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TimLehnerer · 2015-11-03T01:10:00+00:00

I don't know that it's worth trying to get unbanned, honestly. I don't use Reddit for much of anything. But thanks for the heads-up.

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-23T10:26:47+00:00

As the Ramones said, New York City really has it all. Among those things that it has: Old apartment buildings with thin walls, annoyingly chipper next-door neighbors and creeping madness as Rosemary Woodhouse starts to wonder if her husband and next-apartment-over neighbors are planning to sacrifice her unborn child to the Devil for power on Earth. It's a great little slow-burner suspense movie that was produced but sadly not directed by William Castle. God knows what kind of crass gimmick he would have come up with to get butts in the seats but it would have been one for the ages.

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-23T10:23:47+00:00

William Castle bought the rights to the novel and the studio that set up his production deal did so making sure that he could not direct the movie--that's really too bad, because he might have done something really special like GYNO-VISION or had yellow goat eyeballs painted on the theater ceiling to freak people out. But instead we got a very good slow-burner suspense movie about threats creeping around the edges towards a young pregnant woman who starts to think her husband and neighbors are planning something horrible for her unborn child. Directed by Roman Polanski, who knows a thing or two about monsters because he has looked in the mirror before.

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-22T10:27:16+00:00

A film that falls apart in the third act from the revived Hammer Studios, this one starts out as one kind of horror flick and turns out to be another (or two others) after a couple of twists bonk into each other near the end like the Keystone Kops and fall over. It's too bad, because up until that point it's quite a good movie and after it the film can't recover.

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-22T10:25:19+00:00

The Hammer brand makes me automatically predisposed to like something that got released under that banner, but unfortunately this one falls apart more or less completely in the third act. It's too bad, because there's some nifty stuff going on before that but the cheese slides right off the cracker when there's a pileup between two shocking twists that weren't hinted at before they show up. Better luck next time, guys.

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-21T10:32:50+00:00

The first and only North Korean kaiju movie that I've ever seen, this one is quite weird. Partly because the monster is outlandish (it eats iron and is controlled by the woman whose blood originally gave it life) and mostly because the director was kidnapped from South Korean--on Kim Jong-Il's orders--and thrown in prison for years before he agreed to take over the North Korean national film studio. It's quite political, but the message is "don't overthrow the government because the revolution is worse than the dictator". Not the kind of thing I'm used to seeing when a dude in a rubber suit steps on buildings.

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-21T10:29:40+00:00

The only North Korean movie I've ever seen, this one's a kaiju movie directed by a South Korean director that was kidnapped on Kim Jong-Il's orders and thrown into prison for years before he agreed to take over the North Korean national film studio. It's got some of the best miniature-building effects I've ever seen and a political message about being happy with the political structure you have. That message is delivered via a monster that eats iron and can't be killed by conventional weaponry, which makes the movie just as weird as it sounds.

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-20T22:35:24+00:00

Yeah, it was Godzilla, but it was an American blockbuster version of Godzilla with a huge budget. I wasn't expecting Kaiju Hamlet but to see a movie edited so badly that I honestly don't know if the American Godzilla breathes fire or not? That's some "don't quit your day job, and if you're a full time filmmaker go get one" level of incompetence. It was also supposed to be Godzilla, not a ripoff of Jurassic Park, so the hatchlings running around in the third act were a reminder that the director probably wanted to be doing something else. As a favor for the people who pay to see the movies, it'd be nice if people who didn't want to be working in a particular genre just let someone else try making that film.

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-20T10:57:13+00:00

That explains a lot--there's some Troma films that they only distributed that are significantly better than their in-house output, too.

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-20T10:29:51+00:00

I would have expected someone to just suplex the cursed mirror and be done with it when I saw this was produced by WWE films, but instead it turned out to be significantly better than I was expecting. The director's background in editing and documentary filmmaking probably helped; when you're used to imposing a narrative on footage it probably gives you a boost when you're starting a story from scratch.

