The Last Movie You Watched

[Foxaèr]

Started watching "The Forever Purge", the last in the series (?) of nasty violent little films.

I think I've seen all the films to date, including the show, so I'll be sad to see the film series end.

[Gwaithmir]

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

Started watching "The Forever Purge", the last in the series (?) of nasty violent little films.

I think I've seen all the films to date, including the show, so I'll be sad to see the film series end.

Given the profit made from the last one, I wouldn't be surprised if they make another.

Ya know you're on a winner when they us jump cuts to scare the fuck out of you. Well, they always scare me.

---

 I like that movie a lot and still re watch it regularly. Still Like SG Atlantis. Nota great fan of SG1 because I don't like Richard Dean Anderson much. Like Michael Shanks, Amanda Tapping, Christopher Judge and dear old Don S Davis.

Just saw a recent photo of Anderson. Oh dear, the poor chap is not aging well.

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project is the 2019 remake of Black Christmas. And it's a special type of bad. No bullet point list that includes some of the most glaring problems, no snark, no videos of Richie Cusack asking how they fucked this up.

It's a remake of the 1974 slasher classic Black Christmas, which I watched to prepare for this movie. It still holds up, but let's put a pin in that for now, because this has only the barest trappings of the original movie. What makes it this bad? Well, you know how Hollywood's been deciding to update old properties of theirs and make them more "woke" in an attempt at pandering to the younger demographic? The vast majority of the time, the ideology such films promote is harmless, largely a diet version of left-wing politics. This time, it seems like it's aimed for the sort of Twitter users who've become so thoroughly "woke" that they may as well have turned into beings of pure ressentiment. 

No more the story of sorority girls being tormented by a mysterious killer who gives them obscene phone calls and then slaughters them, this is basically a rape revenge movie about sorority sisters who fight off the members of a fraternity who raped one of them. And it's a movie where the director said she put "message before plot." Frankly, I have never seen a movie that took that approach that actually worked. It's one thing to have a movie with an important message. My favourite movie, A Clockwork Orange has an extremely unsubtle set of messages about not only the nature of free will and choice, but the unavoidable fact that, sometimes, the most sympathetic character in a given conflict might just be guilty of some heinous crimes. And this movie's message is that rape and toxic masculinity are bad things. How can a movie with such a fundamentally good message be so shit? Maybe having the vast majority of dialogue (particularly after about the 12-minute mark or so) sound far more like Twitter feminist discourse than something people would actually say.

Any potential place one can put a completely unsubtle political point, Sophia Takal takes. Anyone says "girls," someone immediately yells "women." Professor Gelson, and I have no idea what he's supposed to be a professor of, spends more time defending the fact that his curriculum is just dead white men, presumably so  Kris (the preachiest character in the film by far) a good excuse to start a petition to get him fired. Naturally, this means he's the head of a black magic cult that brainwashes frat boys into being rapists (More on this later). Another point of comparison: Get Out is a more recent horror film, one that wears its political opinions on the state of black people on its sleeve. Why is that film almost universally lauded and this film hated? Well, imagine all the weird racial allegories you could pick up on from that film, and imagine that whenever they come up, like, for instance, when Chris gets some heat from an officer when the car he's in hits a deer (and he wasn't even driving), he uses the opportunity to rant about the raw deal black people get from law enforcement, and he'd launch into another rant when his girlfriend Rose manages to defuse the situation. And imagine that he does this every other fucking time an opportunity to point out the injustices of the world he's in pops up. He wouldn't be wrong, but, let's face it, he'd be so insufferable that you wouldn't give a shit whether he lives or dies, and, by extension, you'd have a shit movie. And you'd get a good idea of what this movie's like. Honestly, the movie gets a lot better when Takal just lets a scene go on without dialogue.

"We're not inspiring people. We're pissing people off." It's a line given by Riley, one of the relatively few sympathetic characters to Kris, and it's an extremely effective summation of the reaction this movie's gotten. Kris has the mentality of a right-wing stereotype of a "Social Justice Warrior" (though without the weight or dyed hair) looking to antagonise anyone she doesn't like without even trying to open up a level-headed discussion. I've went over her petition to have Gelson fired solely because his curriculum is insufficiently diverse, and she's also the sort of person who, when her friend is raped, makes said friend take part in a musical routine at the site of said rape and call out her rapist, put said routine on YouTube, and actually act surprised when they retaliate. When they get misogynistic DMs (supposedly from the college's founder, who evidently died long ago that he owned slaves), she decides to escalate the war of words, and it ends up getting physical. And I think that this is a good place to discuss the twist: the frat boys who are part of a cult that possesses them with this weird black supernatural goop (bleeding out the eyes of the college's founder like tears from a statue of the Virgin Mary, no less). It's always a morally risky move to have your protagonist fight and kill villains who are being possessed to do evil against their will. When you're using these frat boys possessed by this nonsensical goop as your proxy for fighting the patriarchy, well, odds are, a significant portion of those people are likely unwilling participants. So, basically, this victory for feminism involves killing a load of innocent people. In Black Christmas 2019, the men are (except for a pair of token love interests) all unsympathetic by design (to the point where the frat house cult says they do what they do not because they're insane, but just because they're men), and the women (except Riley) are all unsympathetic because they're more mouthpieces than actual characters.

