Blogs Against Humanity - Adventures in Sympathetic Misanthropy

Its a rare thing for a film to affect me on a very deep level, to touch something almost primal and leave me effected by its resonance in its wake. I can think of only a handful of films that fit that description. SCANNERS cemented my adoration of horror as a genre. I'd always greatly enjoyed horror growing up, but this film led me truly fall in love with horror. It led me to embrace the fear and the artistry of the medium, and I can honestly say that it had a huge impact on my life. THREADS took the sum-total of my long-simmering cold-war terror in the face of possible nuclear annihilation, distilled it down into a concentrated dose, and then forced it down my throat. Bleak, unrelenting, cruel, hopeless, and immersive, this film became my inoculation against that fear, a fear which has never died. And every few years, I put on THREADS, and take another dose, shake myself out of the world it creates and then destroys, and go on with my life. THE CROW affected me largely because ...

Man, where to start. One of the most highly-rated and most talked about horror-films of 2018, HEREDITARY features what ends up being the complete and utter disintegration of a family that is already hanging on more-or-less by its emotional fingernails. And, in the process, first-time director Ari Aster knocks it out of the fucking park with his first at-bat. The film features the Graham Family, who is dealing with the passing of grandmother Ellen, and the resulting emotional fallout. Ellen was a mercurial, difficult woman, who has been living with her daughter's family for the past several years as her condition had deteriorated. Daughter Annie (played by the absolutely magnificent Toni Collette), her children Charlie, and Peter, and her husband, Steve, all deal with this in various ways. Steve takes care of the financial aspects, while Annie comes to terms with her deeply complicated feelings about her mother. 13-year old Charlie seems somewhat disconnected from the events and ex...

  Some of my favorite horror-films have strong elements of black-comedy running through them. The 1992 film DEAD ALIVE (AKA BRAINDEAD ) is one of Peter Jackson's first films, and its definitely hilarious, and totally gross. Another fine example is the absolutely phenomenal EVIL DEAD 2: DEAD BY DAWN (1987), which is one of my favorite horror-films of all time. While it is numerically a sequel to 1982's EVIL DEAD , its actually a remake/retelling of the same story, with a few tweaks. Other fine examples include SHAWN OF THE DEAD , ZOMBIELAND , and BEETLEJUICE . DEAD SNOW 2 could definitely be described as a mash-up of several of these films, and what a mash-up it is. The main character is the soul-survivor of the first outing, DEAD SNOW , a man named Martin. Martin and his friends had opted to spend their Easter vacation in a cabin near Øksfjord in Norway. They end up finding a stash of Nazi gold, which reanimates an SS commander named Hertzog, and his company of now-zombie so...

Snuff Film (noun) "A pornographic movie of an actual murder. May or may not be distributed for financial gain." So, I'm sure most of you have heard about "snuff films", and that most of you know that the existence of said films, as defined, is pretty much complete, moral-panic bullshit.  In TESIS, we have a young film student named Ángela who want to write her thesis on films containing violent imagery, and why such images hold fascination for people. She openly considers such footage to be "disgusting", and yet, at the start of the film, she tries to get an eyeful of a man who has been gruesomely killed on a subway track, but she is escorted away before she can see past the paramedics. Clearly, Ángela herself is morbidly interested in the concept and imagery violent death. She hears through the grapevine that another student, Chema, has a large collection of porn and violent horror films. Though he is uninterested and off-putting at first, he eventua...

*sighs* I really had to mull over this one, because I was left with a really bad taste in my mouth when it ended, and its taken me a while to form a verdict. And that verdict isn't a favorable one. Set in the area around Cape May in New Jersey, SUMMER OF '84 is, predictably enough, awash in 80's tropes. You know, like so much these days, from THE GOLDBERGS to STRANGER THINGS , be prepared to take a dip in the shallow end of the trope-pool. They are most definitely present, and yet it doesn't really evoke the feeling of living in the mid-80's. STRANGER THINGS, for all of its fudging of its 80's setting, does a much better job of summoning up that nostalgia and that atmosphere than SUMMER manages to evoke. Worse, the film really fails to subvert any of the tropes, and just gives you things like boys on bikes in the summertime, each of them occupying archetype slots that hearken to films like THE BREAKFAST CLUB , as they hang out in their Frog-Brothers tree-house...

What I'm about to say will sound like blasphemy to some, I'm sure, but... I like Luca Guadagnino's remake of SUSPIRIA a bit better than Dario Argento's original. I've ranked both films at 4 stars, but the only reason why the remake didn't get 4.5 is down to length. At 152 minutes, the film is just too long, by about 30-35 minutes. Because of that length, there are a few times where scenes go on too long, or scenes where too little happens. Fortunately, the film is really magnetic, so even when it slows down, I didn't get bored, so much as simply feeling the weight of the run-time. Anyway... Modern film-making is awash in remakes as all of you know, and as so many of us lament. However, remakes have always been with us, even if they weren't as frequent as they are now. In 1978, a remake of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS was released, and many regard it as well as they regard the 1956 original. In 1982 John Carpenter released what may arguably be the best ...

A superb techno-thriller that depicts the exploits of a cam-girl as she seeks ever more popularity, with plenty of musings on the types of personalities you come into contact with as an online stripper, and the very nature of online personalities in general. Madeline Brewer plays Alice, a lovely, intelligent young woman who makes her money as a cam-girl, and has done so well for herself that she's able to put down a payment on her own house. Her teenage brother knows about her work, but her mom does not, and so like so many of us, there's another version of her that exists primarily online; a manufactured persona named Lola_Lola. Alice wants Lola to be one of the best, and she's shooting to eventually break the top-10 on the cam-hosting site she uses, and if she can manage that, she says that she'll tell her mother what she actually does for a living. In order to raise her profile further, Alice has taken to simulating suicides on some of her cam-shows, and soon, her ch...

A woman wronged, betrayed and violated not once, not twice, but three times, a casualty of the most toxic aspects of masculinity: the perpetrator who only takes, the bystander who consciously decides not to bother caring, and the silencer who will do anything to keep his secrets. Each step is an atrocity of its own, piling up into a waking nightmare. Now, discarded by those who care only for themselves, the woman is left for dead. However, she's not dead at all. Finding reserves of strength that she didn't know she possessed, she rises from the ashes of her old life, reborn. Hell hath no fury like a woman...betrayed. REVENGE is a 2017 French-made film that condemns, in the strongest terms, toxic masculinity, and bashes rape-culture right in its face. There have been a lot of films in the "woman gets even" sub-genres of Action, Drama, and Horror, and most of them have been what amounts to exploitation films. One of the most well-known, and notorious, films in this sub...

REPULSION is a film in which psychological horror is dominant, although things eventually spill completely out of control. Many regard this 1965 film as Roman Polanski's greatest film, and I can understand why. Polanski himself, it must be said, is a fugitive from justice within the US, having plead guilty to the drugging and rape of a 13 year-old girl in 1978, and promptly fleeing the country while awaiting sentencing. He's an absolute bastard of a human being, despite his film-making prowess, and it shouldn't be overlooked. REPULSION itself tells the story of a young Belgian woman named Carol (played with detached perfection by the luminous Catherine Deneuve), who literally can. not. EVEN. Carol drifts through life, going through the motions out of what may be sheer, psychological inertia. She lives with her older sister Helen in London, who essentially takes care of her younger sister while Carol herself works as a manicurist, and doesn't truly ponder Carol's oth...