The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

[mfunk9786]

1. Jaws

I'm about as big a defender of Jaws as anyone, but that's ridiculous.

[Mr Sausage]

Why? Jaws had at least one genuinely unforgettable shock scene (head in the boat). As far as scariest moment goes, it's hard to do better, at least in terms of that sort of thing.

[Feego]

The scene that actually made that list was the opening scene, with the first girl who is attacked by the shark. While Jaws has never really been among my favorite horror movies, I actually think that was a pretty appropriate scene to take the top spot. For such a mainstream TV special, I loved the fact that they chose plenty of scenes that were not necessarily the goriest or even most obvious moments from their respective films (i.e., they chose the "All work and no play" scene from The Shining over the more obvious "Come and play with us" scene or the more explicit bathtub scene), and that they included lots of classic and foreign films that may not be on the typical high school kid's radar.

A few years later when Bravo created a list of the 100 Funniest Movie Scenes, I was looking forward to a similar approach. Unfortunately, no film made before 1960 was included, no non-English-language films, and probably a third of the list (or more) was comprised only of movies made since 1990.

[Sloper]

Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi 2009) Orally-fixated horror romp that stops being mildly-diverting fun thanks to its horribly distasteful ending.

Spoiler

If there's one thing that still leaves a bad taste in my mouth about this genre, it's the morality of some horror films regarding characters who "deserve" violent punishment. In a film like this, it becomes particularly noxious, since the entire film follows Lohman and appears to have her back, only to turn on her in the cheap and obvious ending, but not before she admits that she could have helped the woman. So it's her fault? Uh, it was the woman's third application for a stay on her mortgage and she had no means of income, why the hell would anyone approve her request? Am I supposed to nod my head with liberal smugness and say, "Yep, that's what you get for being a businesswoman and expecting people to follow through on their adult commitments: you get your soul torn apart for all eternity in Hell. That'll show ya"? Fuck that message, and fuck this film.

I'm so glad to finally hear from someone else who feels this way about the film. One big objection I had was that it really wasn't making any effort to be truly scary for most of its length - instead we get what are effectively gross-out jokes which almost always seem to involve a pretty young blonde having maggots, embalming fluid or an old woman's fist forcibly inserted into her mouth. It's queasy on so many levels, and scary in all the wrong ways. A huge disappointment considering how sensitively and powerfully Raimi dealt with similar themes in A Simple Plan (not his story in that case, of course, but he told it so well). Here we have the horror-comedy of the Evil Dead movies spliced with a sort of medieval cautionary tale, and the mix is just horrible. The adulation heaped on this film, and the tone of 'it's good clean fun' in the reviews, are mystifying to me.

I feel exactly the same way about Tales From the Crypt (d. Freddie Francis, 1972), and in particular the 'Wish You Were Here' episode - an acknowledged re-working of 'The Monkey's Paw', but one that replaces that classic story's sympathy for the characters, and its chilling sense of the malevolent fate that stalks them, with gleeful, puerile sadism. It also throws out the logic of the story, because what happens to the unfortunate protagonist here makes no rational sense, either within the confines of the story or in its relationship with the frame narrative (although I can think of one possible solution to the latter problem). This film is also generally thought of as 'good clean fun'. It put me into a nauseous cold sweat for weeks when I saw it about ten years ago.

Films like this appeal to the audience's desire to see people suffer, and to distance themselves from that suffering because it is 'deserved'. They push a conservative message (in this case 'be careful what you wish for', which is the moral reductively ascribed to 'The Monkey's Paw') which says that when people suffer it's because they deserve to. My idea of a horror story is one that looks into the real abysses of the human condition and makes us identify and empathise with the suffering characters. That's when things get really scary, and those are the stories that have a lasting impact.

It's what distinguishes The Descent (one of my favourite recent horror films) from The Descent 2. The first film puts us right there with the characters, making us share their claustrophobia, the physical horrors that attack them in the caves, the madness of the heroine, and even the guilt of her best friend. At no point are we invited to take direct enjoyment from any of this suffering, instead it puts us in touch with our own fears and darker instincts. Then the sequel comes along, gives us a character we can really hate, and sends him to his death in a gut-churningly sadistic manner that seems designed a) to make the film easier to watch so that it makes more money (a key factor here), and b) to make us cheer at the character's deserved comeuppance.

