Finally Watching [Old Movies]

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Postby Merciel » Mon Jan 15, 2018 6:44 pm

We have not done Freaks.

It might be interesting but I'd probably want a broader grounding in '20s and '30s horror for context first.
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Postby Geoff » Mon Jan 15, 2018 7:26 pm

have you done the hitch-hiker directed by Ida Lupino?
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Postby Spoilt Victorian Child » Mon Jan 15, 2018 7:52 pm

No but it is in my spreadsheet.

As for Monkey Business, it's definitely less than the sum of its parts, and there are some bits that are clearly not intended for modern audiences (though I think the Marilyn gags are the best part of the movie). Still it's a comedy with Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, and Marilyn Monroe, so it has a pretty high floor.

I think you could call Grant's haircut either an Ivy League cut or a kind of crew cut; in any case it's a style associated with college students from like the '20s to the '50s. At least half the joke is just seeing Cary Grant with a different haircut.
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Postby No Good Advice » Tue Jan 16, 2018 7:02 am

As an interlude I offer you a golden age Hollywood blooper reel

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Postby Merciel » Sat Feb 03, 2018 7:00 pm

Roman Holiday (1953)

It is so weird to me that the princess in this movie is named "Ann" without an "e." I just expect the royal version of that name to be "Anne."

It's also weird to me that the movie features a princess at all. In romance there's a convention that you can use the lower tiers of the aristocracy for your characters -- romance novels are swarming with fictional barons, marquises, earls, and duchesses -- but in general the actual royal family is considered off-limits, because there's only a handful of those people and everyone knows who they are. You can't just tack on a half-dozen fictional princes and princesses without seriously compromising whatever paper-thin veneer of authenticity your story is supposed to have.

For the most part, movies tend to follow the same convention (there have been a fair few fictional barons and counts in the movies we've been watching, but no fake royalty), so seeing a fictional princess in this film was weird too.

Other than that the setup was basically fine though. I was glad that the central romance was pretty chaste, with no more than a couple of kisses exchanged, because even though she's actually 24 in this movie, Audrey Hepburn looks about 16 and it would have been real uncomfortable to watch her getting all hot and heavy with 37-year-old Gregory Peck. But, happily, they never really got into it and that was not a concern.

I really enjoyed how 2016/2017 everything about Irving Radovich's appearance was. His wardrobe, facial hair, mannerisms, all of it was a total time-travel head trip. I don't know whether hipster fashion is still going to look like that in 2018, but you could absolutely pluck that guy out of that movie and plop him onto any street in any major city in the U.S. in the last couple of years and he would have fit right in.

9/10
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Postby Fullscreen » Sat Feb 03, 2018 7:30 pm

watched The Naked City the other night it found it to be an awkward mid point between neorealism (mainly in use of real world locations) and just being kind of a cheap pot boiler.

It has some great compositions and ensemble framing, but rififi (also Jules Dassin, from 1955) feels miles ahead of it in terms of technical sophistication.

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Postby Merciel » Sat Feb 03, 2018 7:36 pm

nah go for it, anybody who wants to contribute should
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Postby Merciel » Sun Feb 04, 2018 2:17 pm

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

So this is where Raiders of the Lost Ark got the idea for its climactic meltdown, huh.

I was not expecting this to be a sci-fi crossover. The original book isn't -- it's just a typically icky Spillane noir -- so that was a big surprise to me. I think by that point in the movie I was willing to go "sure, whatever" to pretty much anything though. Sure, the mysterious MacGuffin box melts your face off with radioactive lights, why not. It could have been the actual Medusa's head and it would have made as much sense to me.

Which is to say that this movie was sort of fascinating because it's an indie production in 1955, and apparently that means they not only can't afford big-name stars (all the women in this movie, except Velda, look like my old Girl Scout troop leader Mrs. Sweat, and that is not a compliment), but they also can't afford a plot that makes any sense.

