cube 2021 (jp) rated pg-13? awful, terrible. too much going outside the cube, too much actually telling us what was going on with these people. bless the cube maid and her sanpaku eyes, she was the only thing keeping me going
saw x? SAWS BACK BABY. those fucking last two movies were MISERY. saw 9 is literally all chris rock doing a bit, in so far that he is like ‘THIS IS SOME NEW JACK CITY SHIT’ and then goes undercover as his character from new jack city. he cant stop telling a guy in detail how his wife will and is cheating on him every time they talk. samuel l jackson is his dad and dies via firing squad. the movie ends with a bunch of white cops shooting the fuck out of a black man while another one screams. whats the lesson? thats what i kept asking myself for the last two saw movies
BUT THEN SAW X COMES ALONG AND IS LIKE "ALL YOUR COMPLAINTS ABOUT THE TIMERS BEING TOO SHORT? FINE. 3 MINUTES. OH YOU HATED THE SUN IN THE LAST TWO MOVIES THATS GONE TOO. WE MADE EVERYTHING REAL DIRTY FOR YOU AND THE TRAPS LOOK LIKE THEY BELONG IN NIN MUSIC VIDEOS AGAIN’ also mr saw is in no way anything but the good guy here. someone read a surgery book which is great cuz its all about torturing medical scammers. saw x is amazing it literally only took them 10 movies to figure out how to make a real one. they really hold back on flashbacks and nu metal vampire speed editing, but its still there cuz its saw. its just, matured. I LOVE IT. THE GORE FUCKING ROCKS TOO
i cant believe i watched all the saw movies in a week adn just decided to sprinkle on the bad cube as a treat. i cant wait to watch something real
saw x is probably my favorite torturing people in a single locale movie now it’s so great. even though whoever made amanda’s wig should probably have been put in a jigsaw trap themselves.
amandas wig just getting worse and worse is my favorite thing she had merlin from amish mafia hair this time almost. its a really nice distraction to look at and calm down when you’re overwhelmed by all the blood and flying severed limbs
i watched saw 1 for the first time and thought it was ok-decent it was kind of sudacore i guess theyre both drawing from similar pop culture inspirations kind of
i liked that it took place in some unnamed american murder city kind of dystopic in that way and i do think it has something of a visual identity of its own all that film grain and grimy sets
yeah like i think that these movies have been a little inspirational to a lot of videogame horror there are parts of evil within that feel similar too i think… plus i think they have something in common with like the post-industrial america vibes of silent hill series too
speaking of evil within i recently remembered watching the movie by that title (directed by getty fortune heir andrew getty) and it was one of the most uniquely cursed movies ive ever seen
evil within is one of my favorite movies ever, I have that shit on dvd, maybe the most nuanced guy pretending to be disabled performance of all time because i can actually kind of get what hes going for. its also incredibly visually striking and fucking terrifying like its impossible to walk out of that one not wondering what the fuck the getty family was getting up to. it’s like he worked out all his trauma by being possessed by the spirit of michael de luca and methamphetamine
I took a few film electives at uni and the lecturers always proudly declared that the guy who directed saw studied film there. I figured he’s just the only famous alumnus of a very young university in a country that barely has a film industry but idk maybe they genuinely liked the movies
That Condemned was my first visit into this world. In 2010 I took a games studies class in college and met someone who would later go on to be my dev partner on a couple failed side projects. We had absolutely opposite Gamer Origins, I came from the world of Sim Earth and Knytt Stories and Age of Empires or whatever and I’d only ever played like 5 games on console. So he began trying basically to Teach Me About Horror Games and console games in general… I have the strongest memory of him sitting me down in front of Condemned and losing his mind with laughter at how fucking annoyed and disgusted I was by the crass anonymous grime-time-crime-time city lmao.
I later began connecting that aesthetic to other stuff like Saw, and to various other horror films I’d never agreed to finish watching, but I cannot stop thinking of sepia grime gore stuff in my head as somehow Condemned Criminal Origins: The Aesthetic
Did You Know I flew to America? That means I was on an airplane that means there was PLANE MOVIES
Spiderman Across The Spiderverse Part 1 - has no reason to be two movies, dragged it’s plot at every opportunity. Of course one of the most stunningly beautiful movies ever made…when it is a whole movie. 2 Spidermans in a Jamba Juice out of 5.
