Scary Stories (from a Dark Allie)

I know I’ve said it like every day this week, but I will be so happy when this week is over. It’s been a long sleepless week and I don’t feel like I’ve gotten much done. But what I did do is watch this movie. So at least there’s that.

I like this movie. It’s not quite as brilliant as the first one and not quite as ambitious as the second one, but H.R. Giger’s nightmare of a creature has never been more terrifying than in this movie. A David Fincher film, it’s definitely more Seven than Blade Runner or Avatar (or perhaps more closely related films by those directors). Which is to say it’s dark, it’s grim, and it’s not afraid to eschew a happy ending that might have fared better at the box office.

There’s been an “Open House” sign on my street for the past few days so I was inspired to watch this one again. It’s a good one. A bit disturbing, but then again, so am I. Also not unlike me, this movie has a lot going for it.

Have I mentioned I’m a sucker for a good understated title screen? Maybe once or twice? This movie is a perfect example of that. And the movie starts much like its credits – unassuming and quiet. Things start to get creepy pretty quickly, though, and keep building from there. I love that the background music is largely absent, and perfectly timed and placed when it’s not.

It must be a long week. And it’s only Tuesday. I’ve got another early morning tomorrow and haven’t been sleeping well. Maybe all the scary movies are catching up to me and keeping me up at night.

Anyhow, you know this has to be good if there are subtitles for a not insignificant portion of this movie and I still highly recommend it. Actually, all those years of Spanish I took in high school were helpful for this one. I mostly understood what was being said without reading the subtitles.

I do have more to say about this but I’m still tired so you’ll have to live with brevity yet again.

I like the concept of this one – a horror musical. There are others in this genre that I quite like. But this one somehow tries to be a parody of the genre and an exemplar of the genre and unfortunately it fails at both. The lyrics are largely trite and boring and quite frankly they sound quite amateur and often childish. The melodies are all borrowed from other songs. The killer’s songs were the best of the lot and they weren’t all that great themselves.

It’s been a long day and I’ve got an early morning so I don’t have much to say tonight. I love Katharine Isabelle and she’s in this movie, so I like this movie a lot. It’s ostensibly about family, but really it’s about, well, torment. It gets a bit graphic and disturbing at times. The story is reasonably interesting and the ending satisfying.

As some kind of social/political allegory this movie is a bit overbearing and riding a slippery slope in an extreme direction. As a vampire movie, it’s pretty damn entertaining. Or at least refreshing in that these vampires don’t sparkle, they don’t go to high school, and they definitely don’t get tangled in love triangles with werewolves.

No, these are traditional vampires – stakes and sunlight kills them, and they need human blood or they’ll turn into mutated versions of themselves left with nothing but a primal need to feed. And there’s a lot of blood in this movie. Just not enough to sustain a vampire population much longer.

I could have done without the heavy handed clarity around whose side the filmmakers were on – if the contrast between the gloomy blue of the night world and the bright vibrancy of the daytime weren’t clear enough, the cure (and the twist) will be. But the world this movie takes place in is an interesting one even if its characters are pretty flat, and what this movie lacks in scares it makes up for in bloody action scenes.

Overall it’s reasonably entertaining, and it does get some credit for bringing the traditional vampire story back into the mainstream. No sparkling necessary.

This movie had a lot of promise but did a lot of stupid things. In turn, its characters also did a lot of stupid things. It’s still a decent watch, but don’t hold your breath waiting for it to get better – it won’t.

I did like the opening credits sequence though. While it wasn’t totally understated, it did a better job setting the tone and mood for the movie than any other part of the movie did. It’s also where the music really shines in this one, especially since it’s a bit overdone throughout the rest of the film.

Sadly it’s been a long and warm and busy day today, so I don’t have as much to say as I’d hoped. Which is sad, because there’s a lot of this movie. It’s long. Like James Cameron long. Oh, and did I mention it was written and directed by James Cameron?

So the dialogue at times sounds like James Cameron, the action sequences are loud and deliberate like James Cameron’s usually are, and the actors are familiar faces that seem to be favorites of none other than James Cameron. But it’s a damn good James Cameron film at that.

This movie had an okay premise, an okay cast, and okay pacing. Overall? It was okay.

In honor of today’s news that a federal panel has approved the first use of CRISPR genome-editing technology in humans, I chose this movie. It definitely had promise. An intriguing premise, a high quality cast, a writer/director whose previous work I liked. It should have been awesome. Instead it was…weird. Scary, yes, but mostly just weird.

Oh, and with a whole lot of “what did you think was going to happen?” It almost makes me wonder what experiences Vincenzo Natali (who, by the way, wrote and directed Cube as well as this) has had that he chooses such a…distinctive direction to take this movie in.

I’ll admit that I haven’t read up much on the mythology behind this one, and it’s less enjoyable watching it without someone who can translate all of the Cantonese, but this is still an okay movie. Or maybe it’s just that I like Amy Smart so much. And there’s a lot of Amy Smart in this movie.

I was considering going with something holiday appropriate like The Stepfather but it was hot and I was lazy, so I ended up watching this movie instead. It’s pretty boring, which is a shame because it has such an interesting cast. I guess the cast themselves were fine – everyone was believable and earnest. I even believed that Olivia Wilde and Josh Duhamel could be brother and sister! Too bad this movie was so boring I don’t remember their character names. I think Duhamel’s character was named Alex?

I definitely don’t remember the name of Melissa George’s character, but her halting understanding of Portuguese was really well acted and (spoiler alert) is likely the reason any of them get out alive. But there’s not really a lesson here. No justice is really served for either side at the end of this as far as I can tell.

This movie was okay. Well it was actually boring, but everyone in it is just so damn pretty that I had to give it at least three out of five. It barely deserves that – the story is that boring.

Weirdly though, it’s somehow watchable and the pacing is fine so it never drags on it just…doesn’t tell a story. It does have a pretty damn good soundtrack, though.