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Just thought everyone would like to know that The Wicker Tree is finally getting a release. It's from Anchor Bay in the UK, but that's better than nothing. This also gives me the good opportunity to say that The Wicker Man is a must watch for all three of you who haven't seen it. Ditto my avatar by the way. As to the sole film I actually bothered to watch anew.
Phantasm
Shockingly I've only seen Bubba-Ho Tep and his MoH episode from Coscarelli, but this further cements him as a genius of the genre for me. It also beautifully illustrates just how far you're able to go with some wacky and interesting ideas and still have mainstream credibility as long as it's in the name of horror. It doesn't really go far in it's themes, but they're present enough for a smile. The real wonder is the nice low budget visual bizarreness of the whole mess. There are a few really great and creepy images (the tall man over the bed) and though it does steal from Don't Look Now a little too liberally it still manages to forge it's own identity. Speaking of a unique personality I am far happier than I should be to find out this is a '70s film and not part of the post '81 explosion making it stand out from the crowd even more. Definitely going to go out of my way to finish this series (and possibly even filmography) now.

The Prowler (Joseph Zito, 1981): A surprisingly effective slasher film considering it never strays from the formula (and that I guessed the identity of the killer in the first 15 minutes). If it hadn't been released the same year, you'd think this movie was ripping off My Bloody Valentine (or vice versa). In both, some murders took place at a celebratory event held years ago by a small town, causing said event (here, a Graduation Dance, in the other, a Valentine's day dance) to be discontinued. That is, of course, until the town decides to bring the tradition back decades later, causing the killer (dressed head to foot in Army gear here, in a miner's outfit in Valentine) to return. Something both films nail is the atmosphere of the small town setting and the outfits of their killers, which are appropriately creepy. The Prowler in particular has several well-handled and satisfying stalk sequences. Unlike just about every other slasher, when people in this movie run, they flat out run, and no tripping over high heels either. In fact, no one does anything particularly stupid in this one. The movie has a real nasty streak, tho', preferring to linger on the pain and suffering of its victims more than usual. It's understandable considering how excellent Tom Savini's gore effects are, and at least the movie is trying to make the murders less rather than more enjoyable; but it still left a bad taste in my mouth. Not List worthy, but one of the better slasher movies I've seen. I like it better than Zito's Friday entry (which, amusingly, actually displays less directorial skill than this earlier effort).

I just realized that Diane Betrand's brilliant L'Annulaire (the Ring Finger) is a great fit for the unconventional horror category, as my own reading of the film from last year identifies it as an erotic variation on the more traditional ghost story (while Jean-Luc Garbo saw it more as a fairy tale, so YMMV)-- but I've been trying fruitlessly to get more people to see this film for a while, so this is the perfect opportunity. I've deleted my prior picks and made it my sole spotlight. There's an actually not half-bad R1 release from Strand (!), but it's clearly NTSC-PAL sourced from the R2 Second Sight disc so the original is the route to go. (And here's a non-translated trailer that does a decent job selling the film)

Since an erotic ghost story/dark fairy tale was too tempting to pass up, I just finished watching L'Annulaire, and I thought the movie was riveting and very beautiful. Hard to know what to say about it. I'm not sure I would call it horror or if I'm going to put it on my list, even tho' it belongs on some kind of list. What's haunting me at the moment is whether the ending is a freeing act of self assertion or a final capitulation to being contained forever as a specimen, to be admired, or exorcized, or collected, the erotic object truly reduced to a trophy. I think it's crucial that Iris slowly regresses to a child-like state, lazing around on the floor as she fiddles with the game pieces she's been ordered to clean up (as the parental figure watches). Unsettling, but she shows nothing but a desire to continue in this state.

