Lick Ness Monster
Dennis Stamp
From the eerie, eerie depths of Lake Okabena
Posts: 4,874
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Post by Lick Ness Monster on May 22, 2014 6:48:55 GMT -5
I'd like to say that I would be buying that set, but I won't be. As synonymous as the first four films are with my Halloween season, the series just spirals into incomprehensibility toward the end of the "proper" series, to say nothing about Zombie's abominations. I might have to look into getting copies of the first two films individually, though. *shrug
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Post by DSR on May 22, 2014 12:13:17 GMT -5
Yeah, I already have the Halloween flicks I want on DVD. I'm not a big enough fan of the series to upgrade, and there are films in the box set I don't like or have no interest in seeing. Pass.
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Welfare Willis
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Post by Welfare Willis on May 22, 2014 12:42:32 GMT -5
I will buy it. Yes Halloween H20 through Zombie's II are pretty terrible, but the producer's cut sold me. Mind already I have 2 Halloween 2 blu rays and shout factory's version of Halloween 3.
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Post by Kash Flagg on May 22, 2014 19:49:51 GMT -5
www.slashervideo.com/They are having a sale where all their dvd's are 5 bucks plus 3.50 shipping on the first dvd (with 1 dollar shipping each additional dvd). I know most of you don't care for shitty horror, but I bought both Death Nurses and Boardinghouse for $20.50. At the very least Bordinghouse is one some of you need to see. The shipping deal is only via their ebay page www.ebay.com/usr/slashervideo?_trksid=p2047675.l2559
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Lick Ness Monster
Dennis Stamp
From the eerie, eerie depths of Lake Okabena
Posts: 4,874
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Post by Lick Ness Monster on May 27, 2014 8:37:52 GMT -5
Brand new blog post - one that I actually enjoyed writing (for a change). FIVE HORROR MOVIES I'D LIKE TO SEE by Jon Lickness First things first - for everyone out there hoping to see the remainder of the Tomie marathon, I hate to disappoint you, but that abomination is over. Not to say that the series itself sucks. Far from it. But I would be lying if I told you that I felt any degree of satisfaction with that series of reviews. Curtain pulling time for the Lick Ness Monster: I have the goal of writing the best, most informative and entertaining review that I'm capable of, and I feel like I've accomplished this twice - Basket Case and Friday the 13th: A New Beginning. Neither one of them, mind you, were done under the current review format, a.k.a. the laziest damn thing that I've ever done. Thus, the next step for this here blog is a return to simplicity. Classical meat and potatoes reviews are coming back, and they're coming back soon. In the meantime, however, I'd like to do something else. Shockingly, I have a daily life. Oftentimes in this daily life, I get questions. And just as frequently, there are answers. A lot of people across this great fruited plain have an issue with my perceived negativity when it comes to modern movies in general, and occasionally even modern horror movies. Unless you've been living under a rock, it seems like every big-time horror movie to hit the multiplex these days has some kind of connection to James Wan and falls under the "ghost movie" banner. Now, I like ghost movies. I really, truly do. I enjoy the current trend that has reinvigorated the horror genre and brought it back from the brink of the remake-a-mania and forced-attrition-through-torture subgenres that dominated throughout much of the latter half of the oughts-leading into the tens. Lately, though, it just seems that we're incapable of getting anything other than the damn things, aside from the still extremely redundant zombie flicks that bore me to tears no matter how they're portrayed, including straight-up comedically. Warm Bodies, I'm looking at you. What we're going to do here now is look at five different types of horror film that I would like to see grace theater screens in the not-too-distant future. The only parameter I set for myself is that I can't list another iteration of Jason, Freddy or Michael, no matter how damn much I felt like it. 1. SPEAKING OF ZOMBIE MOVIES... I'm going to start with something that I believe would be refreshing not only