Open Thread While I’m gone….

Updated on September 17, 2016 By Ken Begg 41 Comments

After all, I’m sure the six of you still coming here will need a place to hang out.

Look, I realize this is partially a generational thing, as audience expectations shift in what they expect and want from films. (Although Hollywood does some of the shifting, so it’s not entirely organic.)

Horror movies still resist being elephantanized like action films and sometimes even comedies have. Making horror ‘bigger’ just doesn’t make it scarier. Horror is about feeling danger to individual character. Portray en masse peril and you’re shifting into disaster movie territory.

I feel personally this is a prime example. The American Ring remake is a pretty good horror flick on it’s own. This…well, first, it looks like it was partially inspired by Pulse, another Asian ghost movie that was also remade here. However, eventually you are making an apocalypse film, not a horror flick.

The trailer starts well, but once you introduce the notion of the video being on the Internet, and widely available instead of being passed around on VHS tapes, you lose that forbidden artifact thing and now it’s just another type of movie entirely.

Meanwhile, the reliance on souped-up visuals is also something that just doesn’t really help horror flicks much. Special effects in service of a scare, sure. But trying to turn horror up to 11 is seldom achieved by use of more computer technology.

It’s not all computer stuff, though. It’s trying to lard on more and more “cool” things; the bleeding webcam, the ring scar, the burning phone (?), the peeling skin, the hair she spits up…. And then it starts aping The Omen or some crap, and man, I just cannot care a dram.

Also, as usual, the two and a half (!) minute trailer reveals way too much about the film’s putative ‘mystery.’ Thanks for that, anyway. So much less work when actually seeing the film. Not to mention shows us scenes in the sequence they occur in the movie–in this case the trailer even features a day countdown!!!–so that we know roughly how the entire plot will advance for the great bulk of it. Ugh.

The more I watch it, the more awful it looks. And eventually I’m thinking that about the movie, not just the trailer.

Anyway, that’s my take.

Have a great week, everyone. If I get Wi-Fi access on my Kindle somewhere I might occasionally pop in, but otherwise I’ll catch you next weekend some time.

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  • Eric Hinkle

    “Horror is about feeling danger to individual character. Portray en masse
    peril and you’re shifting into disaster movie territory.” Would this mean that zombie apocalypse movies are best considered a subset of disaster movies rather than horror films?

  • Gamera977

    Yeah, once you get beyond critical mass of undead they do seem more like one of the disaster movies of the ’70s just with zombies instead of an earthquake, asteroid impact, whatever.

  • Gamera977

    I can’t argue with anything you said. It looks pretty awful. And that ‘rebirth’ – are they going with the same plot as Raisen or 2 or whichever one it was that Sadako was aiming to be reincarnated though the student? Both of those movies were horrible, I can’t see this being any better. And I wonder if they’re going with some lame half-arse ‘scientific’ explanation here too?

    Just let Sadako Yamamura be Sadako, it’s scarier that way…

    PS: OMG, there is a Sadako Hello Kitty doll… it came up in the websearch when I was checking to make sure I spelled her name correctly. This may out-wierd even the plush Cthulhu…

  • I’m probably the only on here who though “Hey, that looks fun!” while watching that trailer, wasn’t I?

    I mean, it doesn’t look good. It looks like it missed the point of the original by a good mile. But I think I’ll watch it. Not in theaters, mind. And probably after watching some of the long, long list of classic Horror movies I’ve still haven’t seen.

  • It depends on the zombie apocalypse. For example, see the original Dawn of the Dead. While the end of the world is going down, it focuses on just four people and the horrors they go through, thus fitting Ken’s criteria.

  • Eric Hinkle

    I’ve heard that about the movie version of World War Z. I never did see it — tried reading the book and I got so sick of the endless author tract I out it down after reading halfway through and never went back.

  • Eric Hinkle

    That is true. It seems zombie apocalypse works better as horror when it’s about a small group in a confined area.

  • Eric Hinkle

    I don’t know if this will reach anyone in time, but tonight/early Sunday morning (meaning starting at 2 AM) on TCM they’ll be premiering both “Zoltan — Dog of Dracula’ and ‘The Pack’. I am downright giddy to think that such masterpieces of schlock will be appearing on TCM just a few hours after showing Buster Keaton’s THE GENERAL.

  • Rock Baker

    I wish I’d seen this. I’d have asked someone to tape THE PACK for me. Speaking of killer dog movies, I highly recommend the 1976 DOGS starring David McCallum. It’s right up there with KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS. Great stuff.

  • Rock Baker

    Didn’t see the others, no reason to watch this preview I don’t think. I’ve noticed modern trailers are all depressingly generic, anyway. It seems they all use the exact same editing tricks, pacing, etc. When I saw the preview for the new Kong movie, I remember thinking the movie itself looked like it might be entertaining, but I didn’t really get that from the trailer itself. It was absolutely generic.

  • Eric Hinkle

    I saw DOGS on YouTube once. Even reviewed it in a journal on DA. Yikes what a dire film. No one had the brains of an earthworm, and the way they kept bringing up the ‘secret government installation’ and the blackouts, only for the payoff of those two plot threads to be absolutely nothing?

    Though I owe them some credit for being original enough to avoid the ‘all an evil government experiment to make killer dogs’ bit.

    And it was fun, if dumb. Certainly far superior to SyFy’s NIGHT OF THE WILD from last year. No dogs eating kids on-screen or using a microphone to lure a plane into landing in DOGS.

  • I thought Dogs was great fun. Haven’t seen it in years, though.

  • That was my problem with the original Ghostbusters remake trailer: It looked like every other comedy that had come out in the past ten years. That it had only one funny joke based on a movie that was decades old and another joke that was almost that old didn’t help matters.

