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Episode 007 - Swearwolves
13 Plays3 years ago
In this episode we conclude our discussion of horror sub-genres
Sifting through decades’ worth of mass media consumption, my friend and fellow cinemaphile Scrumpy joins me in discussions on film from the low to high brow
CREDITS:
Intro scene from Taika Waititi's "What We Do In The Shadows" (2014) from Resnick Interactive Development, Unison Films, Defender Films, New Zealand Film Commission (distributed by Madman Entertainment)
Opening music: https://pixabay.com/music/id-116199/
Closing music: https://pixabay.com/music/id-11176/
Two Oceans is a creation of Siouxfire & Scrumpy in association with SiouxWIRE
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Transcript
Introduction and Fear Factor Competition
00:00:05
Speaker
Two oceans. Two oceans will begin. On Wednesdays I do like a fear factor competition. You can win like t-shirts and hats and spot prices. I can smell werewolves. You were just about to walk past a werewolf so some shit might go down. Look out guys, don't catch fleas.
00:00:34
Speaker
What's that, mate? Keep going, keep walking. We've got sensitive hearing. What are you filming? It's the music video, is it? We don't want any trouble. I do. Why did you start it? Have I got your hackles up? Why don't you girls smell your own crotches? What are you talking about? We don't smell our own crotches. We smell each other's crotches, and it's a form of greeting. You're on camera, mate. Don't do that. It's OK, because I know this guy. It's Count Fagula.
00:01:02
Speaker
Hey, hey, hey, don't swear. We're wolves. What are we? We're wolves, not swear wolves. You're a very offensive word to the gold team.
Halloween Horror Series and Episode 7 Discussion
00:01:17
Speaker
Welcome to the Two Oceans Podcast, where myself, Sue Fire, along with my friend and talented colleague, Scrumby, discuss film and other media through a decades-long lens of mass media consumption. In this episode, we'll be continuing our Halloween Horror Series and finishing our walkthrough of horror genres. This is the Two Oceans Podcast, and so put on your sunglasses, don't obey, and relax as we begin Episode 7.
00:01:47
Speaker
So, we're here, episode seven, Lucky 7. Seven already. Seven steps to heaven. Seven minutes to heaven. Yeah, maybe some people wished it was only seven minutes. I'll make you wish it's seven minutes, lady. Let's bring up Howard the Duck again.
00:02:14
Speaker
Yeah, it looks like you've watched a lot of horror movies this week.
Review of 'Crimes of the Future'
00:02:17
Speaker
I've watched two, two this week, but they're both new ones that I hadn't seen before.
00:02:23
Speaker
Why don't you go ahead and lead off? What's new? Well, the first one I watched was Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg's latest. Which I have not seen yet. Which, I mean, the interesting thing, and I didn't know this until after I'd watched it, is he'd written it at about the same time as he wrote Existens back in the 90s.
00:02:50
Speaker
And it definitely feels that way. It feels like a sort of classic Cronenberg.
00:02:59
Speaker
And you know, overall, it was very, very good. The performance is solid. It is quite gory. It is David Cronenberg, you know, you know what you get when you buy the ticket. But Kirsten Stewart has one of the most awful performances I've ever seen. I mean, she can be good. She can. This is this is she gets a lot of grief. Right. And because of the Twilight thing.
00:03:29
Speaker
and understandably so, but that she's very wooden or something like that, but I think she's played it to her advantage and even like, there was a Christmas movie or something like that or Thanksgiving movie I saw her in, that wasn't bad and she was good in it. Like I'm like, oh, having never watched the Twilight films and never will, I couldn't really, you know, I didn't have that same animosity or such, but I could see where she could just be kind of
00:03:56
Speaker
a bit of a stick in the mud, so to speak. I mean, she just goes from one extreme to the other because, I mean, I saw Spencer over the summer, the Princess Diana one. Yeah. And yeah, she was very good in that. The movie wasn't great, but her performance was good. But in this, it's so over the top. I mean, it's Jared Leto School of Acting here, you know.
00:04:21
Speaker
And it's painful. It's because everyone's giving such a really natural performance in the movie. And she has this almost caricature. It's almost like out of a, you know, a comedy sketch. It's it's so bad and so jarring. And it doesn't let up like every time she she comes onto the screen. It's it's.
00:04:49
Speaker
It's like someone shrieking. It's really difficult to kind of stomach. More, more. Yeah. I mean, Mark Kermode was asking, you know, was she doing it on purpose? You know, what was it? Was it meant to be that way? Because it's kind of inexplicable. But Viggo Mortensen, absolutely awesome. And Lea Seydoux is really, really good.
00:05:14
Speaker
and some supporting actors as well that I, I, I vaguely recognize from other things, but haven't really sort of seen, uh, have parts as big as they've had in this movie, but it's, it's a really good, it's an interesting one. It's nothing new, I'll say that.
00:05:29
Speaker
OK. It's nothing new, which which isn't a surprise because it was written, you know, way back in the the 90s. But I remember going to see Existens and it almost feels like an extension of that movie. OK, that's not bad. Yeah, that's not bad. Yeah. Yeah. And how about the other movie? Oh, the other movie that I watched this week, I am going to have to think about that. Oh, oh. Is one of your recommendations
00:06:01
Speaker
That's a long list. Give me a minute. Give me a minute. I'm going to have to go to our spreadsheet because there's so many movies with a title very similar to this one.
