just got home from killers of the flower moon. it’s once again about the violence inherent to the american project. it’s three and a half hours of ordinary lives interspersed by deeply evil violence and the compartmentalization required from its practitioners to keep that going. i can’t stop thinking about the brechtian ending. might have liked it even more than the irishman.
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The FNAF movie is super tame scares wise, probably so that it could be approved as a kids’ movie, which it is but I remember seeing the Elm Street movies as a wee urchin even though they were rated R. Kids already love all the gruesome lore of the series, which I was mostly unaware of going in so I can’t say how much it feels like a retread for someone who KNOWS the games. Glad I saw it on streaming instead of the big screen because I could not handle a theatre full of screaming children losing it over youtuber cameos. It’s not great but it is a very competently put together film, whatever that’s worth.
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had the opposite reaction, glad to see it in the theaters because i’ll never again get to hear a room full of people pop off on seeing matpat & whoever else that i don’t know. Knew it was gonna be for all ages but was a lil surprised at the level of violence/ violence at one remove. Felt it did well @ mimicking the game’s like goofy casual tone + gruesome implication.
Thought it was interesting how there’s like multiple lines where ppl say “Oh my Gosh” or “what the Heck”, obviously scott cawthon is like a conservative christian guy so i was kind of on the edge about its politics but that was an interesting foregrounding of it. I did like that josh hutcherson’s character is explicitly trapped in poverty due to ptsd. really captures the core of fnaf being about how much it sucks to have to get a job. wonder if some of the sister & aunt stuff was a later rewrite.
e: flower moon is very haunting and deniro’s character is basically a gamer
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i feel like i could make an entire essay about how dumb fnafs lore is and i hate how much i know and yet im more tempted to see this then the mario movie
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like i know its not gonna have any of the more rediculous elements like the time traveling ballpit or “the scooper” or etc etc and i know itll probably be boring in comparison but i keep hearing how convoluted the plot is and it makes me want to see it play out
do you know ive never played any of the fnaf games i just read about the first one years ago and then watched markiplier play security breach when it came out and went “wait how does any of this make any fucking sense” and, well, several videos of youtubers excitedly telling me about the lore of fnaf later,
i still have no fucking clue and neither do they
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idk much about the games but woke up early yesterday so put the movie on while i had breakfast. i guess the plot is a bit convoluted, but the main problem of that is just making it not a good horror film rather than being weird.
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I watched:
The Gate
Serviceable enough kiddie horror about unsealing a demon gate in your backyard and being tormented by all your fears. Director of Sabotage and Mosquito Man, which means nothing to anybody except @iguferon, and starring Stephen Dorff as a Literal Child. Surprisingly decent! Two F-slurs.
Space Truckers
Stuart Gordon goops and gaffs as per usual. Dennis Hopper and gang must try to survive in an absurd universe by hauling cargo through the solar system. Balls-to-the-wall production design and super funny to boot. If you ever wanted to watch sexy cyborgs disintegrate people or a man’s dick start via chainsaw pullcord, this is the movie for you. Loved it. Apparently considered “so bad it’s good” which makes me want to kill all internet movie critics. No F-slurs.
Sleepaway Camp
A rewatch. Famous for its twist ending some consider transphobic (Angela is “actually a boy”, and was forcibly transitioned to girl by her eccentric and abusive aunt after an accident orphaned her, rendering her practically catatonic for the first half of the movie.), but it’s genuinely a better-acted, better-constructed take on Friday the 13th’s campfire slasher narrative. I also think it’s more queer and accepting than people think, especially given that it’s one of only a few early slashers where the victims… well, they kinda deserve it! Plays with genre conventions and has a distinctly homoerotic lens, what with all the cut tops, tight shorts, naked butts of men. Portrays heterosexualism as almost inherently abusive and violent. Cannot say if it’s intentional but now that I’m in my mid-30s this hits a lot different. One F-slur.
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I accidentally stumbled onto this scene late one night on cable TV at a friend’s house in college and it was magical.
