, and we never see the man see or react to seeing something on the hook, though the pole goes up and down as the boat docks under it. What we do see is a pair of children guiding the couples' boat to dock. They say in Spanish, "Let's help them, Monolo." The man watches while they dock, addresses them in Spanish to be careful of their own safety; on disembarking, asks them (again in Spanish) to hand him his bag, please, and thanks them. (Doesn't offer a tip or anything, but why should he?) As the couple is leaving, the fishing boy -- who has remained silent, bless him -- watches. The man looks back a couple times, puts down his bags, comes back, touches the boy (who has since turned away from him) on the shoulder, and addresses him in English. Doesn't get a response, addresses him again, still in English, then pokes at the boy's personal basket of people-chum.

Of course the assumption is that it's (shuddery font) human flesh, but without seeing what people think he saw, all we have is his behavior, which is presumptuous, invasive. "Hey, is that a human ear on that hook?" is something he never tries to say in Spanish. And if he did think he saw something so obviously wrong he had to get pokey-bothery about it and decided to just go about his holiday, then he deserves to horror-movie-die even harder.

And I don't know why you are dragging gender into it, as if I'm going to get all triggered (as the kids say today).

About the apparent theft, when they try to get ice cream to cool down, Evelyn suggests they leave money, as nobody is around. When Tom gets things from the abandoned store soon after, it cuts before he leaves and it's not out of question that he left money for the things he took

I agree that the husband left money in the shop, I was just being snarky. People like this would never steal goods from a store. But other character things that happen in that sequence: When they’ve discovered the ice cream is too-soft serve, they do not leave the stand the way they found it; they walk away without replacing the lid. And on his way to the store, when the husband sees movement in a window and no one answers his knock, he feels free to enter and wander around someone’s home. It doesn’t matter, of course, everyone’s dead! The flies have better things to eat than melted ice cream. These two are role models.

he is trying to find the German woman who kept calling for help. He eventually finds her, seconds after her murder, with a group boys about to molest her half naked corpse and he chases them away in disgust.

Not how that happens. He simply and wordlessly walks in on them, shocked; and as the children often do throughout when discovered by an adult, they laugh and run away. “Seconds” is also unclear, though it’s that in movie-time; she’s been transported from the switchboard exchange to the church, she’s already been partially stripped – one little girl is twirling around by the altar in her clothes, playing dress-up. Everything about the church scene is great. Even the molestation is depicted as less a sexual act than giggly juvenile curiosity.

Spending more time with the kids and their games would be like spending time with the xenomorph in Alien pottering around the airducts of the Nostromo between kills or with the shark of Jaws flossing its teeth. This isn't Truffaut's Small Change, it's a horror film, the kids are the monsters.

I responded to:

Agreed that time spent with the kids and their games would be the more interesting way to go.

Which ignored my end statement that, “It is a long movie already and perhaps a crisp shorter cut is the way to go.” (Ditto my post, here. Kill me.) But that’s okay, cherry-picking’s in the air. The children are in the role of movie monsters but they are also children, and one of the best things about this movie is that we get moments of them simultaneously acting like children AND like monsters and why not want to have more of a particular thing that the film does well? Certainly more palatable than the atrocity footage, which is what we were comparatively talking about… and for that matter, more palatable than four different phone calls from the Dutch woman, or watching the wife learn how to work light switches. But then the couples’ whole time on the island is kind of a game, the kids had plenty chance to kill them at any time and were only teasing out the run time, shame on them.

I agree that the shorter this movie the better, and perhaps someday I will visit the Island of Death. (And if that cut uses alternate takes or angles that change what I've described, all apologies. I've only seen the original version.) I’d forgotten there was additional news footage and explicit statement of the “children always suffer” sentiment in the scene where the couple are buying film, and a follow-up discussion in their hotel room, making that opening sequence redundant on top of everything else.

And sharks can’t floss. That’s silly.

[Mr Sausage]

Is questioning why a fair-skinned English couple are cast as the main characters in a Spanish production a terrible thing to do? (I presume it was more a practical matter to do with international distribution. But still, it's there.) That a Spanish coastal town is declared overrun by foreigners; “Where are all the Spanish people?” the wife asks, finally agreeing (quite reasonably, no one likes tourists) to find a place their own. “Looks like a foreigner,” says an EMT as they examine the body that washes up on shore. Not worth considering there are feelings from newly post-Franco Spain working their way out, here?

It's not the questioning, it's the too-easy conclusions. All of the above is rendered incoherent by the fact that the children have killed all the locals on the island well before they get to a couple of foreign tourists. So what part does their being tourists, or pale, or rude, or ignorant play in the movie's conceit? Nothing that I can see. The children attack them the same as they do their own family members, the police, and presumably everyone else in Spain. Adults are targeted indiscriminately, so what kind of adults the tourists end up being is rendered meaningless. I'd say the stuff about tourism and Spanish culture in the first third is there much like the prologue, as an attempt to freight an ambiguous story with a lot of overdetermined sociopolitical meaning that it doesn't hold on its own and that the movie isn't sure how to integrate. It's a case of filmmakers straining to have something, anything, to say. Thankfully, once past the first act, they knew enough to get out of the way and let the story unfold unencumbered.