Review of 'Scream' and Other Horror Films
00:06:14
Speaker
How about if you talk about one of your standouts? Well, it's going to start looking at looking through what I've done here is the most recent back to back a week here.
00:06:28
Speaker
back when we talked about the remakes thing, watch the latest version of Scream. Yeah. Which is, you know, Scream is a meta for horror movies. Well, this is a meta of meta horror movies for meta horror movies. It's kind of the inception of meta. Totally. But it works. It works really well. They're smart.
00:06:56
Speaker
What they speak to, you know, they broaden it out a bit socially in terms of what they're going for. The way the older characters are included is smart. Like a lot of it's clever and it's never clever beyond its own goodness. Like it doesn't try to be smarter than it is. It stays really contained and I like it when a movie does that. It's really well worth watching if you're a fan of the original Scream movie in any way, shape or form. I never watched any of the sequels.
00:07:28
Speaker
argument of, well, kind of what we're getting at, right? Online critique and the values are negative values can be associated with that. So it's surprisingly smart. Watch that one. But I watched a video from some other channel that I get some recommendations from in terms of other stuff.
00:07:48
Speaker
Uh, but they said like, oh, the top werewolf movies you, you might not have seen or, you know, well, they don't say might not always hate like, you know, the top things you missed. Well, don't say may have missed, you know, you may have got some credit here, but, um, it was just one called late phases or night of the wolf, which was a nineties or no, no, 2014. Sorry. Just has it kind of nineties feel.
00:08:12
Speaker
Dark Sky production. Larry Fessenden is one of the producers and he's in it for a brief role as well. Werewolf movie that's pretty, I hadn't heard of, totally flew under my radar. It's actually pretty good. But one thing is Alex Guest from The Last Starfighter.
00:08:31
Speaker
is one of the mains. Tina Louise shows up in it, like that Tina Louise. Ginger, you know, a few things like that. You're just kind of like, huh, but basically it's an old, a retired army vet who's blind, goes in this community and there's a werewolf stalking the community.
00:08:54
Speaker
But it plays it really sharp and it's good, a little budget, but it keeps, Tom Noonan is in it as well. I watched Wolfen last night, forgot he was in that as well. Like that guy gets all round.
00:09:10
Speaker
But it's surprisingly fun. It's surprisingly well done little werewolf movie. What is the title of that one again? So Late Phases or Night of the Wolf. It has both and some of them it has late phases colon Night of the Wolf or it's Night of the Wolf colon late phases. It's like whatever the distributor decided to slap on it. I think you can find it online more as Night of the Wolf.
00:09:36
Speaker
but it's like 2014, I wanna say. Okay, yeah, I found it here, yeah. The Perfection, that's a Netflix produced one with, what's it, Alison Williams, the gal from, it was a girlfriend in Get Out in the lead role. And it starts, yeah, out thinking it's one thing and then it changes, like you think it's gonna be more black swan and then it goes a totally different direction, but I think well, it's pretty well done as well. What's the premise of that one?
00:10:06
Speaker
It's more so the perfection is that she's this cellist at this very prestigious, very prestigious school as a kid, but then she has to leave because her mom's dying. And so she kind of has to abandon, give up all the fame and everything she's worked for. And there's a new project, you know, someone new basically who took her place.
00:10:28
Speaker
now and so it's coming together there. She's kind of coming back into the lives of the people that run it. It's like Stephen Weber is the patriarch of this little school and you know kind of like ultra perfection sort of thing.
00:10:45
Speaker
Without giving too much more away basically how they then interact and deal with the past and What that woman went through kind of becomes the core I can't get speak too much more about it without really ruin it
00:10:59
Speaker
Okay, that sounds good. Actually, you mentioned Tom Noonan there. So Tom Noonan was in the film that I watched this week. It was Ty West's The House of the Devil, which I think he watched recently as well. I did not recently, but I probably referenced it recently because of T. West. Yeah.
00:11:17
Speaker
Yeah. I don't know how you say it. And then, yeah, I'm not sure either. Yeah, pretty surprised. Oh, House of the Devil was fantastic. Greta Gerwig in there too. Oh, yeah. And yeah, he's great at sticking to the landing I find in his movies. And some of his movies are quite understated as well. I don't know if you've seen The Innkeepers as well. Quite enjoyed that. That, again, that was
00:11:46
Speaker
I even sat through his Western, which wasn't good. Right. Valley of violence. Yes. I haven't. I haven't. Yeah, I haven't seen it. Don't bother. Save yourself some time. Larry Fessenden shows up in that, so it's Toby Huss. John Travolta is the best performance in that movie, which that should tell you something.
Cronenberg Double Feature Discussion
00:12:09
Speaker
oh boy uh let's see i did a uh i did a uh manage a kronenberg double feature i watched uh scanners which i hadn't watched in forever wow that was uh one of the i i think that there there were very notorious movies when we were kids yeah you you just heard wind of um and scanners was one of them
00:12:32
Speaker
And I just remember people in grade school talking about, you know, heads exploding. The head blows up and it's in like the first 10 minutes of the movie. It's like, wow, where do you go from here? Oh, okay. You're going to go. Okay. Good for you. I mean, I do remember seeing a quite bad sequel to it back in the video store days. Yes.