John Wick 4 after watching Black Rain a few weeks ago I was shocked to again see Hollywood-Osaka where everyone uses shurikens and follows the code of bushido. I noticed the head Japanese guy is gonna be Shogun in a new adaption of Shogun. Watch the hotline Miami part on youtube and save yourself 3 hours. 1 Nothing Bad Will Happen To The Dog out of 5.
Asteroid City I watched this on my very brief Texas connection flight so watched maybe 50 minutes of it’s less than 2 hours run time. I watched it without sound. It seemed pretty good. ScarJo gets totally naked. I’ll probably try to watch The Whole Thing soon.
Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant I had high hopes for a warmovis about the bond between an Operator Who Operates Operationally and his Afghan Interpreter. It sucked though. Horrible dialog and it hinges the drama on the Operator trying to get a visa for 6 months and not on the Interpreter and his family trying to outrun the Taliban for six months. Lots of scenes of Jake Gyllanhall trying to be a big silent type then directly stating his feelings and getting his way because whatever who cares. There’s a much better movie buried somewhere in here. 1 out of 5 Afghan Rugs.
Like 20 minutes of Indiana Jones and The Crystal Skull and DUnC without sound. Great would do again.
Mission Impossible Rogue Nation I missed this one and think I made the right call. The big stunts were not as impressive as I was expecting and the plot felt like something stapled to the action scenes. 2 out of 5 We Can’t Kill The Heroes Now Because Then The Movie Would Be Over.
Disney’s Jungle Cruise again condensed from it’s 2 hour plus run time to about an hour and I missed the last 15 minutes. It was a delight though. It is filled with jokes and real sets and action. It does a good job of doing threat and danger without violence. Skipping all the scenes with Carpool Karaoke guy doing a Kaiser Accent only improved the experience. It ends in a Dark Souls world of an impossibly giant tree rotting under every step as cursed Conquistadors try to kill Emily Blunt over a single flower pedal. 3 out of 5 Bad no-good puns.
You Got Mail 90s New York! Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan! Dave Chappelle as the friend of the son of a CEO of a giant bookstore corporation hellbent on destroying independent bookstores. He gaslights her for the whole movie and it almost works because there is this “come on lady figure it out” angle to it. There is like real emotional conflict (for the 90s where none of these people have real problems and their apartments are all huge.) 4 out of 5 Unread Mail.
I watched all of these while having an increasingly bad ear infection across 2 weeks so judge my judgement justly.
One other note on The Covenant is that it is a Brit trying to understand American Masculinity and completely failing. There is one scene where Jake has a breakdown and keeps grabbing his beard like he is milking it?
I had RoboCop on the brain after finishing the game, so I figured I’d get around to seeing RoboCop 2. In short, I’m gonna pretend I didn’t watch RoboCop 2.
I put on Return of the Living Dead 3, a movie I haven’t seen since I last saw it on the SciFi Channel like, 19 years ago back when SciFi would show horror movies all morning/afternoon on Sundays (or Saturdays; I forget, I just remember they always showed the same two sets of movies and they’d alternate every weekend so some weekends you’d get Return of the Living Dead 3 and others you’d get Day of the Dead). I never really liked Return of the Living Dead III back then, and I still don’t, but at just before the one hour mark, we get this scene:
I had completely forgotten about this scene, so it caught me off-guard when it happened. I thought it was hilarious, but also kind of weird that a movie I can’t stand had a scene that’s pretty much the whole premise of an entirely different movie I can’t stand.
But, yeah, 20 years hasn’t changed my opinion on this movie. And, the ending expects you to forget what you saw like, 10 minutes prior. We saw Riverman’s head split open and his brains being consumed by the girl, so why is his head fully in-tact in the end scene? Where are the rest of all of the holes the girl put in her body? Was there nobody on set for contuity when they filmed the last 10 minutes?
I watched that long documentary about the Nightmare on Elm Street series a year or so ago. It was entertaining and quite thorough.
Last night, I watched the other documentary that’s specifically about the second movie. A few people had told me it’s good, and they were right.
The team filming Never Sleep Again hired a private investigator to track down the lead from NES2 because he’d disappeared for many years, and that led to the second documentary being made (by a different team).
In Scream, Queen, there are a few scenes where they briefly show NES2 storyboards and that made me want to see more of those. I thought there must be a book of them out there but I can’t find one. All I found were a couple examples on this site (which don’t include the ones shown in the documentary).
scream queen is SO GOOD. there’s another one about the actress who played Nancy called I AM NANCY (2011) where she gets really uppity about how no one is a fan of NANCY THE PROTAGONIST everyone loves FREDDY