Bewitching movie.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Fran Rubel Kuzui 1992) I'm not one of the disciples of the subsequent TV series but I thought this was a moderately successful (and very of-its-time) teen horror comedy that's best when exploring the titular daffy Valley Girl's reticence at abandoning her mindless existence for a higher calling killing bloodsuckers. Kristy Swanson is very charming in a role that finds many excuses to dress her for maximum teenage boy mileage. There are a surprising amount of future names in the film-- beyond the above the title names of Swanson, Donald Sutherland, Rutger Hauer, Luke Perry, and Paul Rubens, I spied Ben Affleck, Hilary Swank, David Arquette, Tom Jane, Natasha Gregson Wagner, Ricki Lake, and Stephen Root. Who knows, maybe you're in it as well!

Highway to Hell (Ate de Jong 1991) Now this is a bad Kristy Swanson vehicle (and I don't mean the Hellcruiser she's locked inside). A bizarre, tonally illogical excursion through Hell-as-backroads-Arizona that finds Chad Lowe trying to rescue his bride-to-be Swanson from getting deflowered by the Devil. So, a universally relatable plot. Nothing can be bothered to make any sense, and the film looks both cheap and far too expensive. For some reason every member of Ben Stiller's family and two-time Oscar nominee Richard Farnsworth are in this film as well. Screenwriter Brian Helgeland later went on to win an Oscar, presumably for recalling his work here and just doing the opposite.

Deadly Blessing (Wes Craven 1981) Wes Craven is not a very good director and this is not a very good film. Something about an extreme Amish clan (Led by a not-embarrassed-enough Ernest Borgnine) facing off against a young outsider whom they suspect of being an incubus, with lazy gender politics, dopey scare scenes ("I dreamed there was a spider!"), and a typically awful nonsensical ending-- though that presumes what came before made any sense.

The Trollenberg Terror (Quentin Lawrence, 1958) So ITV ripped off the BBC's Quatermass, and then Berman & Baker did the same filmwise with a screenplay by Jimmy Sangster. Not really in the same league, it doesn't really go beyond being an entertaining monster movie (with admittedly .... low budget .... effects), but worth a watch if you've already caught the Quatermass series and X The Unknown.

Legacy of Dracula (aka tons of other names) (Michio Yamamoto, 1970) Curious, atmospheric Japanese horror - really does feel like a Japanese Hammer - following investigations into various disappearances. The title suggests what is going on, but plot is really secondary to atmosphere. The UK DVD is non-anamorphic scope - and the subtitles annoyingly disappear when expanded - but still manages to be quite watchable, much like the film really. It's very short as well. There are two sequels (apparently very loose) which are on my Lovefilm rental list - anyone out there seen them and can comment if they're worth catching?

Ghostwatch (Lesley Manning, 1992) Fellow Brits should know all about this, but just in case... 20 years ago, the BBC on Halloween broadcast this, a drama that was structured as a live broadcast with the leads playing themselves. Despite being clearly labelled a drama, many people were fooled by it and the resulting s**tstorm ensured that it's never been rebroadcast in the UK. I didn't catch it at the time - my friend and I decided it was going to be rubbish and went to the video store instead - which was a big mistake. Finally catching up with it - and aware of its tricks and plotline - it's hugely effective and great fun, especially the ending where

Spoiler

Michael Parkinson gets possessed.

Catch it if you haven't seen it - it's making my list.

Tucker and Dale vs Evil (Eli Craig, 2010) Made me laugh a lot. It's a one joke film - what if the scary hillbillies in a slasher film are really completely innocent and the student victims are just narrow minded and clumsy - but it's a good joke and doesn't go on too long. Likeable performances from the leads go a long way too.

domino harvey wrote:Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Fran Rubel Kuzui 1992) I'm not one of the disciples of the subsequent TV series but I thought this was a moderately successful (and very of-its-time) teen horror comedy that's best when exploring the titular daffy Valley Girl's reticence at abandoning her mindless existence for a higher calling killing bloodsuckers. Kristy Swanson is very charming in a role that finds many excuses to dress her for maximum teenage boy mileage. There are a surprising amount of future names in the film-- beyond the above the title names of Swanson, Donald Sutherland, Rutger Hauer, Luke Perry, and Paul Rubens, I spied Ben Affleck, Hilary Swank, David Arquette, Tom Jane, Natasha Gregson Wagner, Ricki Lake, and Stephen Root. Who knows, maybe you're in it as well!