00:12:55
Speaker
But i paired that with the possessor which was done by his son corona bergson which i had not seen and that is excellent. Yeah it's it does i mean you know it's more psych and body horror you know kind of thing and keeping very corona berg in line.
00:13:12
Speaker
Uh, the woman's an assassin that they enter into these, uh, basically they find good, uh, good rooms basically to become somebody to take over them for, to do their assassinating. And then they can just leave them until of course it all goes haywire. But it's how it goes haywire, but then why?
00:13:34
Speaker
It goes haywire, you know, that's a lot of what I like about, you know, Cronenberg's thing too. There's a lot of getting at the why the horror is there rather than the horror just being there saves it from that exploitation and it becomes something else. You know, again, I think it's the same thing. We talked a little about David Lynch.
00:13:51
Speaker
Yeah. As well, and there's much more of that looking at environment, looking at context, looking at this, and then it may represent itself as funny, or it may represent itself as horror, or it may represent itself as violence, or it may represent itself as a sweet little moment. It's a lot more inclusive, I want to say, or a smarter way of looking at it.
00:14:14
Speaker
No, I know what you mean. I mean, in Crimes of the Future as well, it also has that sort of underpinning to it that really kind of builds up all the way to the last minute of the movie.
00:14:28
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good movie. I mean, if it'd come out like 20, 30 years ago, there would have been an uproar around it. But now it's like, you know, yeah.
Exploration of 'Hellraiser' Series
00:14:38
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. World's ending. Fuck it. Yeah.
00:14:45
Speaker
Yeah. And then the new the new Hellraiser watch that when it came out. Yeah, I was going to try to watch it this week. It just turned out to be too busy a week. How was that? What do you thought? I enjoyed it. I thought it was fun. I thought it it used. It picked up a lot of what made the original story and the original movie special, but expanded well on it. It's not a lot of the reviews. It's a continuation. Am I is that right?
00:15:13
Speaker
Uh, ish, I mean, kind of, yeah, yeah. It's just because, you know, the puzzle boxes exist and therefore, you know, there they are kind of thing. You know, the, the problem it runs into is that it's like being held up with the originals held up as to a, I think an unfairly high standard just because it was unlike anything that had come previous, um, to it. And I love the original.
00:15:41
Speaker
But it didn't have the same impact for me that did for a lot of horror fans who think like well You can't mess with it. You can't touch it any change, you know, no, you're just being woke. So now you have a female Lead Santa by you know, this this whole thing and it's like well, no, it's actually it's supposed to be beyond that right? That's the point it's supposed to be beyond so this is just being able to lean in it better and Anyway, no, I thought it was good
00:16:10
Speaker
They did the, without, it doesn't really spoil it, they did the same thing they did with the Evil Dead remake from about eight years ago or so, with the main character, your main narrator or protagonist being,
00:16:27
Speaker
dealing with some kind of form of addiction and trauma out of it. That was a good move. And so they lean into that, which really does, especially, you know, this one thing always bugged me with the original Hellraiser, she gets pulled in because of her dad. And this one, they got to go in, she goes in to save her brother instead. So it's a different dynamic. And it's a different, you know, when you're talking about that type of person and how you, you know, the impact addiction has on people around you, right?
00:16:56
Speaker
So I thought that was a deft turn. I liked it. I liked the performances that, you know, it kind of lands more in the line. Yeah.
00:17:06
Speaker
that came out a few years ago. Interesting. It kind of has that same feel in a lot of ways. So I enjoyed it. Well, I'm interested now. Oh, there you go. I think what I enjoyed about the first movie, and I'm not one of those people that hold it up as the standard that some people do. Because I think where it was surprising for movies at that time is the first quarter of the movie.
00:17:32
Speaker
almost feels like a Hitchcock, right? You have the setup, right? She wants something. In order to do it, she needs to kill people. And it turned into something that tonally was different than other horror movies at the time. And then it goes off the rails a little bit, in my mind, further along. Love the Cenobites, love all that. But then it becomes the exploitation rather. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And it certainly did in the sequels as well.
00:18:02
Speaker
Oh, yeah, got work. Although I enjoyed the second one, too. I think the first and second you could kind of hold together as a single. Yeah, yeah. Because the the other thing I like is that the pinhead is conversational. There's, you know, Freddie kind of is in terms of horror icons. But it's very obviously very one way in Hellraiser. I mean, she's able to negotiate or figure out what they're after. You know, there's a back and forth. Yeah, it's a give up.
00:18:30
Speaker
you can give this up or you can't kind of like there's almost a choice to it yeah that's great i do remember the dialogue being quite good between pinhead um and and and that whole you know you know yeah you may be able to do something that we want but um we may just kill you because
00:18:50
Speaker
We're not. We might just move on. Pinhead's interesting because, well, Pinhead, it's not human. It speaks from a point of
00:19:06
Speaker
human beings being insects. But, you know, it's kind of like the Greek gods, they still have interests that we can kind of understand to a certain degree. And yeah, you can have the back and forth and negotiation going on. That's a good analogy. You know, another one that I watched that holds up really well is the gate.
Review of 'The Gate' and Stephen Dorff's Roles
00:19:28
Speaker
That's the one I was talking about during our stop motion episode. Do you know the bit I mean when the body falls forward and it breaks into a million pieces? How did that stand up for you? Fantastic. I like watching them. That does not look like stop motion. It's wild, isn't it? It's so, so smooth. It's ridiculous. There's a couple of scenes later, a couple of shots later, actually, not even scenes where you can tell it's stop motion.