[mfunk9786]

Oh brother, give me a break with the chivalry w/r/t a fictional horror film. In what universe is the plot about "deserving" punishment? A curse is placed on the main character by a lunatic, and it's (despite failed attempts by the film's characters to deny it) unbreakable. The character is obviously a sweet person who didn't do anything wrong, the opening is just a way to get the story moving and give the witch a reason to inflict the curse. The ending's just about the most obvious one in cinematic history (it's majorly hinted at in the film's open fer chrissakes), why are you watching a horror film called Drag Me To Hell if you can't allow it to have some wicked fun with it's premise?

[Murdoch]

Yeah, I didn't see the movie as screaming "she deserves this!" She's damned not because she's bad for denying the woman a loan, but because that lady is a crazy vengeful witch who put a curse on her. I can't understand how someone could watch the movie and find her deserving of punishment, especially given you're supposed to be rooting for her to escape the curse

Spoiler

which is why the ending is pretty unnerving given we have to watch a sympathetic character be torn apart.

[Sloper]

First, just to clarify, I have no interest in being 'chivalrous': when I refer to Christine as a 'pretty young blonde', I'm not saying I would be absolutely fine with all these things happening to an ugly old redhead. I don't think it's chivalrous to say that I get an uneasy feeling when I watch a film in which a stereotypically attractive young woman is force-fed all sorts of horrible things because she deserves it.

As for your non-moral readings of the plot, I'll let Sam Raimi field this one:

Spoiler

That was always the ending of the picture. We felt it was always where the story had been heading with the main character. We felt that anything else would just have actually been more horrible if you think about it, because she’s really a despicable character... I think she was a good person on the outside but when you really start to look at her, when she gets in an extreme situation, the real person comes out. In fact it’s really the old woman that’s the victim in this story and Alison Lohman, I think her character Christine deserved probably what she got.

If you read the full interview, or any number of others, you'll see that I've over-simplified his interpretation of the film, but I really don't see how anyone can watch this film and miss the morality tale aspect. I don't think it's very well thought out, and in practice I don't think it enlists the sympathy or empathy of the audience as much as Raimi claims in that interview, but it's there as plain as day. If you're able to ignore it, good for you; I can't and it bothers me.

[mfunk9786]

What if the lead character were a male?

[Sloper]

I almost said that myself - but look at my earlier post. The protagonist of that episode in Tales From the Crypt is a rich, oily, fortysomething male. So my biggest problem goes much deeper than the age, gender and attractiveness of the character.

That said, and although hypocritical chivalry drives me up the wall (as it does you, apparently), I do worry about the specific kind of 'wicked fun' I'm being asked to swallow in this film. So yes, the fact that she's an attractive young woman makes me uncomfortable, but that's just the icing on the cake (the cake of 'my problems with Drag Me To Hell').

Horror films, especially those featuring pretty, sexy young characters, can sometimes be uncomfortably exploitative. I still don't think I'm inviting accusations of 'chivalry' by saying this.

[mfunk9786]

I am just rather taken aback at this film's ability to turn folks who are capable of objectively praising Giallo films, slasher classics, etc into old church ladies - it's like it's cursed or something

[Mr Sausage]

Where have you ever seen Domino or Sloper praise a giallo/slasher film that thought its female characters deserved their cruel deaths?

[domino harvey]

Viewings this week:

the Beyond (Lucio Fulci 1981) A free-associative zombie film that presumes (rightly, based on Fulci's continued popularity) audiences want scenes of outrageous and gratuitous gore, even (and especially) at the cost of narrative coherence or causality. Hell, apparently even anatomy is up for grabs, as humans bodies are now constructed like chicken pot pies. There are moments when the film dares to be effective, such as the haunting introduction of the blind girl and her dog in the middle of a deserted stretch of highway, or a little girl stuck in an autopsy room slowly backing away from a puddle of her own mother (though shame on the hospital for building that room on a slant!), but any tension or unease is ground to a halt by the filmmaker's perverse desire to show us every gristly detail in slowwwwwmmmmoooottttiiiioooonnnn. Also, more like Fulceye, amirite

Big Trouble in Little China (John Carpenter 1986) Handily the strongest of the post-Halloween Carpenters I've seen, this is a compelling series of sets upon which activities occasionally occur. I'm not sure what's sillier, the plot or the political readings of the plot, but I bought into the whole goofy affair without much resistance and that's enough for a film like this.

the Brood (David Cronenberg 1979) I wish I could say this film displeased me due to some unsettling disturbance derived from its depicted horrors, but it was more the rather unfocused and ludicrous plot machinations, climaxing with the clumsy externalization of something better left metaphorical. And I'm no "How dare you"-ist, but the scene where the teacher violently bites it at-length in front of all the little child actors made me question just how necessary such a staging was.

