Topic: The Movie Thread

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Subbed to horror movie streaming service Shudder recently, so I've watched a few films I've wanted to see for a while, and... well, results aren't great so far (for the movies; the service itself is fine).

I'll be discussing some spoilers with these films, so... reader beware?

I started with recent cult horror film Mandy. I'd heard a lot about this one from people whose opinions I trust, and there are some things to like here. The latter half of the film is a great vehicle for Nicholas Cage's very particular brand of overacted cinematic insanity, and it was fun watching him lose his mind and become a sort of medieval vigilante who forges a battle axe and sets off to avenge his cruelly slain titular girlfriend. But, to get to the fun bits, one has to sit through an hour or so of pretentious, "stylized" cinematography that I guess is supposed to be establishing atmosphere, but, honestly, I found it all rather dull. Characters mumble and slur their lines in a narcoleptic haze (this was one of the few movies where I actually kept the closed-captioning turned on the entire time) and, half the time, scenes are bathed in gaudy red or purple lighting. Plot and character-wise, there's really nothing to this film. Some cult leader (dubbed a "jesus freak" and "hippy," but his cult possesses magical artifacts that can summon motorcycle riding demons, so...) happens to see Mandy, Cage's girlfriend, as he's driving by her in a van one day, and his cult, along with the clearly Cenobite-inspired biker demons as helpers, abducts her and her boyfriend to try and induct them into his cult (Mandy as a concubine, I guess). Things go south, and Nicholas Cage spends the rest of the film going on a nutty killing spree. There's a lot of potential for this to be good, and, in some respects, I did enjoy it, but it's a very uneven experience. Definitely inferior to Cage's other recent horror outing, The Color Out of Space.

The second film I watched was In the Mouth of Madness, an obviously Lovecraft-inspired flick by accomplished horror director John Carpenter about an insurance fraud investigator (played by Sam Neill, or, as most people are likely to know him, the grumpy protagonist in Jurassic Park who likes to scare children with visions of disembowelment) who goes looking for a popular horror writer who has gone missing. This writer's work is apparently causing people to become insane and violent, and the publisher wants to know where he has gone. This film has some redeeming qualities, insofar as it plays a lot with the idea of reality and fantasy becoming blurred, and the inherently subjective nature of human consciousness, but the plot becomes an incoherent, poorly written mess as it goes on. Carpenter was attempting to capture a gradual divorce from reality with its main character, but I found that the movie itself just became sort of disjointed and confusing. Perhaps this was the intent, and the structure of the film is meant to mirror its protagonist's own slipping grip on what is real, but I grew bored with this approach. The film's ending has an apocalyptic angle that I liked, but, overall, I wouldn't recommend this to anyone.

The last, and worst, film was acclaimed Italian splatter cinema maestro Lucio Fulci's The Beyond. While it's not his most famous film (that would be Zombi 2), many fans of this man's work (and he has a considerable cult following among horror aficionados) consider this to be his masterpiece. What better way to be introduced to his films, I thought! Or not. This is described by fans as a textured, surrealistic, and dreamlike cinematic experience, but really all it is is a borderline incoherent, poorly dubbed film that only exists to feed the director's apparent fetish for gore and eye trauma. SO much eye trauma. Want to nails gouge out eyes, of both the metal and finger variety? Want to watch tarantulas eat out a guy's eyes? Hell, want to watch a woman's face melt in acid? These setpieces, and more, are what the film exists for. They're not terribly convincing practical effects (most of the gore looked very fake to me), but this wasn't supposed to be realistic. It was supposed to be gross, and boy, is it gross. Peoples' skin peels like soft cheese, and practically any injury leads to an almost obscene amount of bloodspray and gore, like the violence you'd see in a lot of really graphic 80's era anime OVAs. The woman whose face gets melted becomes a puddle of fleshy slush leaking across the floor. There's an odd fixation on these scenes, though. The film doesn't try to make them look or feel scary, but just fixates on the practical effects. It almost feels more like a demo reel for an ambitious SFX artist. A lot of the situations don't really have much grounding in the narrative, either. The woman whose face gets melted by acid randomly faints, and then the acid TIPS ITSELF onto her. The dude whose face and eyes gets eaten by spiders just falls over after reading a cursed book, and the spiders magically appear. People randomly turn into zombies, for no reason. The plot itself apparently concerns a woman taking possession of a building that has a gateway to hell below it, but, really the film doesn't care about this plot, and there's a very thin amount of narrative material connected A to B and so on. This is the "dreamlike" aspect of the film, I guess, but as a fan of legitimately good surrealist and dreamlike cinema, it feels to me more like an excuse for the complete disregard for plot, continuity, and character this film exhibits. It would be fine if setpieces were striking enough, the atmosphere and music were evocative enough (the score is particularly drab), but unless some Italian weirdo fixating on overly grotesque and obviously fake gore thrills you, I'd urge you to give this a pass. If this is Fulci's best film, then I believe this is the end of my journey with him.