00:19:55
Speaker
But even overall, it's it like, I don't know what they did differently or how they shot it differently. Yeah. But all the effects actually in that movie hold up surprisingly well. Oh, that's good to hear. Yeah. Although I was laughing at, you know, what's his name? Stephen Dorff, you know, is the main kid in that and he's supposed to be like, what, 10?
00:20:19
Speaker
And then movies came out 88 then 10 years later blade comes out and he's the you know the villain The villain in that and he looks like he's you know 50. It's like wow that guy had a little 10 years of hard living I mean you look at seriously look at look at just look at Stephen Dorff 10 years old or you know 88 to 98 you're just like
00:20:43
Speaker
not kind to himself, or maybe he was. Yeah, maybe too much. Maybe he found a puzzle box. Exactly. By the way, just jumping back to when you when you watched it, how did how did scanners hold up? Very well. You know, it's just
00:21:04
Speaker
You know, it's just everybody's, you know, the, the, the main guy is, you know, is a little wooden, but he's supposed to be too. So, you know, it's that weird thing. And sometimes in Cronenberg films, he gets some performances, it just kind of, you know, as you mentioned, you just kind of shake your head out, or it's kind of like, why, you know, his delivery is very like, okay, they
00:21:24
Speaker
got this guy off the street. And then here's all these other accomplished actors. And it's older movies, especially. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it is pretty clunky sometimes. But yeah, but otherwise, no, it holds up. It holds up exceptionally well. So
00:21:42
Speaker
Yeah, just thinking of Michael Ironside, it was great to see him recently and nobody. Did you see that? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, just a nice little side. Yeah, he's still around and he did really well in the part as well. Oh, yeah. It's perfect.
Excitement for 'Werewolf by Night' and Movie Highlights
00:21:57
Speaker
You know, that we've got, you know, we got, although we kind of talked a little about the last couple sub-genres we were going through on that list, but the other one to talk about, new one that I really enjoyed was the werewolf by night.
00:22:12
Speaker
I am going to be watching shortly after this episode. I was sold on it from the trailer. The trailer looks great. The thing is that carries through the entire episode.
00:22:36
Speaker
It's ridiculous. Anyway, let's just pin that a little. Yeah. Yeah. Is that all your movies for this week? Wow. Well, that's not all of them, but that's the majority of the ones. The other one though that I would bring up and it was the one I opposed you about to talk about was movies that are just great to watch, but they're absolutely awful, have no redeeming value otherwise, except
Critique and Praise of Horror Films
00:23:00
Speaker
for pure. And I wouldn't say entertainment. It's just like more of your forced entertainment or something like that. And that was
00:23:06
Speaker
I watched it on Shudder because I'd heard about it before. And I compared it to this other movie that I'll talk about briefly, but it's called Bloodbeat, which is set in, it's like 1980, 81, rural Wisconsin. And a woman goes home with her boyfriend for Christmas. And she and the mom immediately don't get along, but there's some weird psychic thing going on with the moms as painter.
00:23:35
Speaker
They don't know where her painting images come from. Well, and again, this is about working with the best explanation I can from what's given in the movie.
00:23:44
Speaker
Basically, there's a suit of samurai armor in the house, and it animates through this new woman that's shown up. And as it kills, she orgasms. But then mom can fight it with these psychic lightning bolt sort of laser beams, which then apparently others in the family have, but they don't want to talk about. So... Sort of sounds like if Dublin Little China was a horror,
00:24:13
Speaker
And you just jettisoned everything awesome about that movie. Because it is just like, you just, it's one of the things, obviously, they shot it very cheaply. No actors in it. Or if they were, they were like, you know, I started Music Man when I was 16. In high school. You know, something like that. It's just,
00:24:38
Speaker
It's strong together you know everything about it pretty much everything about it is sloppy but you know there's an earnestness to it where they're trying either clearly that you know somebody had a vision for this i don't know what it was.
00:24:52
Speaker
And because the story makes zero sense, the kills make zero sense. Like why it kills, the creature kills who it kills and why a samurai and why it's connected to this woman and why does she have to, you know, orgasm every time it kills someone. Someone in the production team had a suit of samurai armor. Exactly. Someone's like, Hey, we can build a story out of that. You know,
00:25:15
Speaker
I'm like, well, no, you can't, but you did. Well, it's funny, you can have movies that are a mess that completely hang together. In some ways, if you think about the Reanimator movies, it's kind of a miracle those movies do hang together. Oh, yeah, totally. But, you know, like this, you know, this one, you know, as terrible as it was, I would sooner sit through, you know, that hour and a half than
00:25:41
Speaker
two and a half hours or whatever of any Transformers movie. Oh, I mean, were any Rob Zombie fucking. I'll tell you what else I prefer those movies to the overproduced horrors because overproduced horrors take it to a point where it is so and you can see it's overproduced, you know, immaculate amazing on screen.
00:26:05
Speaker
But you need that grit. I know I keep coming back to this to get that to make it convincing and get that tone right for horror. And I can think of a couple of movies where I went in quite excited about it, but then came out just went, you know, I was all right, but not as good as it should have been. And that one of the first one is Crimson Peak.