Buried Alive (Frank Darabont 1990) Jennifer Jason Leigh and William Atherton scheme to poison and pilfer Leigh's wealthy contractor husband Tim Matheson, but things (shock) don't go quite according to plan. A muted revenge horror in the spirit of EC Comics, Darabont's directorial debut stretches out a story fit for a couple dozen panels into full-length, but it still works, especially the messy and painful poisoning scene.

Dead Again (Kenneth Branagh 1991) The prospect of watching a bunch of stuffed shirt actors slumming it in a ridiculous reincarnation-focused thriller is a bit suspect, I'll admit, but the material is so ludicrous and everyone seems to be having such fun (Campbell Scott karate kicks Branagh in the face for God's sake) that it mostly left me satisfied, even if the right time for melodramatics like this went out with Vincent Sherman.

Dead and Buried (Gary Sherman 1981) What I wish more horror films were like. Anchored by Jack Albertson's nicely regal swan song perf as the big band-loving mortician, this highly novel zombie-ish film presents an impossible and beguiling premise and then proceeds to explain itself in an even more implausible and beguiling fashion. As good-natured as a film like this can be.

Death Ride to Osaka (Jonathan Kaplan 1983) Amateur chanteuse Jennifer Jason Leigh answers a sketch trade paper ad and winds up forced into sexual slavery in Japan thanks to a shady contract and some shadier Yakuza bosses. As tawdry as that sounds, this mild exploitation flick is probably the most genteel film ever made about forced prostitution. Were it not for the nudity you could watch it in the family room with Grandma! Of some interest to fans of Ms. Leigh, particularly her role in Georgia, as she gets quite a few numbers here that were clearly not overdubbed. Also features a great score that would sound right at home on some future Valerie Records comp.

Lake Placid (Steve Miner 1999) Classical Hollywood in the best way and yet still fully in the dying spirit of Nineties Horror, this is a film that does so much right to my eyes that it legit shocked me to discover that Lake Placid is yet another horror film I loved that no one, not even easily led horror film fans, seems to like. What defenses can I offer for this Killer Croc Flick? The film is centered around four equally-strong star performances, written by TV wunderkind David E Kelley to be performed with the sole requirement of charisma, not acting. That's not a dig, it's a neutral observation: This isn't a film that calls for method acting. Barely contained paycheck cashing will do, but gleeful fun like we get from everyone here is better (Bridget Fonda, who is admittedly always good even in bad films, especially seems to be enjoying her city slicker archetype). All speak with variations of sarcastic barbs and the dialog, especially in the first twenty minutes or so, is funny in the same vein of a screwball comedy: everyone's a comedian and the world just needs to step back and let them roll. With a few alterations (Moments like Fonda screaming "fuckshit" at her cellular phone would prob have to go for more than one reason) this script could be any contract star vehicle from the forties. But beneath the potentially off-putting verbal sparring, there's an affability to the Names in the film that bypasses the nauseous And Then There Was One reduction that plagues virtually every horror film, especially in a monster flick like this-- this may qualify as a spoiler, I'm not sure, but almost no one dies in this film, and there's something to be said for a film that likes everyone involved a little too much to off them, including the monster. So yes, it's refreshing in the midst of all these films that come from a place of hate and nastiness to come across a picture that, despite its share of R-rated gore and terrors, didn't make me feel bad and allowed me to have fun. I watched Lake Placid with a smile on my face from beginning to end, and I don't think that makes it a lesser experience, or invalid for genre or general purposes.

the Mummy (Terence Fisher 1959) I know I'm missing something with these Hammer Horror films, so I'm withholding final judgment until I see more, but it did occur to me while watching, and it's not really this particular film's fault, that the basic premise of "The Mummy's Revenge," &c is not a very compelling basis for a horror film. Like a lot of kids, I had an early fascination with the rituals and rites of the Ancient Egyptians-- it's really the first example of grotesqueness being taught in school I can remember, and the thrill of learning all the icky details and phantastic lore associated with the era really pales with the drag placing said elements within a modern setting brings. The process of mummification is fascinating, the end result is not. A corpse is a corpse is a corpse, and so all of that which makes Egyptology so fascinating is made rote and ordinary by the typical mummy tale. (I can think of one modern exception, Steven E de Souza's "Creep Course" episode of Tales From the Crypt, which does seem to understand the underlying horror of all those rituals and nastily expresses them with the freedom afforded premium cable.)

the New York Ripper (Lucio Fulci 1982) A puzzling creation, one that bothered me a little less than other detractors if just because I found the film to be more exploitative than misogynist in its aims and execution, which put the gratuitous scenes of slaughter on a (comparatively) higher plane than something legitimately misogynistic like Eyes of a Stranger. Fulci's childish provocation-then-prolongment methodology quickly grows tired, especially when placed within the confines of a barrel of red herrings. Edit out the clueless footsy scene and most of the gore and this would be another of those slight but not terrible NYC detective films that came post-French Connection. Of course, make those changes and it ceases to have a reason to exist, so

Q the Winged Serpent (Larry Cohen 1982) Having enjoyed both Cohen and Michael Moriarty's work in the Stuff, I was all prepped for a good time here, but this was just incoherent slop. Cohen's mastery of filmmaking basics leaves a lot to be desired at this stage, and Moriarty's insistence that he's in a different movie than anyone else annoys as often as it entertains. At least he can act, though, which is more than you can say for the other names in the cast.

Silent Night, Deadly Night (Ira R Barmak 1984) First off, outside of serving as the convenient impetus for psychological trauma, the Santa suited crook at the beginning of this film has to be the worst criminal of all time: dude robs a convenience store for $30, then sticks up a family caravan for no real purpose except to shoot dad, partially unclothe mom before slitting her throat, and vaguely menace a little boy. This is not well thought-out outlawry. But at least it damages the poor little tyke and ten years later his boss dresses him as Kris Kringle and whoops, everyone dies. The film goes to great efforts to explain its protagonist's actions, which makes the ensuing carnage a little easier to swallow and is helpful during some of the more ridiculous moments. Probably the only time you'll see a cop shoot a priest by accident and refuse to apologize.

TerrorVision (Ted Nicolaou 1986) Family's new satellite dish accidentally picks up an alien who beams himself in and out of the TV at convenient moments. Look, this film is trash, and what's worse is that the filmmakers and actors all set out to make trash, so the whole thing's a bit like high-end Troma product. That being said, I can't deny the film merits a recommendation, if only to fully appreciate the delirious set design of the family's house, a garish neon pink-and-purple concoction that looks like a Mall Food Court Circa 1985 threw up on a Spencer's Gifts. Complete with sexually graphic (yet still obtuse) artwork on every wall, the vast domicile proves a daffy successor to the mad cartoon genius of Tashlin. And maybe I was just in a good mood when I watched but I quite liked the girl from Better Off Dead as the gum-chewing Cyndi Lauper-wannabe daughter and I laughed more than once at the corny swingers jokes that even Playboy would have considered passe. You already know if this is the kind of film you can sit through-- and the producers might as well have released the film directly to USA Up All Night-- but it's just interesting enough to make excuses.

[Mr Sausage]

the Brood (David Cronenberg 1979) I wish I could say this film displeased me due to some unsettling disturbance derived from its depicted horrors, but it was more the rather unfocused and ludicrous plot machinations, climaxing with the clumsy externalization of something better left metaphorical. And I'm no "How dare you"-ist, but the scene where the teacher violently bites it at-length in front of all the little child actors made me question just how necessary such a staging was.

You disliked this bit in a movie whose whole premise is the externalizing and literalizing of psychic trauma? I mean, I guess you can dislike the premise, but you seem only to dislike its final manifestation, which is odd. Personally, I've always appreciated the way that the movie reverses the Freudian technique of turning psychic processes into figurative systems, ie. transforming them into higher and therefore less messy mental processes. The Brood, rather than elevating those mental processes through abstraction, takes a reductionist approach and makes them bodily, and therefore animal, functions. It's a hell of an idea, that pain and suffering can be made powerful enough to disrupt and alter flesh, giving that flesh a new purpose. As far as literalizations go, this one strikes me as having a lot of worth, especially in the way that the destruction wrought internally by psychic pain is translated into physical, external destruction, giving you a much more visceral sense of its force.

