Tag Archives: subtitled

Shake Rattle & Roll 2k5

So here’s a twist. There’s a fifteen movie horror anthology series from the Philippines, and I’ve literally never heard of it. Anyway, the podcast randomization was giant blank as the scare, and anthology as the style, and that anthology series is what they picked. I have no idea how they selected this particular entry in the series, which had no giant anythings. But Shake Rattle & Roll 2k5 was certainly an anthology, at least. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t very good.

So, first story was a comedic take on a spirit talker medium lady who is also a scam artist, and her crew that helps her pull off seeming convincingly spooky. They take one last job, and, whoops, the spooky stuff is real this time! It was never quite funny, and never quite spooky, but it was enough of each.

In the second story, there’s a haunted aquarium, though it seemed to me like the mask in the aquarium was the bigger problem, and the family (mother, father, son, live-in maid) who just moved into the condo must deal with said haunted aquarium. More spooky, but less funny.

The third story lost all pretense of being funny at all, when a dude and his pregnant girlfriend or maybe wife move away from the inlaws, but into a nest of Filipino folk shapeshifter cannibals. Except for no main character having a motivation that made a lick of sense, this one was okay.

All in all: meh. …or maybe I needed to have watched one through six. Plus, I paid $2 for the dubious please of its company, which cannot have helped my attitude.

Honogurai mizu no soko kara

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I was so excited to see a movie in the upcoming list for my podcast that I had actually seen before. It’s been so long in a row that I’m kind of losing confidence in whether I’ve ever seen any horror movies. Then I got to the point last episode where they were doing the randomizing, and, you know what, aquatic scare, based on a book style? Yeah, that tracks. But then they did something that was incredibly obvious in retrospect but which I never saw coming. They picked the original Japanese version of Dark Water. Why wouldn’t they, unless the style was specifically “remake” or something?

Like I said, I’ve “seen” this movie, so there wasn’t a lot I needed to figure out about the plot. What details I had forgotten were non-critical, for sure. Thus, I was mostly watching for character beats. In the cast, we have: one kindergarten aged child, with no agency; one kindergarten aged ghost, with minimal agency; one ex-husband, who exists only to be an antagonist; one lawyer, who exists only to be a white knight; a handful of apartment employees, who use their agency to avoid taking responsibility for anything that’s happening; and one mother, who abrogates her agency whenever possible. Indeed, the pivotal moment of the story is her finally deciding to take an action, instead of being acted upon. (And even then, I could make a pretty compelling argument that she had no meaningful options open to her in said pivotal moment.)

If it sounds like I’m unimpressed, well, I am. But not with the acting or the plot, just with how the writing was on such hardened rails that all I could do was be annoyed with people for not making choices or with the story for not giving them any. Said story, at its bones, was this: an ex-wife is fighting for custody of her daughter against a father who never showed any interest until now, and he’s playing dirty tricks. So all her money is tied up in white knight lawyers, which means she has to get a pretty bad apartment. Like, water damage on the ceiling, cloudy water in the faucets, half the residences are empty, even the floors in some cases. And also there’s a spooky kid’s bag that keeps showing up in her daughter’s possessions, and missing child posters from years ago. And then it gets creepier.

Mood, mystery, I already mentioned acting, these were all fine. And I already complained about how few of the people who felt like real characters were also characters who could (or would) take actions. So I guess that’s the movie. All things considered, I think I liked the Jennifer Connelly version more. But, I would, wouldn’t I?

Update: I just learned from Google Translate that the name of the movie on the poster above is From the Dimly Lit Depths of the Water, and that’s just an all around better title. (I mean, unless you need to market it to American audiences as a horror movie, maybe.) So there is one thing I like better about the original, after all!

As Boas Maneiras

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This movie is way too easy to spoil, and so I report with a great deal of satisfaction (both for myself as a viewer and also for myself as a writer) that I do not have to give anything away by explaining what random elements came together for this to be my next podcast horror movie. The scare was mythological, and the style was from the 2010s. See? Nothing. And the title of the movie, Good Manners, is if anything more opaque, to the point that I still do not fully understand how it fit with anything I watched, at least not in a specific way.

The movie is essentially a play in two acts. In the first act, a pregnant woman who is recently isolated from her former life hires a nanny about midway through the pregnancy, with the intent to get her help around the house and at appointments leading up to the birth, and then transition her from helper / housekeeper to full time actual nanny. The prospective nanny, herself rather isolated from her own former life such as it may have been, forms a fast bond with her employer. But then she starts to notice certain oddities.

In the second act, seven years later, an isolated mother and her son navigate their isolation, his allergies and related special needs, the secret that lies between them, and his growing dissatisfaction with the carefully crafted strictures that fence his existence. Also, mostly but not exclusively in the second act, there are random musical numbers that come across as Greek chorus-like, even though main characters are often the ones singing.

The movie: mostly pretty great. Solid slow boil tension, compelling characters, sense of impending, unavoidable doom. The music numbers: weird, but also very distinctive.

Gau Ji

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Another horror podcast movie. I have a lot in a row right now, it turns out. But anyway, this one’s scare was magic, and style was foreign language. So I watched Dumplings, a Chinese[1] movie from 2004 about a lady who sells specially made dumplings[2] mostly to other women, because of their implausibly effective age-defying and even restorative properties. And about the actress who is approaching the hill and doesn’t want to lose her shitbird husband, but is also maybe more curious than she should be about the cooking process employed. Or, more precisely, about the ingredients.

