I hate horror

I'm rather spoiled for choice now. :p I fancy this REC after seeing the trailer - I'll grab a copy when I'm out tomorrow. I've seen a few of the more popular movies mentioned - Aliens etc.

I'm not sure what I think of earlier horrors, 70's/80's....The exorcist for example, utter rubbish. I've seen more but no names spring to mind. I recall seeing The Shining at some point too.
 
Last edited:
shifty_uk said:
I'm rather spoiled for choice now. :p I fancy this REC after seeing the trailer - I'll grab a copy when I'm out tomorrow. I've seen a few of the more popular movies mentioned - Aliens etc.

I'm not sure what I think of earlier horrors, 70's/80's....The exorcist for example, utter rubbish. I've seen more but no names spring to mind. I recall seeing The Shining at some point too.
Click to expand...

I mentioned it originally and a few others have too, but you owe it to yourself to see John Carpenter's "In the Mouth of Madness". It's the best film of his career, in my opinion.

If you're at all familiar with HP Lovecraft it adds another element to the film, and Sam Neill carries it all along with gusto, giving one of the best "waking up from double-nightmare" "wwweuuuuaargh!" expressions ever.
 
Lysander said:
You have totally, abominably misunderstood the film.

And since you're going to come back with a disagreement, I'll explain to you why.
Click to expand...

Firstly, artistically. The whole film was shot in 13 long takes and most of the dialogue is improvised. The actors worked without a script only being told what to generally say. That, in itself, is a great feat. This was director Noe's second ever full-length film and gained him numerous awards and nominations.
Click to expand...

I know that the film was improvised off essentially bullet points. This to me emphasises the lack of direction apparent in the film and creating a film without a script is not admirable in itself.

Second, morally. Being told back to front, the film forces us to think about the consequences of our actions before we see the causes, and whether the outcome is justified by the violence. Of course, it very rarely - if ever - is. There is an ethical point to the backwards theme, rather than just a plot-based one, such as in Memento.
Click to expand...

This to me is simply a gimmick. I did feel at the end that I may have experienced a greater sense of despair by knowing what will happen to the main characters and seeing what lives they had before such an incident occured.

However, its essentially a cheap trick at the end of the day and not nearly as well implemented as Memento which actually gave me a sense of what it would be like to have short term memory loss. Irreversible could be told in a linear chronological style and still be totally understandable. Memento, with its multiple narratives, could not.

The violence is, in itself, sickening - and this is exactly Noe's point. We have become so desensitised to violence through the media that many of us have seen possibly thousands of acted-out killing and deaths, and most of the time we feel nothing when we see them. Noe's depiction of violence makes us feel disgusted as we should when we see someone getting beaten up, or getting raped. It reminds us of our true feelings towards these things when they're not being glossed over by Hollywood and the big studios. They're vile, they're despicable, just how they're shown in the film.
Click to expand...

But whether you feel disgusted is totally subjective. I knew about Noe's justification for the violence already yet now I tend to disagree with it. I feel that excessive violence shows that the filmmakers are trying to make up for a lack of characterisation and decent scripting by simply uping the gore/sadism quota.

Noe's idea that you should show everything in its absolute hideousness is hypocritical as the violence becomes pornographic. The film feasts in the veritable display of a fire extinguisher smashing into a person's skull and men somewhat grossly and openly sodomising each other in an appropriately named hardcore gay club. It just gets very samey and does a good job of desensitising the viewer to images that are supposed to shock but become so commonplace and drawn-out that they simply get repetitive.

By giving us insight into the characters' lives - before and after the events - it shows us how atrocious violent acts really are and how they can destroy people. They are Irreversible, you can't change them afterwards, and they can destroy peoples' lives forever. The moral at the end - "Time Destroys Everything" - posits time as the ultimate destructive force. In the end we will all come to nothing, and we should make something positive of ourselves on the way. The choice is ours.
Click to expand...

This is unfortunately a pretty low grade justification that has been applied to what I've heard called a "third-rate porno". The fact is that the "buildup" to the rape scene was so long and arduous that had the film been presented in a linear fashion I would have been totally bored and not really given a damn about what happened to any of them.

The dialogue that is shared on the train is appallingly dull and goes on forever. Noe employs a clever technique of cramming all the violence and chaos in at the 'beginning' of the film whilst shoving all the dull stuff at the end. This meant that I found the first half of the film entertaining enough overall and then after all the insanity had died down, I got fed up with it.

You make good points and I would have agreed with them a couple of years ago when I first saw the film but now, although I understand the points, I simply disagree. I got all the stuff about the harshness of the violence and the message at the end and the implied effect of the reverse narrative when I saw the film. But after a while, I realised that its simply a shallow attempt at conning the viewer into thinking that they'd seen something worthy or profound. Its not profound or affecting in the slightest. It simply assaults the audience with what Noe thinks are shocking images and cobbles them together in an ill thought-out, badly structured narrative.

The characters appear to be quite one-dimensional and the little nuances are so painfully obvious and spelt out to the viewer that I eventually started to think that my intelligence had been well and truly insulted. For example, the implied irony in Pierre's character ending up becoming a vicious murderer when before he was always cautious and safe is pathetic. That's the simplest form of scripting and no better than any generic Hollywood blockbuster script.
 
Last edited:
shifty_uk said:
The only horror movie I actually found decent was Silent Hill....if you'd even class that as a horror.

So, anyone fancy changing my opinion? Recommend me a scary movie that has a decent story and characters? I don't mind scary/jumpy/gory but story, well shot and good characters are what really does it for me.
Click to expand...

No. I don't fancy changing your opinion.
If the only horror movie you thought was pretty decent amounts to Silent Hill (based on a video game for ****s sake) Then I'd hate to recommend other horror movies for you, but hey I'm in a good mood, so how about some more video game adaptions?
 
Last edited:
rancid-a said:
No. I don't fancy changing your opinion.
If the only horror movie you thought was pretty decent amounts to Silent Hill (based on a video game for ****s sake) Then I'd hate to recommend other horror movies for you, but hey I'm in a good mood, so how about some more video game adaptions?
Click to expand...

Such as? :)

Silent Hill wasn't that brilliant, I'm purely using it to make a point.

So far I've seen REC and Pitch Black. REC - relatively well shot but quite sickening, especially after a tiring lifting session - although, no where near as bad as Cloverfield. Story was okay with a couple of jumpy bits, which I rather liked. Overall, I felt it was.....not bad.

Pitch Black was a great disappointment, I must say. I'm even surprised by the rating it received on Rotten Tomatoes. I don't think a rating of around 50% is deserved but saying that, visually it was rather nice. The colours used in scenes were great but the creatures were a let down.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom