pacman000 wrote:Saw "I Bury the Living" this weekend.
A man who's elected chairman of a cemetery discovers people die when he marks their plots as occupied. Interesting, but with a dissapointing ending.
Well made. Some scenes are stagey, but that's normal for a 50's film, and they pull off some interesting camera & editing tricks later in the movie, as the protagonist's sanity seems to slip.
I remember reading about this one back when I had my old Leonard Maltin film guide and thinking that it sounding interesting. I'll have to give it a watch one day.
I have a free month of Shudder (a streaming site focused on horror and suspense) and I wanted to cross off some odd movies that I'd been meaning to watch but had never gotten around to. So far I've watched:
Phantasm: One of those films that sometimes gets the "classic horror" label but often gets straight-up ignored. It's an odd film about strange goings-on at a cemetery and funeral parlor in a small town as seen by a mechanically-inclined teen boy who desperately tries to get his older brother to believe him. The film has a dreamy, surreal quality that makes some of the illogical things that happen a lot easier to swallow. There are some visually-striking scenes and a some bizarre twists that push the film into the sci-fi realm. I personally had a lot of fun, but you have to make the usual allowances for a first-time filmmaker (low-budget, amateur performances) and some choppy editing due to script rewrites. The film probably had an influence on the later Nightmare on Elm Street series (certainly the ending scene did, at least) and The Tall Man feels like a precursor to Slender Man, at least visually.
God Told Me To: What begins as a straight-faced 70s cop drama with supernatural overtones (placid, smiling people commit murder and then answer "God told me to" when asked why) that goes further into conspiracy and paranoia before changing genres altogether at the halfway point. What makes the movie work as well as it does is some strong acting from the lead characters and the refusal to wink or smile at the audience no matter how nuts things get near the end and there are some surprisingly emotional moments. Film is low-budget but technically solid (Larry Cohen wrote/directed a string of early blaxploitation movies prior to this and later went on to create the It's Alive series, among other things). The lead character's development and self-discovery reminds me a little of Bruce Willis' character from Unbreakable.
Society: Most of the movie is a cartoonish, blackly-comic take on The Stepford Wives/Invasion of the Body Snatchers in a 80s high-school movie setting. It's not bad, but what makes the film remarkable is the final 20 minutes of twisted, highly-inventive body-horror effects - it feels like a collaboration between David Cronenberg and pre-Lord of the Rings Peter Jackson. It's a 10/10 finale in what is maybe a 6/10 movie and it makes the whole thing worth watching at least once. Director Brian Yuzna had previously worked on Re-Animator, so he was already no stranger to goop.