Of course, they have their happy ending, but, frankly, it's a shit one. They burn down the evil frat house, kill most, if not all, of its members, and their victory is a hollow one, because odds are, the cops are going to be really interested in whoever killed off one of the biggest frats in this college. And nobody, I mean, nobody, is going to believe that the frat's a cover for this Eyes Wide Shut cult that uses black goop bleeding from the eyes of the college's founder to turn them into misogynistic psychopaths. Maybe if they had some evidence, but that all literally went up in smoke when they burned the house down. They even broke the bust with the black goop. And this isn't even factoring in that the police (and campus security) have an established pattern of not believing women. So, with all that in mind, The. Sisters. Are. Fucked. No wonder Riley ends the film going from relishing literally smashing the patriarchy to getting horrified. It's like a reverse of the ending of Midsommar.

I could also mention the fact that they rely on jump scares too much, and that the fact that it's a PG-13 horror movie is a big red flag, but, at this point, that kind of goes without saying.

You know what, here's some recommendations:

• If you want to see a rape revenge movie that's actually good, try Ms. 45 or either of the versions of I Spit on Your Grave. All three are on Tubi.
  
• If you want a feminist story that's technically not horror, but still more horrifying than the vast majority of horror films these days, watch The Handmaid's Tale on Hulu.
  
• If you want a feminist horror movie, you can either try The Invisible Man (on HBO Max) or, if you're looking for something more brutal that still ends up wearing its feminist themes on its sleeve and succeeds as a work of art, try The Woman. It's not on any streaming service I could find, but, as hard as the first half is to watch, it still ends up redeeming itself with the ending.
  
• And, finally, if you want a movie called Black Christmas that actually manages to create a good balance of feminist themes and quality as a film, The original Black Christmas movie is a masterpiece, it's available on Tubi, and, frankly, it still worked better as a feminist horror movie than this version.
  
  

Also, don't expect the sort of constant Christmas theming I used last December. At this point, all that's left is a bunch of shit Italian films that aren't available to me and I made a rule of only doing movies in English for the project, an obscure (and short) early CGI Christmas movie, a compilation that's mostly just stock footage from better Disney movies, Santa with Muscles, and a National Lampoon's Vacation spinoff that I might be able to find if it was available anywhere. I'm definitely doing Santa with Muscles (unless Tubi decides to remove it), there's too little new content in the Disney one for me to bother watching it, and I might do the other two films if I can find them. Might.

That said, I think I can take on Jamie Kennedy's 2012 New Years Eve special on the 31st.

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

Last night I watched DUNE 2021 and loved it.

It covers perhaps 1/4 of the book at most. This is great. It will take four or five 2 hour films to cover all of the first book. I think the director is trying to produce a franchise. Part Two has been approved, with a planned release date of 2023.

The film grossed $331 million on a budget of $165 million. A respectable if not spectacular profit. Merchandising deals for games and other franchise products have also been made . I think they're hoping for the stellar success of the Star Wars merchandising.

[Angrboda]

Species.

They were playing the Species movies back-to-back, so I watched the beginning of the second to see how they set up the premise. I was somewhat amused, but also rather surprised to see Richard Belzer doing a quick cameo as President of the United States. I mean, seriously, Richard Belzer? President?

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

Species.

They were playing the Species movies back-to-back, so I watched the beginning of the second to see how they set up the premise.  I was somewhat amused, but also rather surprised to see Richard Belzer doing a quick cameo as President of the United States.  I mean, seriously, Richard Belzer?  President?

 
Love Species. Also Resident Evil. Also The fifth Element. 

To be honest I don't know how much of this  has to do with feisty female protagonists and how much to do with Natasha Henstridge   and Milla Jovovich.-----Have also always been attracted to characters played by Susan Sarandon and Sigourney Weaver.

Why no, none of those charcters

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Species.

They were playing the Species movies back-to-back, so I watched the beginning of the second to see how they set up the premise.  I was somewhat amused, but also rather surprised to see Richard Belzer doing a quick cameo as President of the United States.  I mean, seriously, Richard Belzer?  President?

If the last few years have taught us anything, it's that anyone - literally ANYONE - can be president.

Boru

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

'12 Angry Men' (the good one, with Henry Fonda). Great film, and a master class in how to introduce claustrophobia in an audience. 

Boru

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

Species.

They were playing the Species movies back-to-back, so I watched the beginning of the second to see how they set up the premise.  I was somewhat amused, but also rather surprised to see Richard Belzer doing a quick cameo as President of the United States.  I mean, seriously, Richard Belzer?  President?

If the last few years have taught us anything, it's that anyone - literally ANYONE - can be president.

Boru

 Do you think the last days of Ronald Reagan could have been a hint?

There was a skit from an American show at the time. They said "president Reagan ,who is not senile and never has been, said today"
 Sadly, Mrs Trump is no Nancy Reagan.