for this guy, but for theater audiences at large who WILL get sick of the "urgh! brains!" brand of zombies no matter how much Hollywood seems to feel otherwise. Some of the creepiest, most skin-crawling films I've ever seen involve zombies, and I'm not talking about the flesh-eating kind. I'm talking the REAL kind - the human corpses that can be reanimated with potions and often associated with the voodoo religion. This is a concept that can be mined for endless scares, as it was masterfully in Wes Craven's 1987 film adaptation of Wade Davis' book The Serpent and the Rainbow. What I'm picturing here is a sort of modern version of that film, with a series of bizarre murders in a major city and a couple likable young detectives tracking down the perpetrators of the crime only to discover a vicious crime lord utilizing voodoo for both profit and pleasure. For some added evidence as to just how effective this type of zombie can be in horror, just watch this and brace yourself for the willies. 2. AQUATIC HORROR I don't know what it is, but some of my favorite horror movies involve aquatic animals wreaking havoc on groups of unsuspecting human beings. Psychological horror and deep-thinking are perfectly fine, but some of the things that scare me the most (OK, I'm a wuss) are the things that are the most basic. Venturing into uncharted territory (water) and dealing with the locals falls under this banner. Yeah, there are the Piranha films, but they're really much more in the comedy department, to say nothing of the similar like-styled SyFy original flicks that are entertaining only for shared voyeuristic masochism. My suggestion? A big-budget movie dealing with the "alligators in New York City sewers" urban legend, complete with a third act where a swarm of giant albino alligatos escape the darkness of the sewer and are let free in, say, the East River. 3. A REALISTIC SERIAL KILLER FILM As good as Dexter can be as a television show, I find it to be bad to the point of unwatchable almost as often, because I don't know if I've ever seen a more unrealistic show that passes itself off as serious drama. Seriously, how many close calls can one guy have? No, folks, what I'm looking for here is a dirty, serious portrayal of perhaps the most real kind of monster that any of us could even conceivably run across on the bus or be living next to. I picture a film following this guy from fantasy stage all the way up to the first kill to the escalation phase to the arrest, the gruesome crimes and occasional close calls with police building the tension until the audience is genuinely invested in his capture. No sympathy, no weird moral code, just a real sick bastard portrayed on film for all the world to see. Count me in. 4. ANTHOLOGIES RULE! I'm a sucker for a good anthology movie. From Creepshow to Tales From the Dark Side to older Amicus flicks like The House that Dripped Blood, nothing can top the true variety and levels of bang for the buck that this kind of horror movie delivers. That, and it just feels like you're watching a flick that belongs in the horror glory days of the '70s ad '80s when you sit through one. We've gotten a mini-revival of anthology films over the last few years, but it seems like they have been subjected entirely to DVD and Blu-Ray formats. I'm picturing a movie given a wide release on Halloween weekend portraying horrific incidents on that awesome day through the ages, from the original Samhain to a serial murder spree in the '70s to a modern witches' meeting. And those ideas were culled from approximately .67 seconds of thought. Surely a well-compensated screenwriter with weeks to think about it could come up with something that would rock our collective faces. and finally...wait for it... 5. GRUDGE 3D I'm not giving up hope, dammit. No pithy closing paragraph necessary. Get to it, Hollywood!
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Jiren
Patti Mayonnaise
Hearts Bayformers
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Post by Jiren on Jun 2, 2014 7:41:08 GMT -5
I'm wanting to get back into Asian Horror, Any recommendations?
I've seen - Battle Royale - Ringu trilogy - Uzmaki - A tale of 2 sisters - Ju-on the grudge 1&2 - The Eye - Bloody Reunion
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Welfare Willis
Crow T. Robot
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Post by Welfare Willis on Jun 2, 2014 13:31:02 GMT -5
If you have the stomach for it... Ichi the Killer or Audition.