I grew up watching this film, but on a recent revisit, I found it awfully corny. Rutger Hauer, oddly enough, fails to make much of an impression as the villain. Swanson is great fun, as you say, and I enjoyed the bits with her airhead friends. And of course, Paul Rubens has one of the all-time great death scenes.

Dr Amicus wrote:I didn't catch it at the time - my friend and I decided it was going to be rubbish and went to the video store instead - which was a big mistake.

Ghostwatch was a really good show, written by Stephen Volk who had previously written Gothic for Ken Russell and the 'all-American family hires a mysterious British nanny who sacrifices babies to possessed trees' film for William Friedkin called The Guardian! One of the major problems that the programme faced was that it was shown on an extremely rare Halloween night where the other channels did 'true' horror programming - Channel 4 showed John Carpenter's The Fog and BBC2 did an all nighter of horror films and documentaries (and by all night I mean all night - I think they finished off by showing one of the Abbott and Costello 'horror' films at 3 or 4 in the morning!), so something which purported to be a tame ghost hunting documentary would probably have been passed over by horror fans as well as drawing in a whole different crowd of mainstream BBC1 viewers!

Beyond the horror elements Ghostwatch is an excellent satire of early 1990s BBC television programming, smashing all of the most familiar elements of the broadcaster together - the dramatised reconstructions from a show like 999; the alternately cheesy, eager and patronising children's presenter style personified by Sarah Greene (during the same period she actually was a children's TV presenter for the Going Live! show); Mike Greene manning the obligatory pre-internet interactive phone lines as popularised by the early years of Comic Relief charity fundraising nights; the BBC 'rising star' of the period (there is usually one person who gets picked out due to a particular success and then gets thrown into working on every other show on the channel, even if they might be a poor fit for it) gets filled in Ghostwatch by Craig Charles at the height of his Red Dwarf fame being pressed into doing vox pops to fill time; and of course the biggest coup that Ghostwatch gets is having Michael Parkinson play himself as the consumate interviewer and comforting voice of reason...until things go wildly out of control. No wonder that people familiar with all of these television personalities 'playing it straight' found the programme rather disconcerting!

Here's a Points of View segment about the controversy, and here are the producers defending the programme

Here are 10 great Slasher films that people should check out because you likely haven't seen them or thought they looked stupid.

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon(2006) This is a horror hybrid of two genres I think most people have a general dislike towards, slashers and mockumentaries. Nathan Baesel and Angela Goethals have great chemistry as Leslie and the director of the documentary. The movie tries to give you a step by step example as to how a "super human" would go about it. Leslie is Michael Myers as your typical reality show narcissist...and it works well. Scott Wilson (Walking Dead), Robert England (NOES), and Zelda Rubinstein (Poltergeist) all play supporting characters.

Fritt Vilt 1 & 2 (2006 & 2008) - aka Cold Prey This is a Norweigen version of Halloween where an insane and isolated child comes back to his home and murders the teenage inhabitants. In the sequel the last surviving member goes one on one with the bad guy in an isolated Hospital. This is a film with amazing tension, a great setting, and fantastic pacing. The first one is so good that you immediately will feel the need to track down the sequel.

Homicidal (1961) - William Castle is one of my favorite directors, while most film makers try for originality Castle was focuses on innovation one of his best is the film Homicidal. It's a convincing thriller but the ending is just shear brilliance another popular slasher film tried the same twist years later but they didn't have the actor to pull it off.

Kill Theory (2009) - This is one of those Saw ripoffs that I think is actually superior to the original. A strange madman is terrorizing a group of graduates in an isolated home. The kids have to kill each other to make it to the end. What I love about this film, aside from the originality of it is that it takes the Alien formula of picking off the characters not by a pecking order but more organically. It also ends with a nice little twist at the end which doesn't dominate the movie.

