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Event Horizon doesn't exactly feel Lovecraftian but goes in for its own kind of cosmic horror nevertheless. It's a pretty chilling film actually. I think it's probably Paul W.S. Anderson's best crafted film.
Come to think of it, Possession contains its own Lovecraftian monster too, haha. But it's also just very weird in very many other ways.
'Dead Calm' is a splendid thriller. Kidman is marvellous in it, and tautly directed by Philip Noyce!
Daybreakers is also a good little film. Made for next to nothing and manages to look great, too:
Freaks (1932)
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)
The Freakmaker (1974)
Phenomena (1985)
House (1977)
The Crazies (2010)
Cemetery Man (1994)
The Wicker Man (2006)
Kwaidan (1964)
Now, a couple of these are rather mediocre (Henry, The Crazies), and Cemetery Man was just god-awful (Rupert Everett acting like Jarvis Cocker in what feels like Croupier with zombies), but there were some nice surprises. House, by Nobuhiko Ōbayashi, is simply marvelous. It's funny, sentimental, and has actual moments of absurd horror. And it looks like it was made in the 1990s or something. It's way ahead of its time. You have to see it. The YouTube trailer is lower quality than the Bluray though.
The other Japanese film, Kwaidan, was also a nice surprise. It's a four-part anthology film that runs three hours and is slow as molasses, but it looks and sounds gorgeous and lingers in your mind for days.
The Wicker Man remake turned out to be just fine. It's not any ropier than the extremely ropey original, and Nicolas Cage, as usual, turns in a memorable and original performance. He's certainly more likeable than Edward Woodward's character was, and it seems clear to me that 100% of the humor in this remake is intentional. I think the internet just finds out-of-context Cage to be funny.
Freaks isn't horror, of course, but it is horror adjacent, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how sympathetic the film is to its subjects. I don't think there was any moment in the movie where I thought, 'You'd never get away with that nowadays', and that's pretty unusual for a 1932 film, and especially one with this subject matter.
Agreed. It was the first film I saw at my local Alamo Drafthouse and I had a blast with it. Olyphant was great, he's one of my favorite underappreciated actors.
Olyphant was definitely the best thing going in that movie. He was wonderful. But I don't think I felt any suspense at any point, and the constant cheap, score-assisted jump scares didn't get me either.
A lot of the writing was pretty janky too--Olyphant seems to figure out that a disease is making people crazy, and is then completely bewildered to find people in gas masks putting the town in quarantine. And of course, when one of the heroes gets the crazy virus, it affects him differently so he can briefly recover for a heroic death. Meh.
Granted, I've not seen it in ages, so you're probably right on those score-assisted jump scares. They're so prominent anymore. I've been checking out the Conjuring universe in full with my girlfriend and it's stunning just how much heightened score there is, followed by complete silence for a second or two and then a really obvious jump scare. They couldn't reveal their hand any more obviously. It's disappointing to see employed so often.
And yes, lots of tropes and ham-fisted revelations throughout but the atmosphere and pacing kept me locked in. I dug the brutal ending too.
It's always a bonus when he turns up in something.
It really is. Seems he's been popping up more and more in the last 5-6 years and I'm loving that fact. Deadwood is my all time favorite TV series so seeing any major player from that show get more work makes me happy.
It's a solid film, but it could have been better. I'm confident that Carpenter could have pulled off a great--not just good--Lovecraftian horror flick. But he wasn't at his strongest anymore, and budgets dry up fast when you've suffered a few misses. Poor guy. I practically worship the man, but he was always several steps ahead of critics and general audiences, and that came at a tremendous cost. Remember that idiot critics called him a "pornographer of violence" at the time of the release of The Thing. And such damnation had a huge (negative) impact on his career.
Yeah, it seems Carpenter was always battling the studios for better budgets, and as you say, the fact his films were 30 years ahead of their time and didn't have the audiences then that they have today didn't help him any. I do think he lost his way creatively around the late 80s/early 90s, but in Mouth of Madness you still see his creativity firing on all cylinders. The closest we ever got to an all-out Lovecraft film from Carpenter is The Thing itself, and that's rightfully regarded as his greatest achievement.
Thanks for the recommendation. I'll definitely check that one out. Hard to go wrong with that cast!
Hausu is certainly bonkers. A predecessor to the zany, special effects-driven, anything-goes horror-comedy of types like Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson.
Indeed. It's a good place to start a Mountains Of Madness vibe. I also appreciate Prince Of Darkness as an excellent Lovecraftian adventure. Another underrated Carpenter film IMO. And The Fog has a good Innsmouth vibe to it.
The Thing was actually based on the 1930s short story "Who Goes There?" which itself was heavily inspired by At the Mountains of Madness, so the Lovecraft influence is built in!
You're very right about the Innsmouth vibes in The Fog and the otherworldly horrors stepping freely into our reality in Prince of Darkness. The latter is one I'm still warming to, but there's undeniably a lot of greatness from Carpenter in it and it's certainly one of his most chilling, most foreboding soundtracks.
Also agree with the shout out to that wonderful ending of HALLOWEEN 4.
The preceding film count is irrelevant though when you're trying "something new" at the end of a trilogy like that. Hell, they could've even gone with something entirely fresh in the first installment of the new trilogy, but the final one? The one marketed as the conclusion of a decades-long story that only delivers in that department in the final 10-15 minutes? It's clear though that they had absolutely no concrete plan or outline from the start so it doesn't surprise me.
I think they had a plan - they pitched the entire trilogy back in 2018 as three films over one night. For some reason, they completely changed the plan for the final film.
At least with this last one, it felt like it was unnecessarily extended into a trilogy, given the heavy focus on a brand new character for 80% of the film. It sounds like DGG and co. were constantly course-correcting and changing their big ideas as it all went along. I admire the attempts but the trilogy as a whole is so messy and tonally inconsistent. I was so hopeful it'd be way better and end on a high note at least.
Is any of this all planned out? I don’t really care. The original Star Wars trilogy never was, and that doesn’t dilute that. Ultimately, I feel they all compliment each other in various ways. Like how Ally is temped to “burn this town” with Corey, as if they’re Bonnie and Clyde, which she costumed as for H18. That put me on the edge wondering if she would actually kill with Corey and we see that turn take place, and where that might impact Laurie.
I didn’t need the entire film to focus on Michael and Laurie, because I think we already had that with H18 which would have just as served well as the final confrontation between the two. It’s just that we got two extra films after.
Regardless, these films had way more issues than narrative cohesion and the timely injection of new, fresh ideas, so it doesn't make much of a difference in the end to me.
I did get spoiled about Michael not appearing until about 40 minutes into the movie, so that at least set my expectations to this installment being atypical at best.
First run never matters, anyway. Most people who see movies are those who didn’t catch it in theaters. If you’re a new Star Wars fan, you can get into the nine films now without ANY of the fan baggage that many took in theaters. You’re more able to watch the films as they are, rather than how hyped they were.
I can easily see both KILLS and ENDS develop a cult following years from now. Similar to how SEASON OF THE WITCH has been embraced as its own thing, when for the first 20 years it was largely seen as the black sheep of the whole series.