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Lick Ness Monster
Dennis Stamp
From the eerie, eerie depths of Lake Okabena
Posts: 4,874
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Post by Lick Ness Monster on Jun 2, 2014 18:20:39 GMT -5
I'm wanting to get back into Asian Horror, Any recommendations? I've seen - Battle Royale - Ringu trilogy - Uzmaki - A tale of 2 sisters - Ju-on the grudge 1&2 - The Eye - Bloody Reunion The first three Tomie flicks are quite excellent. Just don't try writing about them. I'm also a big fan of the Korean "Ghost School" trilogy ( Whispering Corridors, Memento Mori and Wishing Stairs. They might not be true blue blood and guts horror flicks for stretches, but they're still gut-wrenchingly tense and more emotional than just about anything I've seen from Hollywood in ten years. New blog post is UP. SO BAD THEY'RE GOOD by Jon Lickness Just last week, I was flicking channels before work when something caught my eye. Weirdly enough, it was a SyFy original movie called Bermuda Tentacles (I'll give everyone one guess as to the subject matter), but what really caught my eye was the fact that Mya Harrison was one of the main stars. Since there was a good portion of my late teenage/early twenty years where this was my dream woman, I had to tune in. Seriously, how was this woman not a more enduring pop star? If you're waiting for the epic conclusion to this story, I watched the movie and...it sucked. And not in the good way. 90 minutes of tedium, horrible CGI, by-the-numbers storytelling and tepid acting. Even worse, Mya's character is a Navy Sergeant who never once gets to remove those thick fatigues and strip down once throughout the running time. It was a world tragedy, I tell ya. If you're reading this, you're most likely aware of a weird kind of subculture within the horror community. The SyFy original movies that air seemingly every weekend have a rather substantial collection of people who are very attached to them, and not for anything resembling quality. It really is something to behold. Every weekend, people gather online to engage in a long round of MST3K-style riffing of the movies in question, the more hokey and CGI-driven the better. The best example of this was the phenomenon known as Sharknado, a movie that had such a huge reaction on Twitter that it was the #1 worldwide trend for the better part of its running time and attracted media attention from pretty much any large outlet with two minutes to spare. It still didn't register on the Nielsens, proving once again that Twitter does not equal ratings. Just ask WWE. Without a doubt, it seems like a lot fun to revel in the SyFy flicks, but it's a ritual that I've never taken part in. Millions (well, scores, anyway) of people disagree, but I don't find these movies (from the infamous Asylum studio and otherwise) to be bad to the point of being good. I just find them bad to the point of being unwatchable, and until recently I couldn't quite pin my finger on why. On paper, they share so much with a lot of the cheesy masterpieces of my youth, with crappy production values, even crappier acting and a few true WTF cinematic moments taking center stage...the fact that it's all done INTENTIONALLY just removes so much of the fun for me. I believe that is what's missing from today's bad horror films. They're not bad in the epic way. They're just bad in the BORING way, where the countless remakes that littered the landscape throughout the latter half of the '00s were just simply too bland to be anything resembling entertaining one way or the other, while the SyFy original films and other assorted direct-to-video crapfests actually try to be bad and instead come across as unwatchable. Folks, I just miss the days when horror movies aimed big and fell hard without doing it on purpose. Thus, I present my picks for the five best horror movies that are so bad they're good. Criteria for these include at least a somewhat serious tone, infectious sense of fun, and a heart and soul at their core, no matter how much they might fly off the rails. Give any of these five movies a rental, grab some friends and commence playing like Mike and the Bots. 5. Troll 2This is one of those movies that just quite simply has to be seen to be believed. Produced by Joe D'Amato, the guy behind the '70s "black Emanuelle" movies and several other sex-drenched exploitation films, the movie is a sequel in name only to the original Troll and concerns a group of vegeterian monsters attempting to turn a family into plants in order to eat them. Which begs the question of why not just eat plants to begin with, but whatever. In between, there's all kinds of nonsense about druids, perhaps the most banal score in the history of horror and the most life-saving bologna sandwich in all of moviedom. 