None of the scene transitions in this movie make any sense. It's just like, okay, now Mike Hammer is breaking into some random person's house and slapping them around, and... who is this person? How did he find them? What do they have to do with the plot? Whatever, who even cares. He's just going to smash this unfortunate Italian singer's record on a counter and then jump into another scene, because apparently the budget didn't cover the two pages of exposition that were supposed to connect Point A to Point B.

Okay then!

Going back to my disenchantment with all the female stars in this movie, it's kind of astonishing that in the two years from Roman Holiday to Kiss Me Deadly, short hair on women has gone from daring and transgressive to just every female character in this film having straight-up '80s mom hair. I suspect a lot of the aesthetic drop-off also has to do with these people not being Audrey Hepburn as styled by an actual Hollywood stylist, but normal people who may well have done their own hair, but... still. Noir needs a certain amount of glamour to work for me, and there's none to be had in this movie.

I did like the one proto-Bond villain with the lazy eye though. That guy's in the right movie.

6.5/10
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Postby Spoilt Victorian Child » Sun Feb 04, 2018 4:32 pm

Kiss Me Deadly feels like the culmination of all film noir — bewildering from start to finish, with the most psychopathic protagonist and the most insane MacGuffin. I loved it, even though, yes, there's something off about the whole thing. Meeker is great, though, he should've been in a million of these movies. That grin he does is something else.

And yeah that MacGuffin blew me away. Without question the best I've ever seen, genuinely shocking and affecting; turns a boilerplate noir into like, Picnic at Hanging Rock.
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Postby Merciel » Tue Feb 06, 2018 1:43 pm

Key Largo (1948)

Old movies really haven't figured out how to do adaptations of stage plays without just recreating them as stage plays, huh. Then again, it's not like modern movies have really cracked the code on that one either.

Apart from its static setting (which wasn't exactly bad, just... static), I liked this movie a lot. Everybody turns in a great performance. It's possibly my favorite Bogart role, and Edward G. Robinson as the gangster is fantastic. Claire Trevor's ruined moll is fabulous too (and sets up a reasonably logical climactic showdown!).

So it's a bottle episode, but it's a fun one.

It is so nuts to me that they needed the Kefauver Hearings to prove the mob was a real thing in the U.S. I know I've said that in connection with old movies before, but it really does blow my mind. This was a pop culture staple for DECADES and people were in denial about it.

On that note, it is pretty funny how the gangsters go out of their way to editorialize about how good Prohibition was for them and they all hope it comes back.

9/10
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Postby Beautiful Jugdish » Tue Feb 06, 2018 1:52 pm

i watched the exterminating angel yesterday and man that movie rips. i really love inexplicable fatalistic horror. its also interesting to contrast the adult themes of the film (the infidelity, drug use, even suggested incest) compared with hollywood films of the same time. 1962 the code was still decently well upheld.
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Postby Merciel » Thu Feb 08, 2018 6:25 pm

I'm No Angel (1933)

I really enjoyed almost all of this movie. Seeing a movie that's overtly about a brassy older woman with a big appetite for men using that to get ahead in the world -- and refusing to be ashamed about it, and making everyone else look foolish for being prudish -- was pretty fun. You could tell that every line of the thing was written by a woman with a very different sensibility than most of these movies have been willing to show. Even the pre-code Lubitsch comedies and the like had a very male point of view, and Mae West is... well, Mae West.

And she gets to use Cary Grant as her rich boytoy, which is a pretty good fantasy.

The only part I disliked was the scene showing Mae West's lion tamer routine. '30s circuses were just so brutal on their animals, and it was supremely depressing to watch these stressed-out, miserable lions get tortured even more. That scene went on way longer than it needed to and it was just pure bummer the whole time.

