The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

[knives]

To be fair to Tension the twist was mandated by the producers with the original plan making more sense.

[colinr0380]

Plus Laura Harrington was also in Devil's Advocate, I think as one of Pacino's entourage in his office at the end of the film. She is best known (perhaps only to me though!) as the heroine in the only film directed by Stephen King, the eternally goofy Maximum Overdrive (Amusingly after what King says in the trailer about "wanting to get a film done right", the film was later remade as a TV movie under the title of King's original short story, Trucks in almost an exact reversal of circumstances in comparison to The Shining!)

While Harrington is great (she doesn't have quite as many quirky affectations as every other character in the film, even downplaying her romance with Emilio Estevez in quite a touching way), I don't think that Maximum Overdrive should trouble the horror list of many people (any goodwill I have towards the film evaporates once we get to a pre-Simpsons shrill performance from Yeardley Smith as a character who unfortunately survives to sail off into the sunset, complaining all the way!), but it does have some spectacular car crash scenes and a great opening sequence. In fact I remember a wonderful section of a Channel 4 documentary on 'the nightmare of technology' back in the early 1990s which showed clips of this film while someone narrated a passage from J.G. Ballard's Crash over the top! Something which, perhaps unintentionally, worked brilliantly to bring the car crash fetishism of King's film to the forefront!

[domino harvey]

Dean Koontz's Phantoms is quite a nifty little film

While I remember little about the film (it climaxes in a church, if my subtlety gauge recalls correctly), I do strongly remember the interview Koontz gave on the Late Late Show with Tom Synder around the time of its release, mainly because it was when he sheared his mustache and premiered that "You've got to be shitting me" hairpiece

Connie Nielsen from Demonlover's in Devil's Advocate in the thankless seductress role as well

[zedz]

Which reminds me - is Demonlover on anybody else's radar as a horror movie? It's fussing around on the margins of mine with about half a dozen other titles. It's certainly a cousin of something like Videodrome, which I don't think there'd be any doubt about including within the genre.

[domino harvey]

Which reminds me - is Demonlover on anybody else's radar as a horror movie? It's fussing around on the margins of mine with about half a dozen other titles. It's certainly a cousin of something like Videodrome, which I don't think there'd be any doubt about including within the genre.

It wasn't until I typed the word ten minutes ago and I am about to type it again on my provisional list

[colinr0380]

Yes, Phantoms does have Peter O'Toole getting into theological debate with aliens who have taken over the bodies of the rest of the team, though again the Blob remake has a better anti-religious touch ("The Lord....will give me a sign"), which is all the more subversive for the original 50s film having been an offshoot of a religious film company (it seems like they don't really like the remake much from the small amount which they say about it on the Criterion edition commentary, especially the nasty tone of the film, but Jack Harris tactfully skirts around the issue!)

[Mr Sausage]

Stop making me want to see films like this

Maybe I can make you want to see one of them a lot less:

Martyrs. Ugh. A stupid movie, a crude movie, a cruel movie, a movie whose only theme, whose only mood, whose only aim, is suffering and debasement and cruelty, depicted with the utmost care and attention. It is especially stupid because it attempts to justify itself [spoilers to follow] through a series of theologically and metaphysically incoherent religious ideas whose pretense to intellectualism would be hilarious if so much time wasn't spent beating you into submission.

You can tell how uninterested this movie is in its supposed ideas because of how little time it spends with them and how much more time it spends showing us in extended detail the sufferings of its various characters. If the amount of time given to its (sham) ideas amounted to more than 60 total seconds, I would be surprised. That leaves you with 93 other minutes of suffering and cruelty to endure.

The idea it advances, that people are hallowed by suffering, is a disgusting religious idea, mediaeval in the most pejorative sense. It's torture worship, and therefore partakes of the very worst aspect of the Christian religion. As William Empson pointed out, in Christian doctrine, the greatest and happiest event to have ever occurred and that would ever occur in the history of the universe was the torture and murder of a man in the middle east. Believing this, Empson said, could not but be malforming--it is where the burnings and stonings and self-flagellatings and the inquisition have their root--and here indeed we have a movie that acts this out in the crudest and stupidest way possible. Crude, in that it wants to show us suffering as a way of tantalizing us for the total opposite, which it then withholds from us (a cruelty to the audience); stupid, because any idiot can do this. You don't need to know anything about anything to pretend you have insight and then not give it. All the filmmakers have done is taken a pre-formed banality and generalization--a received idea--and then dropped it into the movie so that they wouldn't have to do any of the actual effort of working through it or genuinely dealing with it. It's a cheat.