[domino harvey]

The entire plot's pretty bad but the badness climaxes with the revelation of the Literal Symbolic Horror. I don't think much of body horror in general, though, which might explain my cool response to the other Cronenberg horror films I've seen outside of eXistenZ (which does use its bodily fixation well)

[Mr Sausage]

the Mummy (Terence Fisher 1959) I know I'm missing something with these Hammer Horror films, so I'm withholding final judgment until I see more, but it did occur to me while watching, and it's not really this particular film's fault, that the basic premise of "The Mummy's Revenge," &c is not a very compelling basis for a horror film. Like a lot of kids, I had an early fascination with the rituals and rites of the Ancient Egyptians-- it's really the first example of grotesqueness being taught in school I can remember, and the thrill of learning all the icky details and phantastic lore associated with the era really pales with the drag placing said elements within a modern setting brings. The process of mummification is fascinating, the end result is not. A corpse is a corpse is a corpse, and so all of that which makes Egyptology so fascinating is made rote and ordinary by the typical mummy tale.

It's eerie how much your experience parallels mine in this instance. I can't really deny anything you've just said, but that doesn't affect my opinion of the movie. I think this one works best intertextually (god I'm getting heady tonight). Maybe you just need to've grown up with the Universal Kharis films to see how wonderfully Hammer's version brings the sodden material to life. After having seen countless films of victims backing slowly into a wall and just standing there paralyzed while a mummy shuffles interminably towards them, it's so goddamn thrilling to watch Kharis smash bodily through a window like it were paper, and see Peter Cushing, far from standing there immobile, throw himself over a table to avoid the mummy, grab an arrow off the wall, and ram it through Kharis' torso, only to be outright throttled. The physicality of the mise-en-scene strikes you all the more when you have those memories of tired movies where mummies just shuffle around at a snail's pace, catching people who never make a genuine attempt to escape, and just kinda choking them in a not very convincing manner. It's too bad you didn't get much from the movie, but I really appreciate the way it injects a formula that was anemic from the get-go with so much life. It thrilled me as a kid and it thrills me now.

[colinr0380]

I finally finished off the Saw series over the weekend with Saw VI and Saw VII (aka Saw 3D) - I'd been saving them for about a year until I felt in the mood/could stomach the gore and for some reason this weekend became the perfect time! I had not planned to watch both together in a double bill but the impressive ending of Saw VI propelled me into watching the final one too. Although mfunk gave a good overview of the entire series in one of his guides a while ago, I thought that I would throw up my thoughts on the last two entries as well!

Saw VI, I'm tempted to say, might perhaps be my favourite of the entire series after the third entry. Much like the 'odd-numbered average/even-numbered great' system of the Star Trek films, I have a theory that every third installment of the Saw series ends up being better than the couple of preceding entries! I liked the 'moral purpose' sense to the traps in this one, with the predatory health insurance office picking up a little from the crooked housing developers in Saw V in the sense of the crimes getting punished becoming less about unsolved murders or corrupt people being brought to justice than wider issues of housing, healthcare and (in part VII) celebrity - not 'criminals' who have escaped justice per se, but more people who are simply not considered criminals by societal standards. White collar crimes more than blue collar ones.

Part VI also neatly gets around one of the bigger problems of the Saw series - the rather depressing knowledge that nobody is going to survive any of the traps, given that the whole raison d'etre of the films is to show exactly how they work in a gory fashion, so inevitably the devices have to play out fully. (In fact in one of the commentary tracks for the films the producers talk about getting a lot of negative comments from viewers for not showing the 'reverse bear trap' of the very first film working (which is something they then rectify in both Saw VI and VII!), although perhaps the reason that this particular trap became so iconic was precisely because it was one of the few that kept a particular nasty aura of "what would happen if it actually worked?" about it)

While Saw VII sadly reverts back to the 'inevitable deaths' of part 3 or 4 for the trap portion of the film, where the 'hero' has to fail a task and then look on helplessly whilst people are speared or roasted, Saw VI makes all its traps about choosing between groups of characters since the chap forced into these Sophie's Choice situations is the person who makes final decisions on whether people get funded for medical conditions or not. While all the people in the traps are his employees, or I suppose could be considered 'enablers' (This is one of those interesting crazed logic things that continues throughout the series which I find most fascinating and which I wonder whether the filmmakers intend or not - whether someone can actually be more than a representative of a particular issue or moral failing or whether someone can be more than just a murderer being brought to justice, or a junkie, or someone with a failing marriage, or in a rapacious profession? The stated aim of Jigsaw is a kind of twisted form of atonement and that presumably the reason that all of these people fail the tests is because they are literally proving themselves to be just a racist for example, by being unable to change. But is putting them in these tests in the first place itself an example of returning the individual back to their sins, of forever fixing them as flawed and never letting them move on).

