You are currently browsing all entries tagged with 'horror'
Or just my random thoughts about the sci-fi and horror movies I’ve watched. After watching Chronicle, it made me think a lot about the genre as Chronicle smartly crosses both sci-fi and horror. It’s a first person documentary-style sci-fi horror film about three teenagers acquiring the unfathomable power of telekinesis after an encounter with something unearthly and alien.
It’s Joe Dante’s Explorers meets Brian De Palma’s The Fury.
“Matango” is a Japanese classic movie from 1963 which might be considered either one of the pioneer J-Horror movies or a really good stoner movie.
It begins with a shipwreck on a deserted island. I can almost hear the theme song from “Gilligan’s Island” as a yacht with a small group of sightseers gets tossed in a storm. The skipper, his first mate, the rich couple, the girl next door and the professor are all on board.
As they forage for food, the wise skipper tells them to stay away from the ‘shrooms. They could be poisonous. There is dissension and mistrust among the castaways and of course, it’s only a matter of time before they start eating the fungi, with eerie consequences.
A friend of mine had a copy of this classic with dubbed dialogue and we watched it in the wee hours of the night. Despite my initial skepticism and the laughability of the dubbed dialogue, the movie has somehow continued to haunt me every time I look at a mushroom.
We’ve seen heartfelt and feel good performances from televised talent shows from Korea and Taiwan, heck, even racy strip teases from Argentina. But, you’ve got to see this talent show out of India. What looks like an innocuous, bhangra dance troupe with gold spinning wheels, turns into pure horror, bloodletting, and a world of pain and suffering. And I mean for the judges, who look absolutely terrified! You’ve got to see this to believe it. Makes JACKASS look like kibble and Jackie Chan into an amateur.
Man, those are some hardcore Sikhs. Can you imagine Simon Cowell or Paula Abdul seeing this shit on THE X-FACTOR? Cowell would probably shit his pants!
I started trick-or-treating at 6 when no one was celebrating Halloween in Hong Kong. No one in Hong Kong really quite knew what Halloween was at that time. I accidentally stumbled upon some make-up kits and greeting cards with a smiling Jack-o’lantern that year in an American store and I asked my mom about Halloween. My mom explained the whole American tradition of trick-or-treating to me and I thought it was a brilliant idea. On my first Halloween night, I put on a pair of fangs, glued some cotton to my face as decaying flesh and put on two bug eyes with plastic tape… I was trying to be a vampire of some sort.
I knocked on the doors of different neighbors in my apartment building on different floors and very few answered. Even if they did, they were totally puzzled at “Trick or treat.” My mom told me to hit up this kid whom I used to play with when I was two, and so I did. His mom opened the door and I said, “Trick or treat.”
From Dario Argento’s Deep Red
By “Spaghetti Fear” I don’t mean the fear of spaghetti but rather “spaghetti horror,” the genre of horror films pioneered by Italian filmmakers such as Mario Bava who made the 1960 cult classic Black Sunday with Barbara Steele. Bava’s films were before my time as my entry into Spaghetti Fear was in the 80s with Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Lamberto Bava (Mario Bava’s son) and Michele Saovi (who began working as Argento’s assistant director). I’m not just trying to catch the Flavah of the week because fear and horror is the Flavah of my life since I ran out of the movie theater scared shitless halfway watching my first horror movie The Manitou at 7.
(Trailer to Lucio Fulci’s House by the Cemetery)
First, I must warn you that if you’re easily offended or squeamish, please don’t read this post. Also, if you don’t want people spoiling a movie for you, please don’t read this post. I’m going to be talking about Srdjan Spasojevic’s A Serbian Film (Srpski Film), which is due out Stateside in a very limited distribution. After screening at last year’s South by Southwest Film Festival, the film was picked up by a boutique distributor called Invincible Pictures that had plans to theatrically open the picture in the U.S.
I first heard about A Serbian Film from chatting with the horror master Stuart Gordon (Re-animator and From Beyond) in his Burbank office and I was immediately intrigued. Set in the titular Serbia, A Serbian Film tells the story of a retired porn star who gets tricked into making a snuff film by an “insane” director who wants to create “newborn” cinema. The second act of the film is a flashback after our protagonist comes home peeing out blood as he groggily retraces his steps and recollects his memory of being drugged and forced into various gruesome acts of sex and violence.