4. CreatureThere were a ton of movies in the early-to-mid '80s that ripped off Alien, and none of them are more hilariously inept than Creature, a movie that stars Klaus Kinski, Marie Laurin and Ferris Bueller's father. Yes, really. The plot is about an alien that has the ability to telepathically manipulate victims before assuming their identity, making it a sort of weird cross-hybrid between Alien and The Thing. It's no less hilarious in how seriously it takes its preposterous subject matter, especially the bit where a dude sees his naked girlfriend outside in the enormous atmospheric air pressure and falls for the simple ruse of removing his space helmet. And then said naked girlfriend in alien form still bangs him. Yikes. 3. Silent Night, Deadly NightNo, it's not THIS Silent Night, Deadly Night: Yes, it might have the most infamous rampage scene ever, but when it comes to yuletide hilarity with slasher-style kill scenes, I've gotta go with the original film in this franchise, and not just because the sequel is essentially half of the first movie played in repeat. The saga of Billy Chapman is one of those things that words don't do justice - the tender, tragic, and always fun saga of a kid who sees his parents murdered by a guy in a Santa suit only to be raised in a Catholic orphanage and grow into a psychopathic killer himself. Couple this up with some way over-the-top kill scenes and some questionable acting by Robert Brian Wilson and you've got a real winner that gets regular airtime in my DVD player every Christmas season. 2. Friday the 13th: A New BeginningFor a lot of folks, this is probably the mother of them all. Of all the movies in the legendary Friday the 13th franchise, this is the one that truly holds up a lot of the tried and true tropes of the series and effectively went "no such thing as overkill" with them, giving us a ridiculously high bodycount, gratuitous sex and nudity by the mouthful and enough stock characters to choke a donkey. What else is there? Well, we've got Miguel Nunez singing his Top 40 hit "Ooooh baby," the insane scenery chewing of the guy who plays the Sheriff, and the hilarious non-mystery that is this movie's mystery killer. Yeah, uninitiated horror fan, it ain't Jason. This entry in the series might not be anything close to good, but it's never boring and easily the best flick for comedic purposes. and finally... 1. Star CrystalOf all the horror movies I've seen, nothing can top this one when it comes to the sheer level of ineptitude that it manages to achieve. Yeah, it's got a low budget, but the problems of Star Crystal go beyond anything that a studio didn't feel like shelling out. For the first 20 minutes, we get to know a varied group of astronauts only for them to summarily die, the narrative sputtering and giving us ANOTHER group of numbskulls to get behind. From there, the new protagonists are picked off one by one by the strangest-looking aliens I've ever seen in this type of film, only for the twist to be that alien is really...the hero. Yes, really. Take my word for it, this is a movie that is worth seeking out and paying some decent money for on Amazon, because it is bad. Gloriously, wonderfully bad, and I love every minute of it. Don't believe me? Watch for yourself. Long live Gar! FINALLY..., with the upcoming release of that upcoming Halloween Blu-Ray set on my mind, I had one of those magical epiphany moments (OK, not really) last weekend involving a little "What if" scenario. Now, a decent percentage of horror fans aren't too fond of the latter-day Halloween movies (everything from H20 onward), with the Zombie flicks being among the most reviled movies in the horror community. I got to thinking about what it would have been like if, instead of doing the quasi-sequel that retconned a decent portion of the series in 1998 with H20, they had just decided to go the reboot route and start from scratch. This was a time when horror was red hot, with self-referential humor ruling the day, but this was a movie that needed a more serious approach. Given that and the right director, I think a big, long, 2 1/2 hour + epic encompassing and incorporating the original two films in the franchise would have been HUGE at that particular point in time, to say nothing about who they could have gotten to play Laurie Strode (*cough* Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Dr. Loomis (*cough* Jon Voight). That's just my $.02. All I know is that, given those parameters, I probably would have bought movie tickets on six separate occasions.
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Post by Baldobomb-22-OH-MAN!!! on Jun 3, 2014 6:51:14 GMT -5
I get flack for this but I actually LIKE Friday the 13th part 5. it's sure as hell better than 8, Jason goes to Hell or Jason X. sure, the killer may have been an impostor but other than that it has all the staples of a classic Friday movie in abundance.
plus it has the good foresight to kill off the most annoying character in as gruesome a manner as possible before the story proper even begins.
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Post by 'Foretold' Joker on Jun 3, 2014 7:40:49 GMT -5
So Green inferno? Is this going to be good, bad or just another dumb remake that is watchable?