So in Saw VI you get one or two people saved in a couple of traps whilst also getting to see the gory consequences played out fully as well - the 'have your cake and eat it' idea. Plus the arbitrary decisions are working to expose the boss's hypocrisy - i.e. in choosing the unhealthy elderly receptionist with a family over the young healthy file clerk with nobody, with each accompanied with (blackly comic) biased photographs of happy families hugging together or the clerk sitting sad and alone on a park bench, he lets the file clerk die, going against his rules of medical coverage. Or when faced with all of his team of claims assessors on a shotgun carousel, he lets the women live, (except for the one he perceives as a desperate liar, who he lets die). The mechanics of slasher films are getting played with in a fascinating way in this episode.

The ongoing story arc in Saw VI is particularly good as well, with a real sense of threat rather than just of moving the chess pieces around for a big twist as had predominated in the last couple of films, shown in the relationship between Jill and Hoffman (a couple of characters who in a non-horror film would probably just be battling over Jigsaw's estate in probate court and fighting over who would get his collection of dolls). It was also nice to see Costas Mandylor finally getting to play an out and out villain after all of the balancing act of being both a duplicitous policeman and Saw acolyte over the previous few films, and again it was quite blackly funny to see him at the end of this film (and in Saw VII) just using blunt violence to sort out his problems. You know things have gotten to a terminal stage when a character's main solution to his problems is simply to douse everything in gasoline and light a match! Which he does in both films!

I particularly like the pairing of VI and VII in the way that Jill has the upper hand for all of VI and then it twists back in Hoffman's favour for part VII. However other than that I'm not a huge fan of part VII, which feels rather underwhelming as a climax of the franchise, despite the return of the long absent Doctor Gordon from the first part. Although Saw VII could perhaps best be described as being the 'Fight Club' of the franchise, with all of the traps slowly becoming public and the survivor support groups beginning to band together to continue a legacy under their own steam, but with the inspiration of Jigsaw as the 'creator figure' (the other fascinating and difficult aspect of the Saw series is the way that it seems a lot about someone making their mark long after they have died and of significance being ascribed to something by sheer longevity and the way it might have the power to live on after death. Jigsaw is of course the main example of this, but the twisty-turny nature of the series means that extremely minor characters killed off in the first or second films are still making cameos off into the seventh, being brought back to life in other character's remembrances, if just for a brief throwaway moment. This all may just be an unintended consequence of constantly retrofitting and embellishing the first few films into one long saga resulting in building an enormous and quite impressive, if occasionally a little wobbly, house of cards and seeing how coherent it will all remain, but there is the nice, and quite rare, feeling of the films being able to jump around anywhere within the whole narrative at any time)

After the doubled victims of Saw VI, Saw VII sadly reverts back to the contstraining formula of 'one victim who has to die in order that we can see the trap work' - the devices are all quite nastily inventive but in this series the problems usually come not from the situation in which people find themselves in, but in the way that there is no tension to any of the trap sequences, since in filmic terms there is no way that anyone will be allowed to survive them. In much the same way that none of the groups of teenagers in Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th films can survive - they are there to provide the death sequence and nothing beyond that. What is the point of them being around in the film, if not for that reason? (This also plays into the singular characterisations talked about above, because if they were to survive they would need to be more fully rounded out) Similar to the way that the later Friday the 13th films sequestered the teens marked for death in a separate house from the characters in the 'main' plot, the Saw series has always had the main story plot kept almost totally separate from the mundane day-to-day of individual trap storylines for a particular film.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Saw VII is the way that it is getting into fantasy territory for the first time. The most obvious example of this is Jill's nightmare (a first for the series and which allows one of the main characters to get two death sequences, which I suppose in this milleu shows her particular importance to the series!) but there are two other areas where the film appears to show an interest in the imagination of the characters. One is the amusing sequence of a previous Jigsaw trap survivor (who we have never seen before, which is apparently to raise the feeling in the audience that we only saw a fraction of what was occurring in the previous films), whose recounting of her ordeal takes the form of a quick fire, amusingly stylised sequence that is almost EC comic-ish in the way it portrays her hanging over an entire floor of upturned lawnmowers, with the gouts of spraying blood over boxes of impassively watching garden gnomes as she chucks her abusive husband into the blades instead!