I think I want to say basically nothing else because of the spoilers, even though there’s really a lot to cover. I should say this, though. I have not been scared by a movie for a long time, and even then only by very isolated scenes. The film student standing in the corner in Blair Witch. The head-on mirror hair-brushing scene in Ringu[3]. The lady standing over her husband for like 6 hours straight without moving in Paranormal Activity.

However, there are movies I find disturbing. Hostel springs to mind. Human Centipede as well, solely in prospect, because I still haven’t got up the gumption. My point is, Dumplings was a hard watch. Lotta “oh no, they’re actually doing that” combined with virtually no sympathetic characters, and no good outcomes for anyone who is. Yikes.

It’s not per se a bad movie, but I think I must disrecommend to almost anyone who has not read the above and thinks they absolutely have to know / affirmatively want to feel disturbed.

[1] Well, Hong Kong. Technically the same thing by that time, but still, I think the distinction could be relevant?
[2] who could have guessed
[3] I know how they did it. But if you accept the premise within the movie, that’s some real life ghost shit.

Rökkur

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I’ve made it to December 2021. I think this means I’m still catching up? Who can say, really. The scare was (I’m pretty sure) psychological, and the style was queer, and thus I watched Rift, a movie out of Iceland about gay dudes breaking up but then talking about it for the rest of the movie while other things also happen.

The deal is Einar is posing as maybe suicidal and then a couple of days later… no, let me go back. They’re standing at a balcony, post-breakup, and Einar is wobbling his beer bottle on the railing, and says, “This bottle is me. If I fall, do you think you could save me?” And then the bottle falls to the pavement. And then a couple days later, Gunnar gets a 3am voicemail about how he’s out in the sticks and there’s maybe someone with him. So he leaves his new boyfriend and drives out into the sticks to check on Einar, and, well, things are immediately weird, and they stay that way.

It has a tiny cast. There’s Einar and Gunnar (who if it was not clear already initiated the breakup), there’s the new boyfriend but he’s only in the prologue, and then there’s a) the helpful neighbor keeping an eye on the place, b) the creepy old farmer down the road who is introduced as probably a sexual predator, c) the girl at the convenience store who says not to pick up hitchhikers, and d) the Icelandic countryside, full of wind and emptiness and dry December grass, and bends and folds from all the volcanoes off in the distance, and abandoned buildings in states of decay. Oh, and I forgot e) the creepy red car that keeps showing up everywhere.

So yeah. The movie is 100% atmosphere, which unfortunately leaves no percentage points for making a lick of sense. But still, it’s a creepy, immersive atmosphere, and that makes up for a lot of sins, you know?

Noroi

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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)

Based on a very narrow sample size of this movie from five years ago, I have to say that I am shocked by how casually racist French kids are with each other. This has nothing to do with the plot of the movie, nor particularly with the character development for that matter. It was just an adjustment I had to make. (Really, it’s probably like how mean girls in like Heathers or Mean Girls call each other bitch, and mean to be endearing. Of course, that doesn’t really sell itself as a solution either, if you give it more than a second’s thought.)

Again, not the point of the movie. So there are these French girls who I think all live in the same apartment building? They for sure go to the same school, or maybe more like used to go to and are now too old for that, but maybe not. Either way, not much schooling happening. And they’re surrounded by their boyfriends and baby daddies and exes and brothers and so on, and they are also spray paint taggers for some reason, with a secret gang tag all their own and everything. It’s very bonding.

Having established all that, two inciting incidents occur in close proximity. In the first, the white girl finds the name Kandisha tagged [by people not them] under some wallpaper, and the Muslim girl recognizes her as a Moroccan legendary figure who takes revenge on behalf of wronged women. Then they jokingly try to summon her, with no results. In the second incident, later that same night, the white girl is brutally attacked and attempted-raped by an ex-. Later still that same night while showering off the blood and detritus of the evening’s events, she tries to summon Kandisha again, with rather stronger results.

The catch is: you can’t really control a vengeance demon, and without almost any pause at all, the innocent[1] men in their lives are dropping like flies. If only there were some way to call her off altogether! Welp, good luck with that.

[1] At the least, more innocent.

Nochnoy Dozor

This week’s podcast movie was a) vampires and b) a bitchin’ soundtrack. I think I will agree that Night Watch hits both of these marks, even if the soundtrack isn’t quite what I expected it to be. The movie is based on a series of six books, which I almost want to read. The premise is that there’s been a precarious balance between the forces of good and evil, portrayed as the Night Watch (the good guys who guard against evil) and the Day Watch (bad guys who guard against good). Because maintaining the balance is important, since all out war was going to just destroy everything, as per the prologue to the movie.

So now everyone who isn’t human and eventually discovers this about themselves gets to choose if they will join light or darkness, and the movie is about one such dude, who got caught up in the Night Watch during a sting operation when he hired a witch to make his wife stop cheating on him; he was the bait for the bad guy witch, you see. And now he’s trying to save a kid from a vampire but also save the world from ending because it turns out there’s a prophecy about a cursed virgin, and… you know what, I could go on for another two paragraphs and never once have to make a lick of sense. The point is, it’s a dark fantasy movie in an extremely Russian way, and I think most of what I liked about it is that it’s something that would never have been made in America.

It’s not that it’s exactly good, and me saying it that way should not be construed as it being exactly bad either. But it’s 100% Grade A different, and in these fallen days, that’s not nothing, you know?

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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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