Other than that it was good though. I liked that Mae West's irresistableness was purely down to her attitude. For the first part of the film, before she lands in the money, her character doesn't even dress well. With her, it's only secondarily about looks. She's pretty, but she's also 40 in this movie and heavier than most leading ladies, and she isn't particularly trying to hide it, because she is clearly a lady who doesn't feel the need to hide any damn thing.

It's great. No wonder the censors tried so hard to kill her career. They must have been terrified.

8.5/10
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Postby No Good Advice » Fri Feb 09, 2018 3:28 am

Yeah I'll have to watch all the films she's written at some point.
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Postby Merciel » Sat Feb 10, 2018 11:52 pm

Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950)

This is a pretty dumb movie that I didn't like very much, even though Gene Tierney is one of the most beautiful people who ever lived and has some neat costumes here. Wikipedia notes that this movie "reflects a specific phase in the development of the film noir style" which was intended to avoid "wrath of conservative critics and social watchdogs," and that sounds about right to me.

This is definitely a movie that is very much in keeping with 1950 morality: the hero cop is a good guy who just happens to be brutal toward suspects because he hates criminals so much (and, you know, that's a totally forgivable character flaw portrayed as his simple inability to control his temper, as if he were kicking doorstops and not people's faces); the preliminary villain/primary murder victim is not just a small-time crook who drinks too much and slaps his wife around, but also a decorated war hero who has a bunch of newspaper friends (and this far outweighs his small-time criminality, whereas the domestic violence is treated as essentially unimportant except insofar as it gives a would-be white knight a reason to get murdered and the guy's father-in-law a reason to murder him; i.e., the domestic violence angle is mainly about lining up male motivations and is not otherwise important); Gene Tierney's main purpose in existing is to be pretty, bat her eyelashes admiringly (she does SO MUCH admiring eyelash-batting in this movie), and motivate Dana Andrews to accept responsibility for his crimes.

And so on, and so forth. If you like to watch movies as time capsules of American values and heroic ideology that looks terribly dated today, it's moderately interesting on that level. Beyond that I didn't get a lot out of this one.

5.5/10
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Postby Merciel » Sun Feb 11, 2018 12:14 am

Hangover Square (1945)

This is such a weird movie. It's weird from the opening song, which is ultra bizarre (although it makes sense by the end, it's a very strange composition, and I have to wonder how ecstatic or dispirited the composer was to get this assignment), to the initial murder scene (shot in a swoony first-person perspective that never gets repeated), to innumerable small details of how scenes are staged or shot.

Storywise it isn't really that weird at all, except you might wonder why somebody felt the need to retell Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde without the explicit hubris of the original's self-creation/self-destruction dynamic. Like that's the core dynamic of the Jekyll-and-Hyde story, and this is just a variation that doesn't have that. Hyde's just an accidental release of the id in this, which is... not as interesting!, especially since he mostly kills the predictable targets for the predictable (and heavily telegraphed) reasons. It's not particularly horrific since the victims have it coming and it's not particularly tragic since there's no real possibility of control, so the whole plot is like "whoops! oh well."

The behind-the-scenes production stories are pretty wild, though. Linda Darnell and Laird Cregar were both essentially destroyed by show business (Cregar died two months after filming this movie, in part because he took so many amphetamines on a desperate course of crash dieting that he gave himself a heart attack) and died young, Cregar's amphetamines use caused him to behave erratically on set, George Sanders was apparently an enormous pain in the ass, and on and on.

I think it makes the final product a little better -- certainly Cregar's wild-eyed sweaty crazy guy performances have a certain over-the-top insanity that doesn't seem altogether feigned -- but it's still just an odd sort of duck.

7/10
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Postby Mesh » Sun Feb 11, 2018 1:00 pm

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Postby Thrustin Jeroux » Sun Feb 11, 2018 2:09 pm

hangover square is one of the best movies ever made
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Postby Merciel » Tue Feb 13, 2018 10:47 pm

City Lights (1931)

I think this is the only Charlie Chaplin movie we've done that actually made me laugh. It wasn't even in any of the Chaplin bits, it was the expressions of the guy he has to box that cracked me up. That guy was great.