00:26:33
Speaker
which just it just it was just kind of okay I was I just had higher expectations but everything was so clean it was almost like from from the Dick Tracy movie or something like that it would just everything was produced the clothes were too clean and you know everything was just a bit too perfect
00:26:56
Speaker
I'm not sure if you know what I mean, but you can see it's so produced. It almost sort of feels like a stage play. And I just don't, you know, I think that's one of the ways that they cheat around that sometimes is using the shaky cam to make it feel more immediate. But if you don't have that, then a lot of it is down to sort of the lighting and atmosphere and things like this.
00:27:19
Speaker
But, you know, I don't think that movie uses color very well. There's a lot of color in that. But yeah, it doesn't quite click. There's another one. This is going a bit further back. I'm not sure what year it was, but Stoker.
00:27:35
Speaker
Not familiar with that, let's not ring any bells. Yeah, I'm trying to think who was in it. The girl who played Alice in Wonderland in the Tim Burton version. Oh yeah, the one from Carson Peak. Yeah, it's preceding that. And it's from Park Chan Wook.
00:27:58
Speaker
You know, he's the director of Oldboy doing his first English language as well. And that alone, you know, gets her expectations up. It's got Nicole Kidman in it. But, you know, it's Park Chan Wook, you know.
00:28:17
Speaker
And the movie preceding it was Old Boy, right? And oh, he's doing a horror in English. And the only horror in it is that it's kind of bland, really. You can definitely, looking back, it probably was Studio Interference that kind of clipped his wings a bit too much. And there's probably a reason why he never did another English language movie again after that. Yeah. That makes sense.
00:28:45
Speaker
Right. Shall we jump back onto our genres? Yeah. Where did we leave off? Where did we leave off? Survival horror, I think we got to after Supernatural because it was like, we pretty much did Supernatural to death. Yeah, because it was brought up like three different ways already as well. But yeah, survival horror.
00:29:14
Speaker
Yeah. The Last of Us. It's an all-horror survival horror? I mean, I know what they mean by it, but it's one of those things. Yeah. Well, we got the new Last of Us series, which is looking pretty promising from the makers who did Chernobyl.
00:29:35
Speaker
And I don't know if you've seen the trailer to that, but that looks, that looks great. Got high hopes for that. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. The survival horror, you know, usually for me, that's a video game genre, not necessarily. I don't think of it as a movie genre, but it's usually the, the post-apocalyptic thing is like.
00:29:55
Speaker
That's what I think. Although, you know, he could put something like 30 days of night, I think you could throw into that. Because it is about how they actually managed to survive for a month. You know, in this in this vampire apocalypse, that's very localized.
Survival Horror in Sci-fi Movies
00:30:12
Speaker
You know, it's, you know, it's a very contained perspective to it. But you know, you know, that's something a lot of think of a lot of sci fi titles.
00:30:21
Speaker
seem to relate more to be survival horror because the you know, the idea that The tension is like because it's due to the environment, right? There's something that's gone wrong. Yeah alien and alien. Yeah Absolutely predator prey both of those You know those have a much more
00:30:43
Speaker
It's not just a matter, you know, you can't escape. And so you can and you just have to survive. You might not even be able to fight back that well, you know, you know, that's to bring in the point of alien, right? Yeah. They try to fight it and they can't just have to try to survive it, outsmart it, get lucky, you know, something like that. Did you ever see one of Ty West's earlier movies called Trigger Man? No.
00:31:12
Speaker
Yeah, it's an interesting one. I'd recommend watching it. It's from 2007 and it's about this, and I really can't tell you very much about the movie, but partially based on a true story kind of thing, maybe that's like the Fargo
00:31:32
Speaker
Legend. But these guys, these buddies go out hunting and it's done so well. You're really sort of convinced these are friends. They're doing this sort of yearly kind of get together to go hunting. They haven't seen each other because they've all gone to college and all this. And they're back and the three of them go out and they start getting, well, something happens at some point. And in Thai West fashion,
00:32:00
Speaker
it happens without warning and suddenly, and the tone suddenly shifts completely somewhere else. But it's called Trigger Man, well worth watching. I think it's one of his better movies, actually, to be honest. It's probably better than The West Room.
00:32:18
Speaker
And I would say it's a horror and probably a survival horror as well. Even though it's not the whole world, it is pretty much the world of everyone in the movie, so. Okay, good to know. Yeah, I'd say between that and also throwing like cabin fever or something like that, where it's an outbreak, those are certainly, but you know, even then, you know, the thing, I would say that's survival horror.
00:32:44
Speaker
You know it's weird that it bends more to the science or science fiction.
00:32:49
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I'm looking at a list here of Screen Rant's top 10, and God, it's all over the place. Half of this, I would even consider horror. Well, they're listing some things like The Mist, which again, is that post-apocalyptic thing? Sure, that's fine. That's survival, I get it. But then Crawl, which is a great movie, by the way, I just don't think about that. No, that's definitely. Yeah, with the What's Her Butt from Rings of Power.
00:33:19
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, the alligator crocodile, I think it's, but that's a, that's a great, great problem. I think, well, and that's brings up somebody. Oh, the Aja, or I don't know how you say his name, the director of that.
00:33:37
Speaker
It was, uh, you look at, uh, high tension, his remake of Hills have eyes, even like, uh, P2 or, uh, uh, was it mirrors, things like that. Those all have kind of survival horror. That seems to be kind of his shtick. Well, if you're good at it, you know. Yeah, exactly. It seems, uh, seems to run current throughout that. That's an interesting thought. Yeah.
