Friday, October 25, 2013

A Moveable Fest, Week 10: Army of Darkness, Asylum, The Blair Witch Project

Week 10: Tim's Choice

Army of Darkness

Ash is in 1300 AD now (at the end of Evil Dead 2 he is transported there, which is handy as he doesn't have any disembodied heads trying to nom him). He has to find the Necronomicon, which is presumably a book about a recipe convention for disembodied-head chefs. Basically, this movie is vaguely entertaining if you remind yourself it's not a good horror movie, or a horror movie, or a good movie. There's a WTF value that sustains it for a bit, and towards the end some fun and recognisably stylish stop-motion skeletons, but if you've only got a few minutes you'd be better off watching this. The creepiest thing about watching this movie was that at almost exactly the same start day and time, I saw that Karen and her husband started watching the same film.

Asylum

A young psychiatrist chap applies for a job at an asylum, but his job interview probably hasn't been approved by HR: if he can pick the inmate who used to run the asylum (before he went bonkers), then he gets the job. The film then follows the episodic stories of of several inmates, which are neat little set pieces (including an hilarious severed head that breathes through its brown waxed paper wrapping), before it goes COMPLETELY NUTS and we have tiny jerky automaton replicas stalking people very very slowly with scalpels. Ok, it's not scary, but it's pretty hilarious, which is a lot better than boring.

The Blair Witch Project

TBWP (to those in the know) is presented as a found-footage film, where a bunch of college students go on a camping trip to make a documentary about the notorious Blair Witch that supposedly haunts the area of Black Hills, Maryland. The Blair Witch isn't very fond of college students, and there's a lot of shouting and beanies and snotty crying. Flippancy aside, I love this movie. The mostly improvised acting works extremely well: the relations between the characters slide from being politely overenthusiastic to annoying the crap out of each other in a very convincing fashion. They're extremely human, and combined with a wise decision to never show 'he who walks behind the rows' (thanks for that, Children of Corn sequels), this stands up as a very effective horror movie. Really, if you walked out of a tent and found little cairns of rocks, and stick-men hanging from the trees around you: you'd proverbial your pants.




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