Tag Archives: Shudder

Noroi

Podcast movie! The scare was demons, and the style was found footage, and the movie was Noroi: The Curse.

Found footage can be silly. Why are these people recording everything? Why, having seen the things they are recording, do they not make different choices instead of just continuing to record? How did they get so good at filming things? This latter clearly doesn’t always apply. Sometimes, they lean into the “bad camera operator” angle. Sometimes, and thankfully this is one of those, they lean into the professional angle. Sometimes, both.[1]

So anyway, there’s this documentary filmmaker in Japan, and he catches wind of some strange goings on at a local apartment complex. I forget the instigating incident. But something weird happens with a little boy staring out of a window, and some inexplicable sounds on his footage, and he starts pulling on threads. A psychic girl here, a tinfoil clad conspiracy theorist there, dead pigeons everywhere you look, and before you know it there’s a mysterious name, a drowned village, and everyone involved in the documentary are dropping like flies.

Ah, you are saying, why didn’t he just quit? I don’t disagree, but I never felt like he made an inexplicable choice until the last ten minutes of the film, so, not too bad as such things go. Anyway, I’m surprised I missed this one. It was 2005, right around the time the whole J-horror thing got so big that their movies were being remade in Hollywood constantly for a year or two. And yet, not a clue it existed[2]. Which is a pity, as it hangs together very well and is pretty scary. Recommended.

[1] I’m looking at you, Blair Witch Project.
[2] haha oops. 2005 is when the documentary was made. This came out in 2017. No wonder I never heard of it, it’s new!

Kandisha (2020)

Son (2021)

Vicious Fun

An Unquiet Grave

Sometimes a movie is a lot more interesting than it is good.

This is not to say that An Unquiet Grave is bad, precisely. It’s short, especially by modern standards, and it clicks right along at a prodigious speed, but it still, in retrospect, feels a little too long somehow. The character beats and the acting were good, and I liked the plot, but I also think the plot was the problem. There just wasn’t really enough of it to fill 80ish minutes, even if you account for all the long shots of people looking sad.

See, it’s like this. There’s a guy whose wife died, and he has a plan to bring her back, with her twin sister’s help. That right there? It’s the whole movie. There are two actors, a lot of back and forth dialogue, a handful of events, and then the credits roll. I think I liked it, even despite the too long thing, but I also think what I liked about it was the interestingness of the premise and the tiny cast more than, you know, the movie itself. But also, the acting is staying with me. There’s a little bit of special effects, mostly make-up related, but the true horror of the movie is all conveyed in the acting choices, and I’m here for it.

I feel like I may be talking myself into liking it better than it deserves? Because it really isn’t anywhere near great, and I maintain that it’s more interesting than good. I guess I mean the parts that are good may actually be great, but they do not outweigh maintaining such a somber mood for such a long time relative to what actually occurs.

Speaking of interesting: I just learned that the female lead was also one of the writers. This makes me feel better about the brief nudity in the film, which felt otherwise more exploitative than I’m usually comfortable with. Well, wait, let me explain. Exploitative nudity in film is the bread and butter of what I am comfortable with, it’s practically a horror film food group. But this was emotionally exploitative, and while I fully understood the artistic choice behind it, it was uncomfortable all the same. But her also being a writer on the film really does smooth that over a bit, so hooray!

But also, the ending? Like, literally the last second of the movie? That part was brilliant.

Kolskaya sverhglubokaya

Back in the late ’90s and then ongoing for the next twenty or so years, off and on when he did not consider himself retired, I spent a lot of time listening to the Art Bell Show. Hell, I still listen to reruns, it’s a great soundtrack for falling asleep. One of the things I remember hearing about, back in those days, was the massively deep hole in Russia from which recording equipment heard screams and moans, like seven miles down, and had they found hell?! Other than the recording itself, which okay was a little disquieting but could have been produced by anyone from anywhere, I do not recall any compelling evidence being provided. But that’s kind of the point of Art Bell. He gives you cool hypotheticals and lets you feel spoopy, as the kids used to say, and then at the end of the episode the world is still pretty regular, no aliens or ghosts or bigfeet or nothin’.

I never did really hear anything else about that Superdeep hole. Until now, sort of?

Set just before the fall of the Soviet Union, a lady scientist with a dark past and a whole bunch of military dudes are sent to a miles-deep research facility in Siberia to figure out why things have gotten weird. It’s almost exclusively from her point of view, which results in really solid tension building as people head off to deal with this or that mysterious occurrence, and you might hear screaming or gunfire, but you don’t know what actually happened, and what they report back isn’t as useful as it could be at explaining things.

I was reminded a lot of that oil rig game I played last year, but with a serial numbers filed off Russian cast of Aliens. Effectively creepy, high stakes, and intense. Can recommend.

Raw (2016)

This week’s movie from Summer 2021 of the podcast was honestly kind of a spoiler as the scare and I forget what as the style, because man I’m bad at this. The downside of talking about Raw is that I’m going to have to jump into those spoilers, because it’s that kind of movie. But not yet!

So there’s this vegetarian chick from a vegetarian veterinarian family, and it’s almost time to go to vet school! But also, vet school is really weird. Source: the movie, but it apparently involves getting hazed by upperclassmen and even professors? Like, the whole incoming class gets Carried, and hell, probably with actual pig blood, why not? They sure have access to some! Plus weird all night mandatory raves and closet makeouts. It’s honestly a lot more like a mixed-gender fraternity than a professional medical school for animals. Er, about animals.