00:34:02
Speaker
Oh, interesting. Let's see, there's another one here from, I'm learning about a lot of new websites I've never seen before, like creepy catalog. I mentioned Alien. Actually, that's the one thing I've noticed is a lot of these are mentioning Alien. 28 days later, of course, I think we touched upon, oh, Open Water, yeah. Oh, sure. That's both, that's Bible. The Descent.
00:34:31
Speaker
Yeah, I suppose. Yeah. Although, well, yeah, I mean, usually survival horror, somebody survives, but you know, it's I guess, I guess it's how you survive, right? Yeah. It's kind of the Brazil ending, you know, idea.
00:34:49
Speaker
I mean, if you're not, you know, still within the confines of society, be that because you're out in the middle of nowhere or you're isolated somewhere else, then, yeah, it turns into survival horror, I suppose. Did you see The Ritual? It's a British movie. Yes. Yeah. That's listed here.
00:35:11
Speaker
That's a great movie that has a great monster in it as well. And very happy that they didn't make a sequel to that. Well, there's some other movies here I haven't heard of before. Underwater from 2020 starring Kirsten Stewart.
00:35:29
Speaker
Oh, that one's good, actually. Oh, is it? Oh, OK. I mean, it's not great. It's not anything new, but it's what it becomes and sort of thing. And unfortunately, you've got to deal with T.J. Miller in it. But no, it's actually surprisingly good. Oodla gets in and it's kind of like the abyss meets the descent to it. It's actually not bad, and she's actually
00:35:57
Speaker
pretty good at it and the reason she's kind of that distant.
00:36:02
Speaker
more stoic kind of thing. It's explained why. And it starts off, it launches you straight in the action. There's very little setup. Because it's like, well, you're underwater. You're way underwater, oil rig platform thing. And go. And it does. It's literally like that's how the movie starts. So that's impressive on its own. But the effects are good. The story's pretty well done overall. I mean, is it the best movie? No. But it's surprisingly more entertaining than you think it would be.
00:36:31
Speaker
Better than Transformers movie. Better than anything Michael Bay or Rob Zombie put together with their measly worthless pathetic little.
Directors and True Crime in Horror Genre
00:36:41
Speaker
Someone needs to take their cameras away. A dungeon.
00:36:47
Speaker
Not the cameras. Yeah. We'll take those. Put them to good use. Cool. Well, I think we've already touched on survival horror to a certain degree as well. These overlap quite a bit. The next one, though, kind of stands on its own pretty much. True crime. Yeah.
00:37:07
Speaker
uh as horror though that that that's uh that's the trick i suppose there is a fine line between sort of thriller and horror sometimes and this is yeah trying to i mean it's very premise is kind of has that arrogance of like oh this is even though closer to real life yeah or you know this actually happened or you know a version of this happened or you know something like that so yeah they call that serial killer films
00:37:32
Speaker
But you know, you start, but if you do that, then you're looking at, you know, what serial killer movies inspire or serial killer stories inspired, you know, certain movies. Yeah. You know, like, like Psycho. Well, or Ed Gein.
00:37:47
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. How many iterations have we had from like Leatherface to... The Texas Chainsaw. Or the Scottish family, the Cannibal family. You know, that's Hills Have Eyes. Hills Have Eyes, yeah. Any other, you know, number of, again, kind of Texas Chainsaw as well, but yeah. But then get into like Henry, Portrait of Sarah Keller.
00:38:10
Speaker
Yeah, I remember watching that the year it came out and thinking, I will never watch that again. That was great. I'm never watching this again. It was great. And recently I
00:38:26
Speaker
I stumbled across it on television. It was at a particular point, and I had forgotten how strong the dialogue was in that movie. It does pull you in, but yeah. Well, and it manages the balance, I think, because of that, because of the performances, because of what
00:38:47
Speaker
They choose to focus on, it doesn't become the exploitation move, which a lot of them feel then they just feel kind of gross, kind of greasy. It's voyeur porn, right?
00:39:04
Speaker
Well, yeah, yeah. There were other movies that at the time that weren't as mature as having a portrait of a serial killer. I actually got a funny story from kind of must have been seven, eight years ago when I was in London and I was kind of rushing along the street and I ran into someone who just walked out of McDonald's with a mohawk.
00:39:32
Speaker
And it was Michael Ricker. And I could not for the life of me remember his name when I saw him. I felt like I needed to say something. And he just sort of patted my shoulders and let me on my way.
00:39:49
Speaker
Eventually, I found out that the reason that he had the Mohawk is because he was there filming Guardians of the Galaxy. Guardians. Yeah. Nice. But yeah, I ran into Henry coming out of a McDonald's. That can, yeah, that can throw you. Yeah, well, the town that dreaded Sundown. Mm-hmm.
00:40:12
Speaker
That would probably fit into this category if I recall correctly. There's a lot of movies that are influenced by true crime. I don't think there are many that are successful in like completely sort of replicating it. I suppose this week we've had
00:40:33
Speaker
the new Jeffrey Dahmer series come out. And a couple of people asked me if I'd seen that and I was like, well, no, not yet. It's not really high on my list, to be honest.