Beyond that, I was amused to note that a pre-Code comedy felt free enough to go with homophobic jokes (where the joke is no meaner-spirited than that a tough stone-jawed boxer can be made to squirm badly enough to change into his shorts behind a curtain because of some eyelash batting, which I thought was pretty good for 1931) and pissing-your-pants jokes (with what's presumably some pretty expensive liquor, at that), but the jokes themselves weren't that funny to me. I don't know what it is, Chaplin's just always off by a few degrees for me.

Anyway it's still a good movie, obviously, and it's fun seeing the fishing line still visible on screen for some of the stunts and gags. No digital erasure in the '30s!

9/10
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Postby Spoilt Victorian Child » Tue Feb 13, 2018 11:05 pm

I really liked Hangover Square. It is kind of misshapen but it has the same kind of cozy lunacy as Peeping Tom and Dressed to Kill. The Guy Fawkes Night sequence is really spectacular.

I think City Lights is my favorite Chaplin, though it is getting kind of hard to distinguish them. But he usually has a couple of scenes that don't work for me and they were absent this time around. I particularly enjoyed all of his time with the millionaire.
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Postby Merciel » Tue Feb 13, 2018 11:06 pm

Frankenstein (1931)

this movie is fuckin' sick

It suffers a little bit from the Alien/Terminator thing in that all the iconic moments are so iconic that you've already seen half the movie even if you've never actually seen it, but it's still an awe-inspiring achievement in film regardless. Karloff does a hell of a job conveying pathos and half-human inhumanity under all that makeup and prosthetics; it really is a feat of physical acting.

The sets are amazing, the acting is mostly good and just the right amount of hammy (Baron Frankenstein is particularly great in this regard -- guy just nails the comic-relief-in-horror-movie angle), and all in all it's not hard to see why this eclipsed the novel version to become the Frankenstein that lived in everyone's minds forevermore.

(On that note, the early graverobbing set is great for how it turned into every suburban front yard at Halloween for the next, what, almost 90 years now? Everybody, every year, tries to turn their yard into THAT SET!! That's the one! That has to be the single greatest feat of set design ever accomplished: it got replicated in just about every American kid's memory for the next five generations, because either you lived in a neighborhood where somebody did that yard design, or you saw it on a million cartoons and kids' movies.)

It's wild that they had an actual on-screen child murder in this movie. I assume Frankenstein drowned her because he realized how fucked-up it was that this 20th-century American girl was just randomly living in Romania or Prussia or wherever-the-fuck somehow. Everybody else is all dancing around in flowered aprons and wooden clogs, and here's Maria from Yonkers just wandering around in completely the wrong universe. Even a monster built with a pickled brain has to realize there's something wrong there.

10/10
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Postby Spoilt Victorian Child » Tue Feb 13, 2018 11:07 pm

It didn't have anything as good as the roll dance though.
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Postby traced out » Thu Feb 15, 2018 7:25 am

i don't know if it would be your thing, merciel, but "spirit of the beehive" centers on a young girl's child murder viewing experience
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Postby traced out » Thu Feb 15, 2018 7:38 am

city lights' final scene made me cry like a baby when i first saw it
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Postby No Good Advice » Thu Feb 15, 2018 8:46 am

Frankenstein rules, book or film
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Postby mystery meat » Thu Feb 15, 2018 10:33 am

u better watch Bride of Frankenstein stat
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Postby goofjan » Thu Feb 15, 2018 10:50 am

I saw City Lights at Film Forum at one of their family screenings and it was filled with screaming kids and pretentious parents who were loudly explaining the mechanics of all the visual gags.