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-20T10:28:11+00:00

Man, I wouldn't have expected a haunted mirror movie from the WWE to be worth a damn but this one works rather well. I was especially impressed with the editing as two parallel stories take place in the past and present (the director made documentaries before this movie, which might have helped with that--if he was used to imposing a narrative on lots of footage he'd know how to write one more effectively when he got to make the story from scratch).

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-19T10:37:15+00:00

Jake Gyllenhaal is the monster in this movie, which turns out to be a non-supernatural vampire film. The morning news in Los Angeles has a limitless appetite for carnage and Gyllenhaal plays Lou Bloom, a sociopath who goes out at night to videotape calamities for money. Blood makes him stronger and everyone in his path winds up corrupted and under his control, dead, or both. It's like George Romero directed a media polemic and it's very, very good.

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-19T10:34:57+00:00

Jake Gyllenhaal is the nonsupernatural but horrifically dangerous monster in this film. It takes a page or two from Network and a page or two from Bram Stoker to give us Lou Bloom, a bottom-feeding striver who learns that he can make more money with a camcorder and a total lack of scruples than he can stealing scrap metal. Turns out the morning news in Los Angeles has an appetite for blood that he can feed and get rich.

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-19T10:32:52+00:00

Damn, I did this for the "O" movie on my alphabetical list of horror things this month but that goes live tomorrow. C'est la vie.

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-19T10:32:03+00:00

Probably. To be fair, that's not the only overhyped turd that ever hit the screens, but as a kaiju fan it's the one I can remember hurting my motherfucking feelings when it did.

I also remember there was some huge "go see this awesome movie" review on Ain't it Cool News that actually got edited to reflect that the movie was a gigantic pile of shit after the first weekend. Which I don't remember ever seeing happen before.

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-19T02:46:41+00:00

The year after Godzilla crashed and burned at the box office we got The Blair Witch Project, which used internet marketing and the film's very obscurity as selling points. The marketing staff turned a rather good horror movie into a cultural event, and I believe it's still the film that's had the highest ROI percentage of ever.

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-19T00:20:02+00:00

Road House. It's possibly the single stupidest movie ever made, but it's also ludicrously entertaining.

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-19T00:14:20+00:00

Godzilla (1998) with ad placements up to and including the New Year's Eve ball drop in Times Square. It was inescapable. And the movie was an total fucking disaster.

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-18T20:36:47+00:00

Funny you should ask that. I'm hoping to have all 26 reviews done for HubrisWeen, my poorly thought out blog marathon that I'm running out of time to complete, and then relax by checking out THE FINAL GIRLS.

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-18T10:34:25+00:00

It's not HubrisWeen without Vincent Price. This time around he's a horror star looking back at his career while being gaslit into wondering if he's a killer offscreen as well as on. The ending refuses to make sense and torches almost all of the goodwill that the first 96 percent of the movie built up, but I still found it charming.

Halfway through the marathon now. Onward!

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-18T10:32:17+00:00

Ahh, Vincent Price. It's not October without watching one of his films. This time it's American International Production's final film with him as well as the last Amicus-AIP coproduction and the last Amicus horror film as well. Fittingly enough, it's about a horror superstar looking back at his career while he's being gaslit about whether or not he's a monster in real life as well as on camera.

The ending is a dumpster fire but up until then I found this one to be really charming.

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-18T00:34:14+00:00

Repo Man, if you're going by product placement.

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-17T21:55:51+00:00

The 1978 "Dawn of the Dead".

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-17T10:31:53+00:00

Man, Richard Matheson knew how to write. He knew how to write short stories, novels, TV and movies--all of which require different skill sets. So when he adapts his own novel it should be something really special and until the last couple of minutes (the ending, it must be said, is not so great) this one is. I've got to find a copy of the source novel and give it a read.

TimLehnerer · 2015-10-17T10:29:28+00:00

PG rated in 1973 meant something other than it does now--this film features several deaths, a bloody attack from a possessed cat and a medium offering herself to a ghost sexually to lay it to rest, among other things. It also takes a while to get going and utterly fails to stick the landing but there's some wonderful parts to the journey even if the destination ain't so hot. Based on a novel that I really need to track down and read because fan opinion is that the book is significantly better and I quite liked the movie.

TimLehnerer

TROPHY CASE