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Jun 3, 2014 12:35:01 GMT -5
Even better news: This movie is now on Netflix.
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Post by Kash Flagg on Jun 3, 2014 16:32:42 GMT -5
I'm wanting to get back into Asian Horror, Any recommendations? I've seen - Battle Royale - Ringu trilogy - Uzmaki - A tale of 2 sisters - Ju-on the grudge 1&2 - The Eye - Bloody Reunion Watched Rigor Mortis recently (will be out on dvd this month I think) and it's a really good take on the hopping vampire genre.
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Lick Ness Monster
Dennis Stamp
From the eerie, eerie depths of Lake Okabena
Posts: 4,874
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Post by Lick Ness Monster on Jun 3, 2014 20:43:42 GMT -5
Even better news: This movie is now on Netflix. I remember seeing that movie for the first time on AMC Fear Friday in college and just loving the nonstop fun tone that the movie has. Add that up with Tom Atkins in all his glory and the amazing douchiness of the Bradster and you've got 100% win.
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Post by DSR on Jun 3, 2014 21:54:15 GMT -5
I'm wanting to get back into Asian Horror, Any recommendations? I've seen - Battle Royale - Ringu trilogy - Uzmaki - A tale of 2 sisters - Ju-on the grudge 1&2 - The Eye - Bloody Reunion More horror/comedy than straight-up horror, but I say check out WILD ZERO and VERSUS. I will second AUDITION, as well.
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Post by Baldobomb-22-OH-MAN!!! on Jun 4, 2014 22:21:39 GMT -5
so I pre-ordered my copy of Curtains on Amazon. should be getting my copy of Evilspeak on Blu-ray in the next couple days. really looking forward to watching that one.
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Post by Kash Flagg on Jun 4, 2014 22:42:14 GMT -5
Curtains is a vastly underrated slasher.
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Post by DSR on Jun 5, 2014 0:07:21 GMT -5
I think I've mentioned this about 50 times, but I bought one of those shitty 4-movies-on-a-disc-for-5-bucks sets simply because Curtains was on it. The other 3 movies were shot on video garbage from the 2000s. And the side Curtains was on wouldn't play in one of my DVD players. And then in the other DVD player, Curtains skipped!
So yeah, I'd love to trade-up.
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Post by Baldobomb-22-OH-MAN!!! on Jun 5, 2014 6:13:44 GMT -5
I think I've mentioned this about 50 times, but I bought one of those shitty 4-movies-on-a-disc-for-5-bucks sets simply because Curtains was on it. The other 3 movies were shot on video garbage from the 2000s. And the side Curtains was on wouldn't play in one of my DVD players. And then in the other DVD player, Curtains skipped! So yeah, I'd love to trade-up. july 8th is the release date. you can pre-order on Amazon.
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Lick Ness Monster
Dennis Stamp
From the eerie, eerie depths of Lake Okabena
Posts: 4,874
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Post by Lick Ness Monster on Jun 10, 2014 13:09:11 GMT -5
New blog post is up. FIVE OVERLOOKED ANTHOLOGY FILMS A couple weeks ago, I listed out (in minute detail) five different types of horror movies that I would like to see. Among them was another theatrically released anthology horror film, the kind that used to see fairly regular release in the 1970s thanks to companies like Hammer and Amicus and perhaps seeing its zenith in the '80s with some of the all-time classics of the genre regardless of the "sub" prefix. If you're a horror fan and you haven't seen movies like Creepshow, Tales From the Darkside and the original 1972 Tales From the Crypt, well, then what the hell is wrong with you? In all seriousness, when done correctly, these are movies that truly do offer the best of every world. Primarily, they're forced to get going already with the story they're trying to tell and cut out every single ounce of extraneous bullshit. Put it together with a solid over-arching story or theme and you can hit home runs that Star Crystal itself would envy. What we're going to look at today, kids, are five anthology films that might be known to relatively versed horror fans out there but are most likely unknown to the dabblers who dip into "mainstream hits" packages. I'd like to say that I'm hoping for something to be accomplished here, but I've long since given up on that crusade. 