As for its formal construction, I especially disliked the crude way it attempts (successfully, it seems, in the case of a few here) to manipulate you into accepting its premise by forcing you to endure more cruelty than you can take, then suddenly playing some nice music and showing you a character acting like she's in the throes of religious ecstasy. The technique here is obvious: everything before is so horrendous that as a reflex you'll latch onto any respite offered. The filmmakers hope to exploit that by trying to get you to confuse your relief with an actual emotional experience, get you to think "well, maybe there is something to this after all." There isn't. It is simply that the respite seems so much more profound than it actually is by virtue of how horrible the preceding moments are. This is a cold and calculated manipulation with nothing at all behind it.

This movie offers you nothing; it's empty, but couched in terms that help viewers supply it with the thoughts and feelings they brought with them to the movie. That is the wrong transaction, especially for a movie that offers you so much pain and suffering.

[knives]

You just needed that first line of the third paragraph to kick me out of wanting to watch the film though I suppose that hallow intention should be obvious from the title. Gruesomeness in itself isn't a bad thing, but to use it for poorly thought out commentary really irks me. Though that's still not as bad as works that criticize other works by being even worse than those being criticized of which I'd have to say Captivity is the worst recent offender.

[Mr Sausage]

You just needed that first line of the third paragraph to kick me out of wanting to watch the film though I suppose that hallow intention should be obvious from the title.

Quite the Freudian slip!

Spoiler

Anyway, the movie has its characters advance the idea and then works a rather crude ambiguity in order to feign some distance on its behalf as a way of planting the idea while saving itself from having to justify the wickedness and moral turpitude that would come from being open about holding or advancing such an idea.

[domino harvey]

No, doesn't sound like my cup of tea (and just in time, it was next in my queue!). Thanks for enduring, M Sausage, I hope you enjoy your reverie as reward for making it through.

Strange that my earlier deluge of nineties horror films left out Species, which sort of succinctly ties in everything right and wrong with the popular cinema of the mid nineties in a pretty bow. I've always been surprised that Natasha Henstridge was never able to capitalize on her break here to become a big deal: she had the looks and the screen presence to blow up, but was quickly relegated to sixth fiddle for Bruce Willis and Jean Claude Van Damme before fading into b-movie purgatory (though I caught a few episodes of She Spies during its run and found it surprisingly fun in a goofy Saturday afternoon laze fashion)

[knives]

I wish I could claim it was intentional. Any warnings on Inside?

[Mr Sausage]

I wish I could claim it was intentional. Any warnings on Inside?

Haven't seen Inside, and have no interest in putting myself through any more of this kind of nonsense for other people's benefit.

[knives]

I wouldn't want you to force yourself through it either. It sounds like it has the potential to be godawful.

[Cold Bishop]

I'll actually agree that's it's an empty film, and one that's mostly an exercise in genre and style. It's probably not a good film, but it's stands out from the pack of shit that surrounded it. It also helps (and it's probably true of most of these films and horror films in general) to have seen it in a packed screening: you really appreciate the methodology of it's bad taste when it's not just you groaning at it.

Nonetheless, I stick to my two earlier recommendations, and I'm glad to have zedz backing.

[mfunk9786]

Comparing Martyrs to Inside, to paraphrase Michael on this forum, is like comparing a full-scale opera to a comic book. If you don't buy into the gory old-school grindhouse qualities of Inside, well, okay - but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the deep philosophical statement that Martyrs tries to make. Regardless of whether you come out moved by it or repulsed by it - or both - Martyrs is operating on an entirely different level from a OH NO THERE'S SOMEONE IN THE HOUSE movie like Inside.

[Cold Bishop]

Is that not to Inside's benefit? I haven't seen Martyrs, and don't know that I will, but the hypocritical grasp for significance many of these films share rub me as badly as the gore. At least Bustillo and Maury seem to know they were making a slasher film, plain and simple. At the time, at least, I found that bluntness rather refreshing. If it doesn't seem like your film, pass it by: it's hardly a masterpiece or anything, and the concept tells you exactly what to expect.

Which reminds me: Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day is also a film roughly connected to this cycle that's worth mentioning.

[knives]

Couldn't have said it better myself. I'm fully at ease with gore as long as it understands that it is trashy and just tries to make the best of it. When you start attempting to be grand you move onto a tightrope.