But the thing is, one of the hazings is to eat a pickled rabbit kidney. And kind of like being introduced to the new religious viewpoints (or political viewpoints, or sexual awakenings) that college brings to many people, it just stands to reason that if you give a confirmed lifelong vegetarian a hunk of meat, they’re gonna go all out with it, you know?

Spoilers below.

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Caveat (2020)

I saw one of those too clever mystery movies that is amazing if you let it wash you along, but as soon as you start to think about it, everything kind of falls apart. So there’s this scruffy, apparently partially amnesiac drifter who gets hired by his former landlord to watch the landlord’s niece for a few days out in the backwoods. See, the niece is mentally imbalanced, and the uncle is just, ugh, I can’t cope, but I’ll pay you to cope! There’s just this one little Caveat…

Okay, maybe two. The house is on an island, only reachable by boat, and the uncle intends to leave with the boat for the aforementioned few days, but mainly it’s that the drifter has to be locked into a harness with a long chain to allow him to wander some of but not all of the house, as the niece doesn’t want him to be able to get into her room, for example.

It’s a pretty interesting premise, on the face of it. What happened here? Why is the uncle being so weird? But if you think for too long, you’ll start asking other questions, like, why would anyone ever agree to this job? Why is there a lockable harness chained into the basement cement that can reach most of the house but not all of it? If the niece is unstable, why let her have a crossbow? Why is the spoiler in the basement untouched by the passage of time? And so on.

It’s not that it’s a bad movie, it’s just that maybe don’t trust it to have good answers to any of these questions, and enjoy the atmosphere instead. Because there’s definitely atmosphere out the wazoo. Not the least of which is the gratuitous screaming foxes.

À Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma

It started, like it does a lot more than is probably apparent from the individual offerings here at Shards of Delirium[1], with Joe Bob. The first episode of The Last Drive-In this month was a sequel movie about Coffin Joe, a Brazilian villain (or anti-hero, back before that was a thing people said) I had never previously heard of. The two-pronged catch was, a) I have of course never seen the first movie, and b) I could not stay awake past the first 20 minutes of the sequel because of having had three vaccines earlier in the day.

Obviously, I decided to watch the first movie first, which I now have. My conclusion is that the choice to not air At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul was the correct one. Joe is a mortician, and he’s a pretentious self-absorbed dick, but in a way that is initially hilarious. He strikes dramatic poses from on high, he mocks the superstitions of the plebes (including faith), he beats his wife at only period-appropriate levels, that kind of thing. …okay, the last one wasn’t hilarious, but ultimately this is my point. Coffin Joe of this first movie is, as soon as his plan kicks off, supremely unlikeable.

That plan is to have a son. The downside is, his wife is barren. So he gets rid of her, picks a new girl, gets rid of anyone standing in the way of acquiring her, and so on until he gets caught up in some kind of consequence, and I ultimately did not understand why people like him or would watch sequels. Then I did watch the sequel, wherein he’s an anti-hero with likeable qualities instead of just a wife-beating dick, and even though he’s still clearly a villain, he’s a lot more fun, and so ultimately, I would say it’s fine to give This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse a try, even if it has one of the worst endings of any movie I’ve ever seen. (But that was not Joe’s fault[2], and is undone in the third movie [which I have not seen], so yay.)

The sequence in which Joe is walking alone at night on All Hallow’s Eve[3] and runs into or maybe hallucinates the annual procession of the Dead is pretty great, though.

[1] And like is probably eminently apparent from the site in aggregate
[2] Joe the director, not Joe the character, although it turns out they are portrayed by the same human person.
[3] or maybe it was the Day of the Dead, but since it was at night and what I’m about to say happened, I assume it was the night before

Skull: The Mask

With a sample size of two[1], I can say reliably that modern South American audiences and filmmakers are mostly afraid of demons, with an undercurrent of being afraid of corrupt police. Skull: The Mask is about waking up some demon dude who wants to either help the intestines of the earth move (because that would be bad) or stop them from moving (because when they’re moving that’s a good thing), I am really unclear as to which.

After a throwaway gorefest scene with Nazis, we fast forward to modern times, where the top stories are Bolivian children gone missing[2] and a murder spree that started at the home of an archaeological professor and her way too young girlfriend, both of which cases are being investigated by the same lady cop who was recently cleared of murder charges in some as far as I know unrelated case, but man is the press well-informed on these matters, giving out specific details of the murders and showing graphic footage, and I really do have to wonder if it’s done that way down there, or if local audiences would be rolling their eyes a bit.

But so anyway, there’s this mask which is kind of a six horned skull that wraps around your face and now you’re possessed with the demon, and if you guessed that this has some tie-in with the Nazi shit and the archaeologist and the earth’s intestines, then I’d say you’ve been paying attention. There’s plenty of gore, plenty of weird dream sequence stop motion animation, and a respectable number of breasts, all gratuitous, as though the dream of the ’80s is alive in São Paulo.

My intent here was not to give everything away, but I’m torn right now between feeling like I should say more, feeling like I’ve already said too much, and feeling like honestly I’m not sure I’d know how to spoil the plot fully even if that were my intent. In any event, this was an experience and a half, and I’d say check it out.

[1] The other is an unreviewed Joe Bob showing of a movie whose title I’m blanking on, I think Argentinian, and with some serious darkness to it. Like whoa. If I remember the name of it. I’ll mention it.[3]
[2] Maybe something to add to the things South Americans are afraid of?
[3] When Evil Lurks, about which I should add that another fear, if perhaps not of the public but for sure of the writer, is custody battles / divorce.