Finally there is the head of the support group (who eventually becomes the 'hero' failing to save anybody in the traps), whose 'crime' is that he was pretending to be a survivor when he actually was not (all of his entourage who have been 'enabling' him end up dying off in the devices). This does not appear in the final film but in the commentary the writers talk of the way that when he is recounting his epiphanal ordeal on a talkshow PR piece early in the film that they were going to have an extremely stylised recreation of him going through his apparent Jigsaw trap (a Man Called Horse/Cannibal Ferox-style Native American stunt of lifting himself up on hooks through the chest) in an extremely bright and clean room, with him giving off a bright aura of purified light as he survived the situation and was given a supposed new lease of life! Which would have gotten ironically contrasted with the final, total failure to pull the same situation off in the real game in one of the usual grimy torture locations of the series!

That I think was the most novel innovation of Saw VII, and it was nice to see the filmmakers mining the character's inner thoughts and feelings for more than just a narrative driven flashback to explain things to the audience, but instead in order to tackle the difference between hopes and fears and reality (even if the major example did turn out to be a cliched "it was only a dream" sequence!)

I'm still quite ambivalent on this entire series - it is goofy and increasingly ludicrous (yet ambitious in way it continually paints itself into a corner yet still wiggles free for yet another entry), yet amusingly grand guignol on the one hand; and dark and depressingly futile on the other. It is both a continuation of the slasher film cycle and yet plotwise far more complex than the average Nightmare on Elm Street, let alone Friday The 13th film. It feels like sound and fury finally signifying nothing at all very much (although there is always a slim thread of continuance, despite the reset button being regularly pressed), yet it does constantly throw up difficult and troubling ideas. I'm not sure if I'm reading far, far too much into the series containing sequences of people fighting each other with circular saws or having jacked-up cars running at 70 mph drop directly onto their head and then drive through their body, yet the constant references to old horror tropes such as the Pit and the Pendulum in Saw V, or the Man Called Horse/Cannibal Ferox material in VII (or the Merchant of Venice 'pound of flesh' literally coming from unscrupulous money lenders in the opening of Saw VI), keep me from just dismissing the series entirely. It is grand guignol often to a fault, but pulled off in inventive and thought-provoking ways, even if the thought that most often gets provoked is usually "Ewww!"

[Mr Sausage]

Island of the Fishmen (Sergio Martino, 1979): Better than a movie titled Island of the Fishmen has any right to be. An Island of Dr. Moreau clone essentially, with some voodoo, an unstable volcano, and Joseph Cotton thrown in for good measure. Some castaways wash up on a mysterious island under the iron rule of Richard Johnson, and everything that you would expect to happen happens. It's predictable, and yet somehow manages to be entertaining. There are some surprisingly effective under water special effects, including a giant submerged city wriggling with fishmen. Equally surprising is how the movie refuses its ample opportunities to be exploitative (there is next to no gore for instance). I appreciated the odd little touches that you commonly find in Italian genre films. Here, not content merely to have fishmen, the movie makes them drug addicts as well. I don't know why, presumably so there could be a scene of a Barbara Bach pouring white liquid from a chalice into the waiting gullets of fishmen as they stroke her face. The voodoo priestess is named Shakira, and I laughed every single time someone called her that. The movie was redubbed, reedited, and outfitted with newly shot scenes (nearly all of them explicit gore) for both of its American releases, so you'll also find it under the titles Something Waits in the Dark and Screamers. I haven't seen these shorter, gorier versions.

[colinr0380]

I've not seen the film of Island of the Fishermen/Screamers yet but I have heard the wonderful score to the film which has a nice epic feel to it - so much so that I wouldn't want my idea of the film gathered from the score to be dashed by actually seeing the final result! Although your write up has me thinking that I should see it now! It certainly sounds a better 'fishermen' tale than Humanoids From The Deep!

[Mr Sausage]

I've not seen the film of Island of the Fishermen/Screamers yet but I have heard the wonderful score to the film which has a nice epic feel to it - so much so that I wouldn't want my idea of the film gathered from the score to be dashed by actually seeing the final result! Although your write up has me thinking that I should see it now! It certainly sounds a better 'fishermen' tale than Humanoids From The Deep!

The score was pretty rousing. The Screamers version has a totally different score which, while bearing no resemblance to the original, still sounded decent from the small clips I saw on youtube (made liberal use of the Blaster Beam).

[Siddon]

1. Jaws

I'm about as big a defender of Jaws as anyone, but that's ridiculous.

The list was of moments, hard to say the opening of Jaws isn't the scariest moment of all time especially if you limit to iconic popular films.

From the '30s, don't forget Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, loads of great Karloff films (The Man They Could Not Hang, The Black Room, The Mask of Fu Manchu, The Invisible Ray, etc.), Dwain Esper's Maniac, and anything with Tod Slaughter. Which reminds me...

Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, I thought Fredic March was good, I really enjoyed his acrobatics when he was Hyde. But the rest of the film was just to much of a snoozer for me. To much of an imbalance could have done more with suspense.

Testament of Dr. Mabuse was pretty good but really not much of a horror film.

I watched Maniac on your recommendation. I found the film to be somewhat of a mixed bag. The movie had some fantastic imagery and you can see a lot of Val Lewton's work that was inspired from it. The biggest knock on it, or why I didn't really like it was I felt like the acting was not up to par. The lead was nonsensical, over the top, and really difficult to understand his motivations. while I will remember the images from the film it was so disjointed that I don't think I would even consider it for any sort of ranking. I understand that the counter argument is that the film is of a different time but Peter Lorre in Mad Love, Claude Rains in Invisible Man, and Dwight Frye in Dracula were all able to play crazy without taking out of the film with inconsistency and over the top acting.

[puxzkkx]

After seeing some of the famous works by the "Four Heavenly Kings of Pinku" I'm tempted to write off pinku eiga as a genre inimical to any kind of successful thematic exploration. Actually, that's a lie - works by Ryū Murakami, Ryūichi Hiroki and a few others operate within the pinku system and are great films regardless. But after being grossly disappointed by a few early Zeze films last year I find myself again a bit nonplussed by Hisayasu Satō's Muscle, which has eye-catching bookending sequences (the opening, with its deconstruction of the photographic process, its gaze lingering on the bodybuilder's form in a way that somehow separates it from being, or humanity) and an interesting structure but seems to rest on an interesting collection of motifs without ever drawing them together into a satisfying 'whole' theme. From what I read of Satō's other works they are similar sexual/violent body horrors with obsessive and masochistic characters, so maybe this is just an example of dressing up studio-commissioned softcore scenes with something resembling subtext. Unlike Zeze's films Satō makes this interesting if not successful - but if 'interesting but not successful' is as far as he gets in his career, what a shame (and reviews of his other films appear to point to this).

I also saw something that was mentioned a few pages ago - Diane Bertrand's The Ring Finger, which I believe does have a total system of meaning but that system is so obscure and Bertrand's handling of the film's structural elements so vapid and toneless that by the end of the film, instead of asking myself 'what questions are being posed here?', I found myself asking 'why should I bother wondering?'. Can't say I'm a fan. I guess I can detect a well thought-out intent on Bertrand's part, but that intent is never even hinted at onscreen in a way that makes me want to chase its scent.

[matrixschmatrix]

I watched Maniac on your recommendation. I found the film to be somewhat of a mixed bag. The movie had some fantastic imagery and you can see a lot of Val Lewton's work that was inspired from it. The biggest knock on it, or why I didn't really like it was I felt like the acting was not up to par. The lead was nonsensical, over the top, and really difficult to understand his motivations. while I will remember the images from the film it was so disjointed that I don't think I would even consider it for any sort of ranking. I understand that the counter argument is that the film is of a different time but Peter Lorre in Mad Love, Claude Rains in Invisible Man, and Dwight Frye in Dracula were all able to play crazy without taking out of the film with inconsistency and over the top acting.

I don't know, I thought the acting was totally consistent with the rest of the movie, which feels like a deranged piece of outsider art- I mean, there's a whole and totally irrelevant speech from a man who's running a cat murdering farm, and that's not one of the stranger aspects of the thing.

[matrixschmatrix]

I watched Maniac on your recommendation. I found the film to be somewhat of a mixed bag. The movie had some fantastic imagery and you can see a lot of Val Lewton's work that was inspired from it. The biggest knock on it, or why I didn't really like it was I felt like the acting was not up to par. The lead was nonsensical, over the top, and really difficult to understand his motivations. while I will remember the images from the film it was so disjointed that I don't think I would even consider it for any sort of ranking. I understand that the counter argument is that the film is of a different time but Peter Lorre in Mad Love, Claude Rains in Invisible Man, and Dwight Frye in Dracula were all able to play crazy without taking out of the film with inconsistency and over the top acting.

I don't know, I thought the acting was totally consistent with the rest of the movie, which feels like a deranged piece of outsider art- I mean, there's a whole and totally irrelevant speech from a man who's running a cat murdering farm, and that's not one of the stranger aspects of the thing.

[knives]

We really need to put years by the films named maniac as there are about twenty of them. I thought the discussion was on the Lustig film for a second.

[swo17]

We could always just refer to it by the more inviting title Sex Maniac.