The Prowler (1981) - The Prowler doesn't really play by the same rules most slashers do. This is a movie more about a spree killer than a serial killer. It's a slasher film about murder and less about why, I don't think you can even tell who was the killer a day after you watched it. But what makes this film a must see is the special effects and the pacing. This is not a film that will bore you.

Psycho II (1983) - I'm sure people feel like this is an audacious idea, a sequel to Psycho, absurd. Yet here's the crazy thing, it's a very good movie on every level. It's one of the best shot, acted, and written films of this era. Anthony Perkins plays Norman Bates as a man released from the asylum returning to his home. Meg Tilly(greatly under-rated actress) plays a young woman who works at the diner Bates finds work at. Dennis Franz plays the new sleezy motel manager, which he does effectively and Robert Loggia plays the therapist that let Norman out. The plot is wonderfully twisted the director does a great job finding different angles to shoot the scenes.

Slaughter High (1986) - This is one of the last "great" films from the slasher era. Don't get me wrong the acting is bad and the film has major plot holes and the "teenagers" are some of the oldest looking people you'll see outside of the Peach Pit. But What makes this film so immensely watchable is it's enthusiasm for the genre. Everything from the set, to the setup, to the villain is well done.

Strait-Jacket (1964) - Anther William Castle Psycho ripoff yet this one is more prophetic as it mirrors the plot of Psycho II. Joan Crawford plays a women who is released from a mental asylum when she comes back home to live with her daughter strange things start to happen. The films questions is she going mad or is she being set up.

Triangle (2009) - This is a movie that starts as a slasher and then something happens and it becomes something innovative enjoyable and thought provoking. Mellisa George plays the lead and she is just amazing, had this film received wider recognition she might have been up for awards. The story revolves around the passengers of a yachting trip in the Atlantic Ocean who, when struck by mysterious weather conditions, jump to another ship only to experience greater havoc on the open seas. And that's all you should know about it before you watch it.

I'll also toss Triangle a recommendation. It's like if Cube 2 had been good.

Busy week.
Black Magic
I wish I could be as enamored as others with my first taste of HK horror, but this was pretty bad. It's not as ridiculous as the premise is desperately screaming for and does not to make me take it seriously. It's not good-bad, Troma-good, or even insane. It's just bad.

Girly
Now here's a perfect piece of insanity. Francis is real hit or miss as a director, but this script and cast are too game for even an untalented director to fail let alone someone as devilish as this Hammer veteran. The way it deals with the sexuality of it's killers is pretty interesting, particuarly the almost asexuality of Sonny. There's hints of homosexuality with him, but it all stems from Girly's possessiveness of the guest. His character seems almost entirely developed out of her's with no presence of his own. That doesn't hurt the film though as the actor jumps within the role in such a way 9as does the rest of the cast) where regular characterization doesn't feel like it matters. The movie works more like a dark Monty Python sketch (which is to say a regular one) and under that logic of manners the character's having no personality of their own, but rather the one given to them by the others fits better.

Eyes of Laura Mars
A Carpenter scripted Kershner joint starring Dunaway and Tommy Lee Jones. You already know if you like it. The ultimate twist is pretty easy to tell and how they get rid of the killer is just absurd, but the characters (particularly Auberjonois' queen) allow the problems with the story not to matter and give the film a reasonable level of fun even if this is nobody's best work.

She Freak
Terrible remake of Freaks is terrible. No this movie is not worth more than a tired joke. Though it did make me appreciate people like Alonso and van Sant who do and succeed with the people walking and not talking for an hour thing even more somehow and highlights what the original did right.

Berserk!
More circus mayhem starring Joan Crawford in a better than usual performance. If Laura Mars has one of the more predictable twists than this goes in the opposite direction, though not for good reasons. It doesn't make any sense and despite really flimsy attempts to communicate otherwise doesn't make a lick of sense. Before that last minute though the film actually does a great job at establishing character and setting with all the wonderful red herring you could eat (Diana Dors slimy character and the midget naturally being the best) with the tense moments succeeding absolutely. Outside of the plot mechanics (and Crawford's makeup) it doesn't work as a horror film much content to just The Greatest Show on Earth us with the ending coming along basically because the film is already over 90 minutes so might as well. This all sounds more cruel than I mean and would recommend the movie as a fun, if slightly dumb, night out.