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yeah I loved the ending, it’s like the most depressing “where are they now” possible wrapped in a mini crisis about it being not just the violence but the ability (the need?) to digest that into entertainment that’s inherent. also lily gladstone is ridiculously good in it.
last night I accidentally watched the 2004 director’s cut of THX 1138, which (having never seen any other cut) actually kinda works. it has a some of the disruptive cgi stuff of the star wars special editions, but it only really shows up in large crowd scenes and the car chase at the end and makes them feel really disorienting compared to the super austere interior environments that make up most of the rest of the movie. also the music (when it shows up) is so good, there’s a gamelan-sounding piece that plays while thx is getting poked and prodded by all these medical devices that I’ll probably be listening to on repeat
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i watched the previous two films of the lokesh cinematic universe bc im going to see leo: bloody sweet tomorrow… i really enjoyed them, love the way lokesh kanagaraj films depict night in digital cinematography
vikram uses the swag as fuck mocobot style of cinematography for some of its fight scenes (the same technique used in maaveeran starring sivakarthikeyan which i loved), kamal haasan and vijay sethupathi 1v1ing as the camera swings around the shot…
(also has a remix of the theme from the original vikram film from 1986 which i havent seen but i thought that was cool)
i love watching a director develop his style further and further—my letterboxd feed had people talking about the style of camerawork in leo as more kinetic than his previous films and some comparisons to tsui hark’s 90s / early 2000s films like the blade and time and tide where the camera practically never stops moving. so yeah im super excited to see it
might watch a history of violence tn cause a lot of people were saying leo had some similar story elements, i think lokesh kanagaraj is sort of an enthusiast of english pop culture (vjs role in vikram reminds me of a breaking bad seasonal villain) so it’s fun to see the way he plays with things like that idk
also while the movies have some shared characters they arent exactly sequels to each other or anything
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I love this movie.
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thx 1138 owns so hard. i watched the original version on archive.org recently, then looked up the directors cut and couldn’t stop laughing at the enormous CGI blowjob machine that takes up like half the shot that he inserted to jerk off robert duvall
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OMG yes this and the scene where they’re like “sorry your gf got turned into a baby 
” are so incredible
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saw a 35mm print of ginger snaps ln in a huge packed theater full of girls who cheered every time ginger said some shit like “i want to tear something alive apart” or she was covered in blood, really like that movie
it’s extremely Gender and lesbianic, i love how the last act becomes increasingly painterly in terms of shot compositions and their domestic household becomes a horror movie dungeon
also the mom is awesome
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i think a lot about their mom nearly literally saying “i know you girls did murder, we can flee the state, well leave your dad behind ill burn the house down”
most supportive mother in horror? in film? love her
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John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness
God this movie sucked. What happened if satan was captured in a 7 million year old canister and looked like baja blast? and jesus happened to be an alien sent to warn us about it? and the canister of baja blast satan has been in a basement of a church? and to investigate they send a bunch of…grad students?!? And they get trapped by a bunch of…homeless people that are possessed by the devil somehow??? It’s very much MST3K fodder. People on letterboxd said it was carpenter’s scariest film. It’s not. There’s no stakes, and no tension because all the characters are unlikable and deliver the least inspiring dialog. There aren’t that many good practical effects, or compelling shots, or anything. Characters get killed off because they’re doing the dumbest shit instead of having any awareness at all. Just really boring. Alice Cooper makes a cameo as one of the homeless people.
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we watched this earlier in the month, and last night in the mouth of madness as well. they were both kinda goofy and you are right, not really scary at all. i feel like carpenter also loves his characters being assholes (except i think people find them likeable??? is this the case?). even the movies i haven’t seen, those that aren’t horror, just give the vibe of “the main character is a huge asshole” just from the title/poster combos.
but like, i still liked watching these even if they weren’t like the powerful praise they get. gooey goofy horror with gross stuff happening goes a pretty long way for me.
also, in the mouth of madness is definitely more fun. they do a lot more nasty special effects stuff and wild happenings. waaay more to satisfy my demand for monsters. and the ending is legit funny, instead of feeling like bullshit like in prince of darkness
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I always liked the menace of Prince of Darkness. I do find it boring, but I also find most of his movies boring, so it’s hard to tell if that’s just me or not. Just the premise is eerie to me. I like it a lot and I almost kind of like that this isn’t treated with the lavish hard-science blockbuster movie lavishness that a Michael Crichton movie would have. I think the desperation and end times vibe comes through in the spareness of the production in every sense.
Still not a movie I love or could really recommend.
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I feel like I am on a different planet from these takes
Like, Prince of Darkness isn’t my fav carpenter by any means but it is still leagues ahead of the rest of the horror genre and it is definitely the peak of satanic horror (the exorcist is a well shot comedy film so I can throw out my good opinion haver credentials right now)
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