00:40:48
Speaker
But yeah, the things I've heard about it so far, I'm, you know, probably put me off for a little bit, you know. Yeah. Oh, yeah. There's a 20 minute masturbation scene where he's watching horror movies. It's like, yeah, I don't need to see that. I don't need to see that. I like horror. I like horror. But, you know, I wouldn't classify that as horror, though. Right. A lot of it. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
00:41:13
Speaker
That's the thing with this particular thing. I don't know if I necessarily include it because I usually don't think of it as horror. I usually think of it as the police procedural or something like that because it's actually how it's balanced. Or it's something totally from the perspective of the
00:41:32
Speaker
of the serial killer to the end. It's just, again, typically grossly exploitational, not, you know, you're just like, oh, you can slip into their shoes, but then you'll get out safely. It's like, that's not the point. You're picking the wrong people to do that with. It's not what we're going for here. Well, I suppose. Just because we can doesn't mean we should. Yeah. Would you consider seven to be a horror?
00:42:03
Speaker
You know, that's the thing, it's got horrific elements, but it's more of a thriller and procedural thing, right? It does have a lot of the tonal... Tonally, it's very... It is quite horror. Probably more so than his entry in the Alien series, right? Yeah, yeah.
00:42:28
Speaker
Well, you know, that that that entry, I don't want to go off on this too much. That that entry in the Alien series actually had an interesting script because what it was supposed to be. Yeah, what it was supposed to be. And it just piece by piece started getting taken apart because it was meant to be everyone from the last movie survives.
00:42:49
Speaker
they're in a forest planet, which again was a new setting for Alien. Yeah, all of it sounded really good. And it, yeah, it turned into something else. And they went, and yeah, okay, on top of all these changes, you know, we're not going to get you a suit, but we'll see G's the big new thing. So we'll use that.
00:43:13
Speaker
We'll bring in some of the best British actors of the time. Right, completely wasted, a lot of them. So bad, so bad. Speaking of bad, this is the one I spoke of that blood beat earlier. There's another one very similar, and this was the era when you would just pick something off the
00:43:36
Speaker
video rental shelf and just be like, yeah, okay, we'll give this a spin. Having no idea, you know, just solely based on the color of work. One reviewer gave it like a decent, you know, three stars. This one, no one did. So we're safe there. But it's called In the Woods. And, you know, I know it has the same name as a musical, but this one's set in Minnesota. Okay. And two guys find two buddies are out and they find this
00:44:06
Speaker
skull, and it's haunting them and bringing back this creature, and that's a basic story, so they have to fight it. It's just everything around that, the performances, the dialogue, and everything around that is Edward levels of, you know, it should be camp, but it's not, and that's what I think makes it funnier. It's the Edward thing of you try so hard and fail so spectacularly.
00:44:33
Speaker
There's an earnestness about it that's just, obviously a lot of these things are better to watch when you're loaded, but Gary, I still like busting that out because especially if you watch it with anyone else or you talk to anyone else that's seen it, you've got like instant connection, instant bond, right? You suffered through this together.
00:44:56
Speaker
And after that point, it's like, okay, you know, it's like, you know, I've, there's a lot of, you know, things I will jettison in terms of what I need a movie to be. If you get into it, you're like, okay, I, okay, fine. This is, this is this. They're going to do that. And they're going to follow this pattern or whatever. But some of this, so that they don't even hit that threshold. They just fall off, but it's doing something that, you know, in this way with this no budget and,
00:45:25
Speaker
You honestly have zero idea what the hell is going to happen because you don't think anybody knows what's going on. Again, still more, you know, it's a favorite terrible movies because it's like, it's one that's tough to recommend, but not.
00:45:41
Speaker
tough to recommend oh you gotta see this but it's like oh you should watch this it's awful like why are you recommending it because it's terrible you gotta know but it's not terrible like it's feeling like you feel like you wasted your life for you know yeah yeah and he and he rubs on me movie you feel like you waste your life and he owes us those hours back or what
00:46:01
Speaker
you know, the tone has a lot to do with it. It's why after every sort of DC comic book movie on the whole, like the Justice League movies and the Batman and Superman's that have come out over the last 10 years, I feel like I've got a hole in my life. Like it's not even funny talking to people about it. It just makes me angry. Yeah, I just get even more angry. Please don't remind me of that. I don't want to talk about it anymore.
00:46:26
Speaker
But the same thing's true of comedy. Have you found that? Where I will watch something and it'll be the most ridiculous thing. And in my head, I find it funny, but I don't laugh out loud. But I come across someone else who's watched that weird little comedy I watched. And when we start talking about it, it starts hitting
00:46:44
Speaker
how weird and funny it was. And you end up laughing hysterically at that point. But yeah, finding someone who's gone through that unusual experience with you, it sort of augments it, doesn't it? It takes it to another level.
00:47:00
Speaker
You know, you can it's actually like that scene in Jaws where you're comparing the scars on your body. This is where I watched this movie here. I managed to make it through this. Yeah. I watched all three movies intentionally. Mostly sober. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's an interesting. Yeah, because and again, it's it points out, you know, it's one of the things
00:47:28
Speaker
And usually for those kind of movies, there's some kind of horror or sci-fi or something like that. So it's representing something film can do that no other media really can or did. I think there's probably now it's morphed into either
00:47:50
Speaker
an entertaining TikTok or YouTube video or something like that, where then you can see the popular, you know, something going viral for a good reason because it's just something, it just finds, it's found another way to express or explore that coming together over something awful, right? Yeah, yeah.