1. Kwaidan (a.k.a. Ghost Stories) It's a mistake to call this movie overlooked or underrated, but I'm genuinely stunned by how many people have never heard of this amazing 1964 Japanese film that just might be among the most beautiful and haunting motion pictures of all time. Now that the masturbatory gushing is out of the way, Kwaidan gives us a quartet of Japanese folktales involving ghosts and the spirit world. Of them, the two strongest are "The Black Hair" (that has a simultaneously horrifying and unintentionally hilarious ending) and "The Woman of the Snow," and since they are the first two stories, this is undoubtedly a front-loaded flick. It loses a bit of steam with the latter two stories, but the overall effect of watching this 3+ hour film is something that every horror fan should experience. J-horror for realz, and all. 2. Three Faces of Fear (a.k.a. Black Sabbath) Mario Bava is a pretty well known guy among horror circles for his contributions to the Italian "giallo" genre as well as his more famous Gothic horror pieces. For this reporter, however, this movie is his masterpiece, a trio of completely unrelated stories that cover a pretty large territory. The first, "The Telephone," is an exercise in nonstop tension with sexual deviancy as its theme. The second, "The Wurdulak," stars Boris Karloff (who also hosts the film) is set in 19th century Russia and deals with a sort of vampire outbreak complete with a completely correct down ending. The third, though, is this movie's true ace. "The Drip of Water" might just have the freakiest looking corpse that I've seen in any horror movie, and the use of the reds and greens in the color scheme heighten the oppressive atmosphere that much more. 3. The Monster ClubVincent Price and John Carradine in the same movie, and yet so many people haven't seen or even HEARD of this awesome flick from 1980. The film has a very good framing device, as a writer played by Carradine is bitten by Price's vampire, who then takes him to the titular club where all of the various stories unfold. The three stories are "The Shadmock," about a demonic creature with a vast wealth; "The Vampires" (take a guess); and "The Ghouls," the strongest of the three and left for the finale, where a movie director is trapped in a town of flesh-eating mutants. The movie has a very good pace, more than its fair share of cool scares, and the always awesome presence of two of horror's greatest luminaries. 4. Three Cases of MurderThis 1955 British film also boasts an additional gimmick that can either be a Godsend or an outright disaster on a case-to-case basis: a different director for each story. Sometimes, it results in really good variety ( Twilight Zone: The Movie), and sometimes, it's just disjointed as all get out ( Four Rooms). This, however, is an example of the former, as we're given three relatively straightforward but all very effective scary stories. Two of them are supernatural, and these bookend segments are where this movie's main coolness factor comes from. The final segment in particular, with Orson Welles playing a politician seeking to outdo his opponent by entering his dreams and destroying his sanity, is undoubtedly the strongest, with Welles reportedly taking over the direction of the segment before it was over. 5. 4BIAThe most recent film on the list is from 2008 and takes us to Thailand. This is another excellent example of the "multiple directors used to outstanding effect," as all four stories in this film concern supernatural phenomena, occasionally interconnect, and have twist endings that RL Stine would piss himself over. Specifics aren't necessary for this particular film; it really is about the experience of taking it all in, piecing it together like a jigsaw puzzle, occasionally being confused as f***, and overall being entertained by the sheer nonstop creepiness and atmosphere that this film manages to serve up. And yet most people would rather rent The Conjuring. Now's about time for my "next time you're about to..." wrap up paragraph, so you know the drill. Folks, take out the Creepshow and Asylum DVDs and give these movies a look-see, because they're worthy additions to any horror movie library, boast great variety...oh yeah, and they're pretty damn scary.
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Brood Lone Wolf Funker
Ozymandius
Got fined anyway. Possibly a Moose
James Franco is the white Donald Glover
Posts: 62,096
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Post by Brood Lone Wolf Funker on Jun 10, 2014 21:07:14 GMT -5
I just watched Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones and felt so let down. For Asian horror there are so many choices
Three Extremes 1&2 Suicide Club Shutter One Missed Call Are just some of them
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