Visiting Hours
Candania, how I love your slashers. While this is no Black Christmas it's still a pretty intense number with an appropriately creepy Michael Ironside performance. The movie doesn't make as much use of it's setting nor the themes set up in the opening scene as much as I would like, but it manages well enough on checking off all of the important things and I suppose even bringing up what it does is better than most (even if the film itself seems at odds with those concepts ending up on a conclusion I disagree with). Also Shatner is here inexplicably.

Bad Dreams
Especially with the casting of Jennifer Rubin let alone considering the plot I couldn't help but think of Nightmare on Elm Street here and unfortunately that film I've been trying to be a defender toward here is squashed by this one. It handles it's material in a smarter way with some even grander set pieces. As Dom already said just as the film is about to go off the rails it comes up with the only explanation that would legitimize the potential silliness to the degree I'm betting it plays better the second time. It's also really amusing to see who worked on the film behind the scenes with Fleming later doing Dick and one of the writers doing a lot of classic (and not so classic) action movies. In fact much like Dick the real genius of the film is how even the smallest role is so memorable. Even that bodyguard who's onscreen for all of ten seconds is pretty memorable (and considering what the next scene is that says something). If I had a complaint about the film it's the incredibly lax security, but I suppose the ending explains that away well enough.

knives wrote:Busy week.
Black Magic
I wish I could be as enamored as others with my first taste of HK horror, but this was pretty bad. It's not as ridiculous as the premise is desperately screaming for and does not to make me take it seriously. It's not good-bad, Troma-good, or even insane. It's just bad.

I like the film, but it certainly has gotten a reputation of being something of a bore recently as people discover it on DVD. I can easily see how people may feel that way if they get there via Boxer's Omen, or Cat III splatterfests... or if they have their hopes up after hearing about those films's reputations. It's not scary, nor brain-frying, but I think it's goofy fun. It could, however, have used more sleaze, as that's what Ho Meng-Hua was really good at, being one of Shaw's premier exploitation filmmakers (along with Kuei Chih-Hung and Sun Chung).

It's why I prefer the sequel, which cranks everything up several degrees.

Visiting Hours was another of those films that briefly made the video nasty list. I have recently made my first order from the Warner Archive. Which long unavailable piece of cinema was my first pick from the burn-on-demand riches available? Illustrious director Ken Hughes' final film, the slasher Night School (aka Terror Eyes in the UK)! Which was another one of those films briefly on the video nasty list before being quietly dropped.

The strangest thing about it is how elegant and rather staid the mise en scene is - the action bounces around between three or four key locations, with a murder closing off a location and narrowing down the focus onto those which remain. This is not really a film where we get a sense of the world being an open one, rather very narrowly defined with every character we meet, even the minor ones, ending up having a role in the drama. This can either be seen as disappointing or as adding a nice sense of claustrophobia to the drama!

I cannot really see anything particularly terrible about this film that would have placed it on the list, so I assume that it was just caught up in the wave of panic at the time. Although there is a rather misogynist streak to the way that the women are portrayed throughout (there are flashes of rather inappropriate humour all the way along from the cops - not reaching Last House On The Left levels of incongruity, but they still act flippantly - through to the rather unnecessarily prolonged 'where's the head going to pop up?' post-murder scene in the diner, which seems to revel in the aftermath in comparison with relatively coy sequences following the other murders), but I suppose this is not too uncharacteristic of slasher films in general. I guess this worrying feeling could be seen as being tackled in the 'twist' reveal of the killer, but then that could also be seen as compounding it!