Also a kid behind me kept screaming "I WANT RAISIN BREAD!"
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Postby Merciel » Sun Feb 18, 2018 6:32 pm

On the Town (1949)

It's hard for me to believe that this movie came out in '49 because the colors, costuming, and choreography all make it look and feel so high-school musical that I can't believe it's not a production put on by some overachieving magnet school in Georgia.

It would have to be in Georgia because it's so very blithely white, and a very particular type of white that to me is all about being rich in the Deep South and growing up in a racially homogenous suburb. Not because there's anything particularly Southern about these characters, just because I think that's one of the few enclaves where this specific cultural attitude still survives largely unchanged from 1949: superficially cosmopolitan, superficially cultured, totally blind to everything but the narrowest sliver of human experience.

This story is ostensibly set in NYC and it makes a huge deal out of being in NYC and then it completely whitewashes everything to an amazing extent, which is particularly striking because the actual Broadway musical was unusually inclusive and equitable for its time -- there were black actors who had regular roles and were treated like regular people (whereas they're all just servants and caricatures in the movies of the period), one of the three main female leads was Asian, etc.

Not so much in the movie version!

The "Prehistoric Man" song-and-dance number in the museum of natural history is particularly bad. It's ostensibly about cavemen, but the whole dance is ooga-booga African and Native American... mockery? cultural appropriation? I don't even know. It's super cringeworthy, anyway, not least because these grinning white people are conflating them all together as a cartoon "prehistoric man" primitive enough to be shown next to the equally trivialized, equally wiped-out dinosaurs (who also get casually knocked down for lols!).

I thought about this section of one of Charles Pierce's fulminations in Esquire. He was writing about Elizabeth Warren's Pocahontas speech, but it could as well have been about that scene:

It was about so many other things—among them her family and the kind of weaponized American mythology that has been used against all people of color down through the centuries, but notably against the indigenous peoples of North America. It was a speech against genocide, cultural and otherwise. It was an appeal to a truth nurtured for hundreds of years by people who saw themselves and their culture first destroyed, and then rendered into amusements for the people who’d destroyed it.


That is pretty much how this all came off to me.

The movie's also pretty cringeworthy in its gender politics. All the women are perpetually throwing themselves at the men, always for comic effect but also with a note of "yeah, they really are that desperate" under it. Hildy and her roommate are both particularly bad (although the roommate does at least get a gentlemanly brush-off from Gabey, so it's not as cruel as it could be), but it's all of them -- Claire pretending to be interested in intellectual pursuits solely as a distraction from chasing men, Ivy putting on airs and then being outed as a burlesque dancer (the tamest one I've ever seen, but then she does work the boardwalk at Coney Island), all three of them promptly losing their sailors at the end of the 24-hour shore leave.

I did like Gene Kelly. I always like Gene Kelly. He seems like a supremely likeable person and he has the most benevolent smile lines. He's really the only likeable thing in this movie, since the women all play caricatures and Frank Sinatra is clearly an enormous dick serenading himself in all his love songs.

5/10
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Postby Merciel » Sun Feb 18, 2018 7:28 pm

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

This is a really interesting sequel, by which I mean that you can see a lot of the problems and possibilities that come up again and again in SF sequel-dom. The continuity is nil (Elizabeth is a completely different person with a completely different personality and style who's now a brunette rather than a blonde; old Baron Frankenstein is retconned dead; Victor just vanishes from the story altogether), the fictive universe expands to include new possibilities (Dr. Pretorius and his strange homonculi!), some of the horror gets downgraded to camp (the homonculi again, the entire sequence of Frankenstein learning to smoke and drink), the qualities of the original characters change in ways that undermine their original portrayals for better or worse, probably spurring endless nerdrage arguments about which version is Correct (Frankenstein learns to talk!).

The special effects, lighting, and makeup continue to be astounding. I was also astounded to learn via Wikipedia that Boris Karloff broke his hip and Colin Clive broke his leg during filming, although Clive was apparently a raging alcoholic who used to pass out regularly on set, so maybe that part's not so surprising.

