Horror Movie Talk

Synopsis

After cocktail waitress Frida and her friend Jess meet tech billionaire Slater King, they are invited to join him on his private island. Along with his friends and a few other women they are brought to a beautiful island filled with bottomless drinks, great food, and a party that never seems to end. Although this vacation truly seems like a dream, things are a little…off. This dream soon begins to unravel and what’s revealed is a true nightmare. 

Review of Blink Twice

I chose Blink Twice to review this week because it’s a film that I sort of stumbled upon the first time I saw it, so I didn’t really know much going in, and I was just so pleasantly surprised. 

Now watching it for my 3rd time not only does it hold up but I found it almost more enjoyable due to being able to appreciate a lot of the effort put into the foreshadowing that you don’t catch until you know what happens. 

The themes of different power dynamics within our society are explored in a satirical way while also bringing real world intense horror elements that aren’t your typical dark figure in the corner 

Kravitz was able to visually capture this well using day and night as a tool as well as some memory devices that help the audience and the characters keep track of time and the different worlds the characters are living

The cast is great, it is incredibly well acted and believable and the pacing may be a problem for some viewers but it kept me engaged waiting for the reveal so to say. I like that you know something is going to happen you just aren’t sure how yet or exactly what it is going to look life 

Overall it was very fun to watch, it’s beautiful, dark and at times extremely horrifying

Score 

9/10

Synopsis

Two young men who are either 16 or 25 discover they like kissing. Their parents don’t like them kissing. So they call the gay exorcist, the kind that exorcise the gay out of gays, not the normal type of gay exorcist. The zealous christians who adhere to the Old Testament beliefs about gays use witchcraft (which they seem to be fine with) to curse the two mates with a sex demon.

Review of Leviticus

I was interested to see how they would handle the deep and complex issues of religious trauma for gays. Unfortunately, they handled these issues as clumsily as a back of the bus handjob between two teenagers. There really didn’t seem to be much depth behind the characters or relationships that would have made this movie really interesting. 

Instead we get a repetitive and oppressive reliance on the gimmick of the movie revealed in the trailer. A supernatural entity that appears as the person you lust over to lure you in, so that it can harm/kill you. If you are expecting more, it’s not here. 

There are a couple of lines in the movie that act as ciphers for interpreting the message of the film, but they don’t give much depth to the themes.

I’m sure that this movie will be meaningful to many people that watch it, and it being released during pride month is obviously intentional, but for me it was a miss.

Score

4/10

Synopsis

In South Korea there are 7 super-haunted locations, and Gonjiam the abandoned asylum is one of them. This movie follows a team of ghost hunting live streamers as they attempt the biggest stream of their lives. Picking up 3 female volunteers and one bro volunteer, the Horror Time crew breaks into the haunted asylum and begin streaming it to the world. But things do not go as planned for the jaded paranormal investigators, and they are quickly in over their heads as real occurrences present themselves. You could even say they are experiencing some sort of incident in a ghostland.

Review of Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum

This is my second viewing of Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum. I first heard of this movie from our facebook group a while back and checked it out with zero expectations and was pleasantly surprised. For a movie I had never heard of before, it was actually pretty fun to watch. Coming back to the film about a year later I am able to see some of the flaws a little clearer. Mikayla mentioned that found footage is hard for her because the camera motion makes her feel nauseous. Well that really becomes a problem for this movie as there are like 20 moving cameras switching back and forth. Each character is equipped with a go pro looking directly at their face, a pov cam, and some of the crew even have handheld cameras just to bump that multicam number up. One of the dudes has a wide fisheye camera that is so confusing to look at that you literally can’t even tell what’s going on when they cut to it. It also takes about half the movie’s runtime for anything scary to really happen. With those negatives out of the way, I think this movie provides some seriously scary scenes, creepy atmosphere, and visuals that will stick with me for a long time. I still like this movie, it just isn’t quite as good as I remember it being. If you like found footage style horror and foreign films it’s worth a watch in my opinion. 

Score 6/10

Synopsis

Picking up 26 years later we see our four original characters Brenda, Cindy, Ray and Shorty reunited but for all the wrong reasons. They are once again being targeted by a masked killer. With the introduction of some new characters and new spoofs, the audience is taken on a journey to find who the killer is before it’s too late. 

Review of Scary Movie 6

Scary movie 6 being released after the longest gap in the franchise with the return of the Wayans brothers was promising a lot, I’m not quite sure if we got all that was promised 

The movie does deliver with with multiple parodies of more recent popular horror films like the substance, weapons, smile and a lot more but some jokes fell more flat than others 

I find it really hard to give a score to a comedy as it is often super subjective and I’m just not into the scary movie franchise all that much, not really my kind of comedy 

It wasn’t a miserable experience and just for the nostalgia I’m sure there are plenty of people that liked this film but for me it was a major miss

There were plenty of bits/points that I found funny but more that weren’t than were 

Score

4/10

Synopsis

A failing furniture store owner and aspiring architect Clarke is trying to work on himself in therapy when he stumbles upon a hidden portal to a labyrinthian series of rooms. These “backrooms” have an uncanny nature about them. They don’t seem to have any logical floor plans, scale, or use case. They are like a memory of a room, and not a room itself. As Clarke explores deeper he is confronted with a danger within that might consume him if he stays too long.

Review

Backrooms as a concept started as a creepy and tongue in cheek 4chan comment and them was adapted and thrived on youtube as a series of shorts. Now the creator of that series helms a hollywood movie starring oscar nominated actors.

It accomplishes a great feat in bringing a very specific flavor of horror to the masses. Liminal horror. the unsettling feeling of the spaces between spaces.

whereas most horror would focus on the scary, or horrifying, or dread. The word the exemplifies Backrooms is uncanny. It’s the feeling of something being just off enough to capture your attention.

The plot and the characters seem like secondary concerns compared to maintaining the weirdness of the production design, but are just complex enough to give the audience something to latch onto.

The personality flaws and trauma of the protagonists seem like a key to unlocking the secrets of the backrooms. But by the end of the movie, it’s just as ambiguous and dreamlike as the beginning.

It’s hard to list out what works so well in the movie, but I found it uniquely enjoyable and disturbing.

Score

10/10