PRINCE
Prince Gomolvilas is a Thai American playwright and performer, who co-stars in JUKEBOX STORIES—a storytelling, song-singing, bingo-playing, theatrical extravaganza—that will be performed on June 24 and 26 as part of the National Asian American Theater Festival in L.A. He also wrote the stage adaptation of the Scott Heim novel, MYSTERIOUS SKIN, which launched East West Players’ 2010-11 season, and he runs BAMBOO NATION, an arts and entertainment blog. He recently started taking Muay Thai lessons, so he is confident that he can kick your ass. (If you’re six years old.)
During the summer of 2003, I was taking a stroll through Old Town Pasadena, a quaint neighborhood that happens to have a touch of street cred because of the porn store that’s crammed between the upscale restaurants and clothing boutiques. I passed by the now-gone United Artists movie theater and saw a poster for a foreign horror flick called The Eye (2002). I remembered reading somewhere that the filmmakers, identical twins Danny & Oxide Pang, were born in Hong Kong but frequently worked in Thailand. This didn’t quite make them Siamese twins (ha!), but since they were somewhat connected to “my people” I decided to saunter into the cinema for a fun and delightful afternoon matinee.
The movie scared the living shit out of me.
A blind woman receives a cornea transplant, but, along with her new vision, she is also able to see dead people. Sure, the seeing dead people thing has been done to death, but the Pang Brothers are clever visual stylists who expertly alternate between quick genuine “jump” moments and unbearably long scenes of utter dread.
Is there no French word for LE HANGOVER?
In my last blog post, I reported on the more mainstream side of the Cannes Film Festival — hotly anticipated art house fare like THE TREE OF LIFE, MELANCHOLIA, THE ARTIST, as well as more of the glitz and glamor of the world’s most important film festival. But there’s a darker side to Cannes, the Marche Du Film, a film bazaar where companies, producers, agents, and representatives hawk their films, hoping to strike deals. This is really where the fun is at Cannes, because you see films of all shapes, sizes, budgets, and quality, and usually, they’re pretty genre-oriented.
The general rule of thumb is that sex, violence, nudity, and gore transcends all boundaries, and although this year was a “buying spree” for American distributors, the films that sell tend to be of the Z-grade variety, because a) they’re cheap and b), um… they’re cheap. On the flip side, there were also a lot of high quality genre films with great production values, and shows the globalization of moviemaking as foreign films compete and stand on their own, against bigger Hollywood fare (see: South Korea). So, in this blog entry, I’m going to highlight some of the more unique fare that inhabited this year’s Cannes. Although there wasn’t a film as magnificently cheesy like NUDE NUNS WITH BIG GUNS from last year (it’s rare to capture lightning in a bottle), it was still a pretty good year for schlock and genre cinema. Here are some highlights:
3D SEX AND ZEN: EXTREME ECSTASY: I’ve been badgered by Offender Phil for my review on this film. The market screening I went to was packed, full of horny buyers ready to sink their teeth (and wallets) in what is being advertised as Hong Kong’s first 3D porn film.
Here’s a bizarre incident that happened in Lancaster, CA over the past weekend during a packed screening of SHUTTER ISLAND. A man was stabbed in the neck with a meat thermometer after he exchanged some words with a woman who was talking on her cell phone during the screening. The attackers were two men who were with the women. The victim is currently in a coma, but expected to have a slow and promising recovery. The perpetrators are still at large. Here’s a KTLA news story about this heinous attack with purported security camera footage of the victim and the attackers before the screening.
I am sure this is coicidence, but movie-going attacks have occurred during other horror and thriller film screenings. Here’s a quick rundown:
The final entry in my month-long celebration of all things Halloween
The big night is finally upon us and that means my last Halloween-themed blog. I’ve always enjoyed reading about “real-life” stories of the supernatural so I thought it’d be a fitting way to end my series with a quick sampling of a few paranormal happenings from Japan—a country that definitely loves its ghost stories. Happy Halloween! Wishing everyone a fun and safe time! Don’t forget to submit photos of your costumes. Info here.
PSYCHIC PHOTOS
Nensha photo plates
Another entry in my month-long celebration of all things Halloween
I’ve written previously about my love for horror flicks. I grew up on them and my childhood is filled with many pleasant memories of sitting in front of the TV and watching everything from the old Universal monster movies (the classics—Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman) to things like Poltergeist which seriously fucked me up. But I have a special place in my heart for the ones from Asia.
It’s not necessarily because I’m Asian (though that may play a small part in it), but I think it has more to do with the fact that a lot of these genre works from Asia are truly bizarre and have a very distinct sensibility that I can only describe as…different.
