My opinions on obscure movies!
Jan. 19th, 2012 03:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
uberreinigerWhile the internet was blacking itself out in protest (and rightly so,) I sat around and watched horror movies. But they were really good horror movies.
Black Death - I've wanted to see this film for a while because it stars Sean Bean and I was expecting to watch him good-naturedly slog through a cheesy, low-budget shocker for the paycheck. This is actually a very good, thought-provoking film. Rather than a straight-up horror film, it's more appropriately thought of as a noir suspense thriller that just happens to be set in medieval England where everything is morally ambiguous and what we see is unreliable.
The main character is actually Osmund (Eddie Redmayne,) a novice Christian monk torn between his vows and the woman he loves. At the height of the bubonic plague one village in the area is untouched by the disease and Osmund accompanies Church investigator Ulrich (Bean) and his squadron of soldiers to find out why. Ulrich believes it's too good to be true and that supernatural forces may be involved.
I like the fact that this movie doesn't take the easy way out by casting the medieval Church as stock villains and/or setting up a conflict between repressive, militaristic Christians and peaceful, earth-loving pagans. Black Death dares to present both sides as equally violent, authoritarian, and cruel and yet at the same time, equally valid. I also liked that they never flat-out state exactly *what* the witches believe. On one hand they seem to practice a sort of Druidic paganism, but they make statements that lean toward them being Satanists/general occultists or even simply nihilistic atheists. This might be frustrating for some viewers, but the film is immersive enough that I felt this ambiguity heightened my empathy with the heroes' confusion and not knowing what to trust or who to believe.
I found this film very thought-provoking and felt it raised good questions about what we take for granted not only in terms of religious beliefs, but even what we may have taken for granted about certain such beliefs being evil or wrong. Be warned that it is a very depressing film.
Noroi: The Curse - Noroi is a Japanese "found footage" film from 2005. That's a few years before the found footage subgenre exploded back into popularity in the West and for those who think that the genre is contrived, not scary, or just plain out of good ideas... you need to see this movie.
Noroi centers around paranormal investigator Masafumi Kobayashi (Jim Muraki) who is filming a documentary of his investigations. He films a series of seemingly unrelated cases... but people he films keep acting in unexpectedly hostile, violent ways and voices and images keep showing up on the tapes that should not be there...
I will be honest, this movie starts out kind of slow and the Japanese variety show footage that Kobayashi draws on for his early leads gets pretty tedious. Having said that, I found the last thirty minutes of this film to be freaking scary! Noroi is one film that really knows how to effectively creep up the tension. It's hard to say more without giving too much away, but I stress again that if you're tired of or not impressed with found footage horror movies, please give this one a chance. You'll see what this much-maligned film technique is truly capable of.
I almost forgot to mention the best part. You can watch the entire movie for free on Youtube divided into eight parts starting here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zha9jJuB2yg Suck on that, SOPA.
Black Death - I've wanted to see this film for a while because it stars Sean Bean and I was expecting to watch him good-naturedly slog through a cheesy, low-budget shocker for the paycheck. This is actually a very good, thought-provoking film. Rather than a straight-up horror film, it's more appropriately thought of as a noir suspense thriller that just happens to be set in medieval England where everything is morally ambiguous and what we see is unreliable.
The main character is actually Osmund (Eddie Redmayne,) a novice Christian monk torn between his vows and the woman he loves. At the height of the bubonic plague one village in the area is untouched by the disease and Osmund accompanies Church investigator Ulrich (Bean) and his squadron of soldiers to find out why. Ulrich believes it's too good to be true and that supernatural forces may be involved.
I like the fact that this movie doesn't take the easy way out by casting the medieval Church as stock villains and/or setting up a conflict between repressive, militaristic Christians and peaceful, earth-loving pagans. Black Death dares to present both sides as equally violent, authoritarian, and cruel and yet at the same time, equally valid. I also liked that they never flat-out state exactly *what* the witches believe. On one hand they seem to practice a sort of Druidic paganism, but they make statements that lean toward them being Satanists/general occultists or even simply nihilistic atheists. This might be frustrating for some viewers, but the film is immersive enough that I felt this ambiguity heightened my empathy with the heroes' confusion and not knowing what to trust or who to believe.
I found this film very thought-provoking and felt it raised good questions about what we take for granted not only in terms of religious beliefs, but even what we may have taken for granted about certain such beliefs being evil or wrong. Be warned that it is a very depressing film.
Noroi: The Curse - Noroi is a Japanese "found footage" film from 2005. That's a few years before the found footage subgenre exploded back into popularity in the West and for those who think that the genre is contrived, not scary, or just plain out of good ideas... you need to see this movie.
Noroi centers around paranormal investigator Masafumi Kobayashi (Jim Muraki) who is filming a documentary of his investigations. He films a series of seemingly unrelated cases... but people he films keep acting in unexpectedly hostile, violent ways and voices and images keep showing up on the tapes that should not be there...
I will be honest, this movie starts out kind of slow and the Japanese variety show footage that Kobayashi draws on for his early leads gets pretty tedious. Having said that, I found the last thirty minutes of this film to be freaking scary! Noroi is one film that really knows how to effectively creep up the tension. It's hard to say more without giving too much away, but I stress again that if you're tired of or not impressed with found footage horror movies, please give this one a chance. You'll see what this much-maligned film technique is truly capable of.
I almost forgot to mention the best part. You can watch the entire movie for free on Youtube divided into eight parts starting here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zha9jJuB2yg Suck on that, SOPA.