[mfunk9786]

I'm the kind of guy who likes a film like Inside, but there's no arguing that with someone who finds it mean-spirited. But I don't know that anyone can accuse Martyrs of being mean-spirited - even if they determine that it's not worth the time or effort involved, it's hard to say it didn't try to say something substantial about the topic at hand. I mean, maybe they're out there, but I don't know if the people who hate a film like Requiem for a Dream can honestly accuse it of being a cash grab, even though it's a deeply flawed [to be kind] effort to explore very heady subject matter.

Here's my quickie defense of this very recent and as yet underdeveloped and scapegoated subgenre: Just because something is very violent, doesn't mean it's lacking in any value. Just because you feel anyone could do it, doesn't mean that anyone else has the audacity or creativity to be so bold. There are awful 'torture porn' films (I'm taking the moniker back, I hate it so much) like Frontier(s) (which I'll write about in more detail next time I feel like making a several-film evaluational post) that just try to take films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the kinds of gore extremes that impress tweens who have downloaded their first torrent - but then there are films that are either well made horror with a heck of a sense of humor (Hostel), slasher films with a nü-gore edge (Inside) or films that [at least attempt] to use the entree into a popular genre to explore philosophy (A Serbian Film, Martyrs) - that are all worth people's time even if they end up hating some or all of them. That's what I've tried, and will continue to try, to bring to this thread that I felt might be lacking, even if my efforts are met with derision. I understand every single person who doesn't like every single one of these films, but I can't be alone in loving those that I love. Martyrs made me stay up one night crying about my own mortality and the pressure of religious influences all around me, and I don't know that I'd be comfortable admitting that if weren't a film that I felt was worth defending as more than meets the eye. I mean, if you don't like it - okay - but don't avoid it just because it's violent unless you like, get physically ill at the sight of cinematic gore.

[Gregory]

Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day is also a film roughly connected to this cycle that's worth mentioning.

I've put off buying this for years being unsure of how to choose from what's available. Looks like the Panorama might be the only DVD still available. Can anyone tell me if it's anamorphic (or at least OAR?) and uncut? Decent picture quality?

[zedz]

Nonetheless, I stick to my two earlier recommendations, and I'm glad to have zedz backing.

What am I being blamed for this time?

Oh right, Cargo 200. That's some strong medicine, all right, but it's not in the torture porn safari park.

[Murdoch]

Which reminds me - is Demonlover on anybody else's radar as a horror movie? It's fussing around on the margins of mine with about half a dozen other titles. It's certainly a cousin of something like Videodrome, which I don't think there'd be any doubt about including within the genre.

It's got my vote.

Spoiler

The notion of the pornography industry as this giant conglomerate kidnapping people and forcing them into sexual slavery to be broadcast online certainly meets my definition of horror, even if it doesn't fit conventionally within the genre and often is more of a corporate espionage thriller.

[Mr Sausage]

...the deep philosophical statement that Martyrs tries to make.

It doesn't make one, and it doesn't try.

Spoiler

How anyone can confuse a few lines of extremely generalized dialogue on a vaguely religious theme for either depth or philosophy is beyond me. Its bloody ideas are incoherent! Work them through:

If: the soul can achieve a vision of the metaphysical when the the physical is destroyed,
Then: the body is distinct from the spirit and the spirit must be released by the destruction of the body.

Martyrs posits that achieving a vision of the metaphysical through bodily suffering in fact causes physical life to extend, and this is the evidence that one is a martyr and can achieve transcendence. That means the following:

If: the experience of the metaphysical by the spirit sustains the physical,
Then: the spirit is not distinct from the physical and does not need to be liberated from it.

They're fucking incompatible! It conflates two separate ideas that have been in contention for centuries. That means the metaphysics the movie posits are wrong, so all of the sect's efforts are wrong, so these girls went through suffering for nothing and the audience with them. 94 minutes of awfulness because a couple of characters in the movie are insane. Great.

[mfunk9786]

Spoiler

Don't you realize that the idea behind Martyrs is that the work done by these sick people is nightmarish and wrong regardless of what the result of their efforts are?

And don't you realize that this forum has spoiler tags, which you're not exempt from regardless of how much value you feel the film you're arguing about has?

[zedz]

So the Big Idea is actually

Spoiler

torturing and killing people is WRONG?

OMFG. Deep.

[mfunk9786]

Oy vey. This conversation would be a lot less disastrous if more than two people had at least seen the film