Perhaps the greater focus is on authority figures - this night school appears to only have the female director and one Anthropology teacher working in it (again a disappointing lack of opening out the world of the school or a purposeful limiting of the environment down to characters with a use to the narrative?), who both turn out to be using the school in order to have affairs with their young adult charges!

Spoiler

Yes, this does involve the director of the school inviting one of the girls under threat back to her home for 'protection' in order to drug her into having a lesbian tryst! But don't worry, in a Tenebrae-anticipating move, transgression is swiftly followed by murder!

The over-friendly waitress in the diner gets the most cruelly abused though (a class comment?). Apart from the drawn out 'Where's the head? Is it in the soup being served up for the hungry customers?' comedy (and the rest of her body getting dumped into the trash), the only reason that I can discern for her getting murdered is just because she briefly flirted once with the Anthropology professor whilst she was taking his food order in the presence of his murderous assistant! I suppose this is meant to compound the murderer's psychosis since otherwise every other murder actually seems understandably motivated! (i.e. in terms of the assistant trying to kill all of the other people the Anthropology teacher has been having affairs with!)

The Anthropology angle does lead to a quite nice head-hunting explanation for the murders (plus a novel and amusing twist on the Psycho shower scene, in which the red water running down the plughole here is the residue from a love scene between two characters playing around with African face painting materials!), although with this being the only subplot that is fleshed out it removes any mystery of who the killers might be from the film!

(Also is the one cop working everything out and giving a knowing "Or is it?" reponse to his partner when he declares case closed really enough to qualify him as a great detective? He resolutely fails to actually save anyone with working out whodunnit, so doesn't that just make him a rather ineffectual audience surrogate character?)

Not the best slasher film ever made (the murder scenes are particularly staid, with the characters acting upset, more as if they have just remembered that they have forgotten to do something important rather than with the knowledge of facing certain decapitation and death!), but strangely the flaws and utter lack of mystery made the experience of watching it quite endearing in an undemanding way! It's a professional, elegantly staged, entertaining while it lasts film, with victims who are walking the fine, barely characterised line between the audience not wanting them to die and yet not being sympathetic enough for us to be troubled by their murders for long. But its straight forward narrative and sticking within genre norms means that there is nothing particularly memorable about it - having watched it on Friday evening, details are already beginning to fade away on writing this on Monday!

Can you have such a thing as a safely untroubling horror film? If so, Night School gets as close as possible to that, scraping through to graduation after completing the minimum requirements in order to qualify.

Glad you dug Bad Dreams, knives, it really is just so much fun and one of the few films I've seen from this project that I'd readily watch again (along with the Ally Sheedy Fear-- hopefully someone someone someone will give this great film a prime spot on their list so it doesn't get Orphaned. Knives or Colin, maybe?)

If I had to turn in a list today it would probably make the cut, but by the end of this I won't promise nothing.

The incredible transfer on the Blu-ray edition of The Ring is yet another reason to check out this grim, strange horror film. It walks through its bafflingly absurd J-horror plot without the eye rolls it would've deserved in less capable hands, and Brian Cox gives an awesomely game supporting performance. This is a modern studio horror film that gets it right, and one you shouldn't miss.

mfunk9786 wrote:The incredible transfer on the Blu-ray edition of The Ring is yet another reason to check out this grim, strange horror film. It walks through its bafflingly absurd J-horror plot without the eye rolls it would've deserved in less capable hands, and Brian Cox gives an awesomely game supporting performance. This is a modern studio horror film that gets it right, and one you shouldn't miss.

