Horror Movie Talk

Synopsis

In this 2007 French film, a pregnant woman on Christmas Eve, the night before her induced labor is mourning the recent loss of her husband in a car crash when she is terrorized by a nameless woman in the dark. 

Review

This movie is something else. it uses the equation of vulnerable person + unstoppable psychopath = dread to the maximum effect. It would be bad enough with just the pregnant woman as the protagonist, but we also the the In Utero POV showing the baby suffering from the trauma.

It’s very rare that a horror movie makes me actually feel something. I’m a jaded horror movie reviewer. I’ve seen it all. This film gave me a visceral reaction so deeply that I regressed to childhood and was watching parts of this movie through my fingers. This movie goes hard.

Even with the rather cheesy CGI of the early 2000s, you can’t help but still be disturbed by the ideas that said CGI is portraying.

While I can’t say I enjoyed this film, I can say it is a good film and achieves what it sets out to do.

Score

10/10

Synopsis

Gemma is a mother and a dentist (the two hardest jobs of them all), living in her childhood home with her daughter Maya. When Gemma was a child she watched her mother battle with mental health and eventually kill herself by bashing her own head into the shower wall repeatedly. Why does Gemma continue to live in that house and use that shower? Cause the plot needs her to. After experiencing some insidious events, Gemma must protect her daughter as she tries to reconnect with her past. What happens next will shock you, but spoilers…it’s insidious.

Review of Insidious: Out of the Further

Insidious is a franchise that has been near and dear to my heart. It was one of the first horror movies I really got into as a teenager, probably because it was rated PG-13 and I was too young to buy my own rated R tickets. The first two are gems, the third is okay, and the fourth is so terrible I don’t even want to consider it a part of the franchise. Some studios would have let it die. But not Blumhouse. Blumhouse will NEVER let this franchise die. Insidious 5: The Red Door came out a few years ago, and you know what? I didn’t hate it. But now we get a 6th addition to the story, which is mostly disconnected from the story in the other films and follows its own path. The story is about as good as I expected from a 6th Insidious installment, and it was able to make some lore additions that I found fresh and interesting. If you are looking for a great movie, maybe go rewatch Obsession, Hokum, or the Backrooms. This movie is pretty alright, and I think that is all we can ask of another insidious movie.

Synopsis

From a young age, Maren (played by Taylor Russell) has carried the innate urge to consume human flesh—a hunger that has shaped nearly every aspect of her life. Shortly after turning 18 and finding herself on her own, she sets out across the country in search of her estranged mother. Along the way, Maren encounters a colorful cast of outsiders and drifters, including Lee (played by Timothée Chalamet), with whom she develops a budding romance. Through this coming-of-age story, Luca Guadagnino explores themes of queerness, identity, loneliness, and life on the fringes of society. 

Review of Bones and All

Bones and all is a great romance movie for horror lovers 

It’s artsy and at times weird for the sake of being weird but through the use of cannibalism we get a representation of the intense otherness that some feel  

The approach to queerness is very interesting as how characters are shown in a more dynamic way where it’s a part of the character than their whole identity. (for example unlike stereotypes) 

On the horror front the gore is very well done and visually striking every time

The characters are weird, and interesting to watch with great performances from all the actors involved 

It makes you want a bigger look of what this world make look like in different situations

This is a great adaptation of Camille DeAngelis’s book by the same name in that it keeps the source material close to home but makes enough changes to make it artistically distinct. 

The only criticism I really have is that the film lingers a little too long on the bliss of romance and falling in love on the road without really diving into what makes them love each other besides both being outsiders. 

I also  would have loved the film to get even darker and perhaps show more horror-esque scenes. 

Score

9/10

Synopsis

Fire In The Sky tells the based on a true story of Travis Walton, a logger in Arizona traveling home with his crew getting abducted by an alien UFO. Now I know what you’re thinking they can’t possibly stretch out a single abduction story into a full feature length horror film. Well do I have news for you. You’re right. But! You can stretch it out to about 3/4 of a drama and 1/4 of a horror movie.

Review

This movie came out just months before the pilot of The X-files that all featured an alien abduction. Alien abduction was in the air in the early 90s and this movie came out at the prime time with a wide release and failed at the box office.

I saw it in theaters when I was just 11, so I definitely have thick nostalgia glasses on. It is not a prefect movie. In fact narratively it is a real oddity. It spend most of the movie exploring the fallout and doubt around Travis’ friends story of his disappearance. In the last 1/4 of the movie we are treated with some of the most intense sci-fi body horror put on film, and I think that 20 mins still holds up. Instead of the cold sterile and clinical scenes with grey aliens that are described by most alien abductions, this film shows a terrifying matrix like goo cocoons with menacing and indifferent wrinkle monsters conducting horribly invasive surgeries. The terror of Travis is palpable and visceral.

After the reenactment of the abduction the movie just kind of stops.

Score

7/10

Synopsis

Beginning her first year of Vet school, Justine is a vegetarian who has never had meat. Luckily her older sister goes to the same school and is there to show her the ropes. During an initiation ritual she is pressured into eating a raw rabbit kidney, and soon learns that, “hey, I really like meat!”. After the initiation her body starts to go through withdrawals, and she is desperately craving more. But breaking her lifelong commitment to abstain from meat leaves her insatiable, and animal meat just isn’t doing the job anymore. She needs something more real. Something more human.

Review of Raw

Raw, or in french Grave (yes its a foreign film) is a 2016 horror movie directed by Julia Ducournau who also directed the movie Titane. The movie focuses on the coming of age story of Justine played by Garance Marillier. The acting is great, and each character has life and nuance, making them fun to watch and interact with each other. The score of the film uses music so perfectly that I got chills in some scenes when the sound and the character’s facial expressions express the emotions of the characters so well. There are parts of this movie that give me a full body cringe because of how nasty it is, and that is really impressive to do, considering the body horror isn’t even that extreme. The true horror comes from the lengths the characters are willing to go to in order to satiate their unnatural desires.