I remain amused at the incoherent costuming in these movies. The peasants and servants are out of one vaguely period, vaguely European cinematic universe and then there's Baroness Frankenstein done up like a standard '30s movie star, wearing a fur coat over her fur coat. Excellent.

The framing device made me laugh too, because could it be any more camp? Gavin Gordon as Lord Byron was rolling his Rs all the way across the room with every line, Elsa Lancaster showed a phenomenal amount of boobage as Mary Shelley (who got her own name in the credits this time, I notice, whereas she was "Mrs. Percy Shelley" in the first one), and Douglas Walton's Percy was this odd pale golden godling who you could just tell was destined to die in his 20s. It was a very strange scene.

I want to write about the homonculi but I don't even know what to say about them, beyond how weird it is that they were explicitly explained in the movie as having been made from Pretorius's sperm (which was a real :shock: that they put that in there), and how weird the chosen stock types were. A king and a queen and an archbishop and a ballerina, all in their little perfect costumes like those squirrel and frog taxidermies that used to be popular, all living in tiny nightmare jars where they sit on display 24/7, all apparently content to live tiny nightmare lives as animatronic displays.

There's something there but I don't have the concentration to figure out what it is.

Pretorius is great. Pretorius is hands-down my favorite mad scientist character in film. He has just the right blend of camp craziness and genuine horror.

9/10
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Postby Merciel » Tue Feb 20, 2018 3:22 am

The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

I really loved this movie. It's great. You should go watch it immediately.

It's great in large part because it's so wonderfully and perfectly imperfect. Several versions of this movie have been lost irretrievably to time. The best surviving version is still jerky and stuttery, with glitches and visible jumps where a second or two of footage is gone. Characters vanish from the screen during these jumps without explanation. Others appear abruptly, or move from place to place on the screen, or lose gestures in mid-articulation. The net effect, when combined with the stylized mannerisms and expressions of '20s silent cinema, is like watching some Lovecraftian artifact of madness where bits and pieces of reality have been deleted by cosmic horror, and what survives is only partially intelligible to the sane.

It's also great because it's just weird and remote enough to feel genuinely alien. The 1931 Frankenstein does not feel this way: film technology has improved enough that the people are recognizably Golden Age Hollywood types, and you can hear them talk, which removes a great deal of distance and therefore mystery. But the 1925 Phantom of the Opera is a silent movie that's also a period piece, so the characters dress in this bizarre hybrid of 1920s and 1890s fashions and comport themselves with a combination of silent movie mannerisms and fake opera period-piece mannerisms, and the upshot is that they don't behave like recognizable people and that makes it all infinitely more absorbing as a fictive universe.

And, finally, it's great because Lon Cheney Sr. was clearly a guy who understood exactly how makeup worked in this medium, and the effects he constructed for the Phantom still hold up as a phenomenal achievement in practical effects. The film quality not only blurs out the limitations (you can't see anything of the wire pinning up his nose) but lends his whole persona a ghastly, otherworldly air that fits perfectly with the general sense of unreality created by all the other things going on here.

His Phantom mask is great too. It has this look of bland, sleepy benevolence that's deeply creepy in its own right, and the fine cloth that hangs down over the mouth blurs out of visibility in the old-timey film, so that the effect is less like he has a veil over his mouth and more just like reality has vanished where his mouth should be. There's a blur in the film and it's like whatever was actually there was so horrific, so impossible to countenance, that it melted through the film and warped what the camera understood, and what's left is just this moving patch of indistinctness on his face.

It's fantastic. I want to write an entire game or a novel or something just borrowing what this movie does and setting it in some Lovecraft pastiche story. But really nothing I could do with it would hold a candle to the movie itself.

10/10
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Postby No Good Advice » Tue Feb 20, 2018 4:39 am

Hell yeah

With your current horror streak are you planning to watch some early zombie oldies as well? White Zombie, I Walked With a Zombie..
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