I remember liking the remake well enough when it came out (crazy digital horse and all) but I revisited the original just a couple months ago and was pleasantly surprised at how well it holds up. I hate to be the guy who says 'the original's better' so I'll just chime in saying that I prefer it's relatively bare-bones unfussy approach far more than the remake. It doesn't hold a candle next to, say, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's metaphysical horror and I'll admit that the prologue is hokey (one point where the american version probably improved upon the original) but I honestly think Ringu is one of the best examples of a refreshingly strong, clean concept done right (a cursed videotape) in the genre. A great central mystery, some (ahem) killer set pieces and a mounting sense of dread thanks to some seemingly insurmountable obstacles (the seven days time frame limit, the storm, fruitless back and forth trips that cut down the little time they have left, etc). It also really benefits from being set right in the last days of the VHS format. For people who are nowadays accustomed to the fast results of the internet age, the fact that the poor protagonists have to make do with newspapers, analog freeze-frames and old-fashioned detective deduction really seals the deal. And hey, anybody else remember that at the time one could only see the film in bootlegged vhs copies outside Japan? Fun times!

I don't want to denigrate the remake of The Ring too much since it is one of the best recent Hollywood remakes of Japanese horrors and all of the actors are excellent (Naomi Watts versus Nanako Matsushima? I can't decide between them as they're both excellent!). My issue however is the same as Anhedionisiac's point about Nakata's film being set in the last days of VHS and analogue media (love the trip our heroine has to make to the store in order to get the photographs processed!), complete with the rather low key video (jumping mirror aside) in comparison to all of the spinning chairs and CG ladders falling to the ground in Verbinski's film. The horse on the ferry scene is a magnificent touch in the remake, though.

(Plus the Hollywood version of The Ring doesn't feature a great allusion to Straw Dogs!)

However, despite thinking Nakata's version of Ring is the best one, I do have a strange affection for the wonderfully nutty Ring 2 films (both Nakata's sequel that ignores Koji Suzuki's Spiral sequel novel, which had been turned into a flop film simultaneously with Nakata's Ring, and Nakata's Hollywood sequel to the Verbinski film) which might not be satisfying due to the way they spin off into so many tangents, but show a great imagination (or at least riffing skill!) behind them!


And Ring 0: Birthday is simultaneously painfully slow (and a disappointing origin story, partly since the evocative clothing of Sadako throughout the series turns out not to be her daily dress but costume from a play being performed inside the film) for the first three quarters yet judged on its own also feels like one of the best in the 'abused teen taking revenge on bullies' subgenre since De Palma's Carrie.

I saw the Japanese 'Ring' trilogy when I was 16 IIRC but I do remember that I preferred Ring 0 to the other two - i thought it blended horror and a sort of Shakesperean drama really well, and it managed to provide what a prequel needs to provide without ever seeming expository for exposition's sake, no mean feat. Plus, the acting is the best of the three Japanese films.

I watched Ringu and I must say that I'm even more enamored with the American remake than I was before, for reasons that I would never expect from an American film. The Ring takes time to tell a story where Ringu feels rushed, regardless of the occasionally corny or on-the-nose dialogue in the former that's lobbed off in the latter. It's hard to criticize an original film based upon a remake's improvements, but that doesn't change the fact that I find The Ring's icy mood and use of makeup/shock cuts to be more compelling than the Japanese original's rather bland way of delivering this story. I mean, The Ring earns the prize for it's

Spoiler

waterlogged makeup effects for the corpses

alone

mfunk9786 wrote:but that doesn't change the fact that I find The Ring's icy mood...more compelling...

Have you seen Kiyoshii Kurosawa's Pulse yet? Kurosawa is a master of that icy, detached, uncomfortable aesthetic you find also in The Ring. With Pulse, Kurosawa basically took all of the tropes and conventions of the J-Horror boom as exemplified in the Grudge and Ringu films and worked them to their peak, while also using their stories of curses and hauntings to explore really interesting and genuine metaphysical and sociological themes that those previous films mostly overlook. It's the apotheosis really of the modern ghost film, both more frightening and more probing than any of its predecessors or successors.