00:48:11
Speaker
Although a lot of that's reductionary, you know, it's like, okay, you can watch, you know, five minutes of clips from the Turkish Star Wars or the Iranian Superman movie or something like that. But if you've sat through the whole thing, you intentionally sat down and watched through an hour and a half or two hours of this. That's a whole other ballgame. You were like on a different level. Yeah, I mean, I very rarely get your battle coin or something.
00:48:36
Speaker
very rarely don't finish a movie. It's kind of sacrosanct to kind of give a movie a chance until you get to the end.
00:48:45
Speaker
probably the most awful horror experiences I had in watching a movie was the Batman V Superman. And I think I got halfway through that, which is to be fair, was about three hours. Three hours. Yeah. But I had to stop. It just it just kept digging the hole deeper and deeper and deeper and getting further away. And what about what about Favorite Terrible, though?
00:49:14
Speaker
Do you have any that you'd like to queue up to? I think you're like, man, this movie's awful. I can't recommend it, but it's awesome to watch because oh, no, no, I've got a whole list of those. And I think some of them over time have started to emerge as becoming kind of cult classics. You know, you know, how Sue as well. I think on a lot of levels that is.
00:49:42
Speaker
kind of awful, the acting, the dubbing, all of it. It's not great. The special effects are wonky, but they're creative. They took the risk and they fell over a few times, but I completely respect them for taking the risk to push it somewhere new. Yeah. Always got time for that.
00:50:05
Speaker
Yeah, we could probably do a whole episode around those. I'm going to have to just start noting those down as I remember them, but yeah, there are a lot of memories. We can just pepper them in as we go. Yeah, maybe. Maybe it's a bit too much to take them all at once. That might be, yeah. This is the shit week. Anybody making that? Exactly. Not that the episode's shitty. It's the content. No, no, not the content either. But what we're talking about is... Let's really qualify the hell out of it.
00:50:34
Speaker
Yeah, I actually sort of thinking about it, you know, I was thinking about horror movies and some of the mainstream horror movies to come out. And I think one of so I've got three favorite movies from Tim Burton that I really think are good movies.
00:50:55
Speaker
and their edward uh mars attacks which again is so ridiculous i don't know how it stays up but i had such a great experience of watching that in the theater and uh not knowing what it was about just going in and watching it and the audience i was with just had a ball a lot of fun uh but then sleepy hollow as well and um the reason
00:51:22
Speaker
that I really like Sleepy Hollow and I kind of was hoping that he was going to start leaning into horror more was as I remember being absolutely shocked that he had blood and lots of blood in the movie and you know really kind of catching that hammer horror feel and I thought more of this please but
00:51:46
Speaker
He gave up. I mean, I think that was the movie where he just started to consistently make just awful movies from that point onwards. But yeah, yeah, just that almost no color in the movie aside from the red. And actually, Hammer Horror actually made a movie that was of the woman in black.
00:52:15
Speaker
with Daniel Radcliffe. And I thought that was very good as well. Yeah, really good. And then they made a knockoff sequel that was, you know, I've not heard anything good about it. So yeah, yeah. Cool.
00:52:32
Speaker
Wow. So we're going to have to come up with another theme next week. I think that we can keep the horror thing going. I think there's still a little bit more and we've got Halloween coming up. I'll have some more time to catch up on some movies. And in fact, probably the next one will fall almost on or around Halloween. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, doing exploring things to the werewolf by night, exploring the horror comic angle.
00:53:02
Speaker
And so I was basically trying to kind of, well, mansplaining that a bit to my wife. She was very patient with me. But when I was a kid getting into comics, I'm like, oh, these superheroes, this is great. And then I found out, wait a minute, there's horror comics?
00:53:16
Speaker
There's comics with monsters, like Dracula, the werewolves have their own line, and they're not just everything we've seen before. How is this? That was the books I used to always check out from the school library and grade school was there was a book of movie monsters, and it was so great, and it had lots of pictures in it, and it was all these essays with a bunch of pictures in the middle, the way that they used to do.
00:53:45
Speaker
And there was a section on giant monsters, which had Godzilla and all these great, great cinematic giant monsters, and then had the classic era, and then had just everything. It had all the creatures in it. And I remember just loving that. But then, yeah, like you say, and recently, they've been reprinting EC Comics and really nice hardcovers. I wish I could afford them.
00:54:13
Speaker
They've printed at least two dozen already, if not more. I mean, there's just tons. But they're terrific. Just thumbing through those. They're just such great ideas and imagery in them. And then Jinji Ito as well, doing this manga horror, which is a lot of fun. So my son Jack has collected almost all of them.
00:54:41
Speaker
Oh, wow. And he got one. So the one book that he did that wasn't horror actually is horror. And it's about his his two cats. Right. And the funny thing is, it's about him and he's the main he's the main character in the story. But out of the corner of his eye, he'll he'll sort of hallucinate that his cats are doing something.
00:55:08
Speaker
pretty evil, you know, like dropping something and it was tea or the black splodge pattern on the cat's back will look like a face screaming. But it's laugh out loud funny while also being horrifying. It's really good. It's worth checking out.
00:55:27
Speaker
my goal. Cool. And I think that just about takes us to the end here. What are you doing? So we're going to make up trip finally going to Denver.
00:56:00
Speaker
We don't smell our own crotches, we smell each other's crotches and it's a form of greeting.