  • Eric Hinkle

    As we’re speaking about both killer dogs and J-horror, I have to wonder, why has no one ever done a horror movie about the Japanese inugami? A beast created by black magic out of a pet dog that has been starved and tortured to death, it gets used by its creator to possess, kidnap, mutilate, or kill their enemies. Of course if the sorcerer loses control it kills /them/ instead and then goes after their families. I mean, it sounds like a natural. It’s certainly horrible enough.

  • Rock Baker

    My impression was that they established the experimental facility and then gave the audience enough credit to put the pieces together instead of having the characters put it together for us. It makes sense, really. We in the audience know genre conventions, while the characters don’t know that they’re in a movie.

  • Rock Baker

    For all intents and purposes, it’s the plot of a mummy movie.

    Not really the same, but I do remember a pack of killer dogs in the bizzaro ATTACK OF THE SUPERMONSTERS….

  • zombiewhacker

    By the way, TCM has chosen Christopher Lee to be their actor of the month for October. Not just a one day salute, but weeks of movies starring or featuring Lee… and not just the usual Hammer/Amicus stuff, either. On Monday Oct. 3, TCM will be showing Jinnah, LOTR: FOTR, and the first two Lester Musketeer movies. Later in the month TCM will show Lee rarities like Nothing But The Night, The Pirates of Blood River, The Devil-Ship Pirates, Terror of the Tongs, and MANY others. It’s almost enough to make Ken start watching cable again!

  • Eric Hinkle

    Thanks for sharing that news! That sounds like an awesome lineup.

  • Eric Hinkle

    Maybe. I guess I’m just not used to being treated like I was intelligent by movie makers.

    Though I still think an argument can be made for the research facility being a red herring, and the dogs go crazy for the same unstated reason avians do in The Birds.

  • bgbear_rnh

    Seems that the only thing that makes me jump in a film anymore is when something like a car accidents happens unexpectedly.

  • Darkward

    There’s more than six of us who read your site. Most of us just don’t post very often. Appropriate to your topic, we’re mostly “lurkers”…

  • Rock Baker

    Well, THE BIRDS gave absolutely no rationale. DOGS does provide one, even if it is peripherally. I think in Hitch’s film, it was the absolute mystery which was supposed to make it so terrifying. His was horror, while DOGS was more of a science fiction thriller.

  • bgbear_rnh

    Dogs finally got fed up with those stupid Halloween costumes.

  • The Rev.

    Along with a horde of killer rats and a swarm of killer bats! Too bad about what happens to the rats. At least the others are left alive and cured of their killer tendencies.

    I’m not familiar with the inugami. I’ll need to do some research.

  • I have nothing coherent to say except I’m drunk on a Tuesday and it’s the Army’s fault, but they are going to let me go to T-Fest first to hang out with Ken’s other 5 regulars.

    Also, nothing will ever be scarier than the hoary old original “Haunting” because no-one trusts their audience any more. Which sums up 90% of my response to all modern horror.

    Get off my lawn!

  • Eric Hinkle

    It’s something from real-life Japanese black magic.

    WARNING: What follows will be gross, especially for dog lovers!

    The ritual to make one is, you take your pet dog and bury it in the ground up to its neck. Then for about a week or so you keep setting bowls of food and water just out of its reach, and as it strains to get them you tell it ‘The pain you feel is less than the pain I feel’. Then when it’s dying, you either slice or saw its head off while saying certain words that are never written down but passed down orally — and it becomes an inugami. And IF you can control its murderous rage, you can use it to murder, mutilate, or kidnap people. Kind of like Mayomberos and the ghosts they’re supposed to enslave.

  • That’s literally one of those flicks where I sit here scratching my brain trying to remember if I’ve actually seen it or just imagined it based on a million similar things. I did definitely set the VCR to catch Zoltan a million years ago, but remember nothing about it except that it rivaled Dracula’s Widow in quality.

  • I rarely miss cable, but that will do it.

  • Not sure on the hows and whys of my watching it, but I remember David Mccallum and a few key scenes (and the ending too). It’s been one of those films I’ve always thought of following up on and never do.

  • Hey, now. Surely I’m one of the six and I’m not going to T-fest.

  • Gamera977

    Yow, that is pretty friggin’ horrible. Much more scary than a vampire like Zoltan.

  • Gamera977

    I think Ken is refering to us since apparently we have no lives and therefore nothing better to do than post here ;)

  • Gamera977

    I will be checking the schedule for that too!

  • *If* I watched it it would almost certainly have been on my local UHFs “Shocking Theater” which specialized in that sort of thing.

  • Whose fault is that? :)

  • And this is a weirder than usual circumstance where the Army (really unexpectedly) wants me in San Antonio on Monday (long story and the source of the incipient alcoholism) so they are willing to pay me to drive there from Dallas, then fly me home to the East Coast on Friday or Saturday.

  • bgbear_rnh

    Yes, I am lucky to have my own office at work and the firm really does not care much about my non work related internet use.

  • EVERYBODY’S EXCEPT MINE! But of course. :-D

  • zombiewhacker

    Remember Exidor from Mork and Mindy who always imagined himself to be surrounded by mobs of followers? That’s how I prefer to look upon the Jabootu fan following here. Whenever Ken claims there are only six of us, I swiftly counter, “Nonsense, you fool! I see hundreds of people swarming around me in Temple Jabootu right this second. Nay… THOUSANDS!”

  • The Rev.

    Glad I haven’t had a chance to research yet; at least now I know to be careful when I do. Christ.

  • Eric Hinkle

    Heck, that’s not even the worst real-world occult ritual I’ve read of. Go read up on what Palo Mayombe sorcerer-priests do when they make a Nganga sometime.

    It comes close, though.