For the most part, and this includes the Ring/Ringu and Grudge films, ghosts in movies exist only so that they can be frightening. If they have any sort of existence or thoughts outside of that, no one can tell. They are essentially plot devices with a limited purpose. Kurosawa, tho', understood the same thing that Henry James did when the latter wrote his ghost tales: that ghosts can be vehicles for carrying a wider range of meaning and exploring a wider range of issues. Kurosawa's ghosts, while often terrifying, don't exist for that purpose; they represent our own social unease, our alienation, our fear of nihilism and loneliness, and they even have feelings on the matter. Kurosawa also has a unique way of filming his ghosts. There are no sudden flashes, noises, jumps, or anything to startle you. Just the opposite: his ghosts are preternaturally slow and quiet, and rarely insist on their own presence. They're scary because they're so goddamn unearthly and because, since they're not trying simply to be scary, you're free to imagine a whole range of even worse motives behind their odd movements.

K. Kurosawa is one of the masters of the ghost story, and paradoxically so, since his ghost stories aren't really about ghosts at all.

Mr Sausage wrote:K. Kurosawa is one of the masters of the ghost story, and paradoxically so, since his ghost stories aren't really about ghosts at all.

Agreed, absolutely. He's the heir to Teshigahara + Abe in his ability to use genre conceits to almost scientifically examine society and individual experience, and a disciple of Antonioni in his understanding of space. And I think ultimately his films have more in common with other recent art-ghost films like Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and de Orbe's Aita then they do with the J-horror genre in general, with the caveat that they are genuinely really f**king scary.

For this list, I would also highlight Cure, Doppelganger, and Loft as must-sees.

Cure is, I think, his masterpiece (with Charisma and Pulse coming in just behind it). Doppelganger is actually a comedy, tho' a highly original one, so I won't be considering it for this project. Bright Future is another one I would recommend for the List, with the caveat that it needs to be watched twice. It's a hard movie to get a handle on at first, but offers enormous rewards. A very unconventional and visually striking horror film whose ostensible horror subject--the release of a highly toxic jellyfish into the Japanese sewer system--becomes increasingly metaphorical as it is pushed into the periphery as support for the real subject of the film, the difficulties of two men from different generations in connecting with each other even after both suffer the kind of loss one would think would bring them closer.

Just to round off some of the other K. Kurosawa horrors I've seen: Seance is a flawed remake of Seance on a Wet Afternoon, but it once again shows Kurosawa's mastery in handling ghosts and evoking a slow horror from them. His recent Retribution is an effective ghost story, tho' it feels like a minor work. His early-career homage to slasher films, Guard From Underground, contains little of the sense of stylistic and narrative invention he would later show.

I was going to mention Bright Future and Doppleganger, since they feel like horror films with the horror element removed but with the ever present sense of upcoming, sudden and irrevocable doom hanging over the narratives. The characters often feel like they are teetering on the edge between achieving their goals (even if their goals might be futile ones, or ones which don't solve anything, or, as with the jellyfish, are both personally triumphant and yet rather frightening in implications for the wider world!) and destroying everything out of a sense of subverting stifling social norms. Doppleganger may be a comedy and uses many comic tropes, but the scene of the doppleganger ransacking the hero's office, something which might normally play as goofy fun, I often find unbearably upsetting for the way it destroys a career (in fact a very similar scene occurs with the gang ransacking an empty office near the end of Bright Future). These films know that destroying someone's old life in order to 'liberate' them, or to alter a person's consciousness in some way, isn't an easy or simple solution to problems. After all even if everything else is destroyed around you, you are still left with yourself and all of your unrealised hopes or unrealistic expectations for company!

In other words I think Kiyoshi Kurosawa's films are some of the finest films about the modern world.

mfunk9786 wrote:I watched Ringu and I must say that I'm even more enamored with the American remake than I was before, for reasons that I would never expect from an American film. The Ring takes time to tell a story where Ringu feels rushed, regardless of the occasionally corny or on-the-nose dialogue in the former that's lobbed off in the latter. It's hard to criticize an original film based upon a remake's improvements, but that doesn't change the fact that I find The Ring's icy mood and use of makeup/shock cuts to be more compelling than the Japanese original's rather bland way of delivering this story. I mean, The Ring earns the prize for it's

Spoiler

waterlogged makeup effects for the corpses

alone

Yep, The Ring is much better than Ringu.