Sara Watches Stuff

When a movie is fairly universally regarded as terrifying, I become fixated on it. My fascination with horror as a genre has really hardened me to the notion of "scary", but Hereditary  was getting rave reviews and being called scary by all the people whose opinions result in critically acclaimed horror. I had to put on my cynical boots - a lot of these people also loved The VVitch , which I found very hit and miss, and the movie comes from the same producers. Still, my yearning to get to the bottom of what people consider to be a properly scary movie in the current day found an acceptable target.  With Hereditary , it's easy to see why people were so enraptured. It's a thrilling experience. For a relatively new filmmaker on the mainstream scene, Ari Aster has created a very tightly directed and composed movie. It follows a family after the death of Toni Collette's character's mother, through varying places of grief and understanding of the complexities...

I wrote fairly recently about my favourite horror movies and my twisted love affair with the Saw  franchise. When the movies were still getting released, I never got the chance to share in the Halloween tradition of horror releases, because no one else I knew cared at all. And so at 9:30pm on Halloween this year, I donned a bunch of fake blood and some hastily drawn jigsaw pieces and watched a new goddamn   Saw movie. Upfront and honest: Jigsaw  is not a good movie. It does not stand alone, and you will not enjoy it if you do not enjoy the movies as a whole. There was an obvious attempt made at creating an independent piece that stood apart from the seven films prior but still tied into the mythos, and while the game plan is clear, I wouldn't call it successful because it doesn't really make sense when viewed as a part of the series as a whole. As a reboot, it's just average; as a sequel (an octquel?) it's sub-par.  Jigsaw  is obsessed with creating a ...

The world is pretty hard on for clown movies, right? I remember how excited people were  getting for this on horror websites back when Eli Roth's involvement was announced, and then I swear I didn't hear a single thing about it until it popped up on to my Netflix feed recently. I think it only really released to VOD last year, to add to all of the clown movies the world can't get enough of. Man - so many clown horror movies. I know clowns are freaky, but they're not that freaky. Clown is about a Normal Horror Movie Dad who finds a clown costume for his son's birthday party and then finds himself unable to take it off but rather possessed by the demon of the costume that has a specific hunger for children.  I wish I had something interesting to say about this movie, but it was pretty generic. Peter Stormare was a bright spot as someone who had gone through the demon clown experience before, because he's never afraid to ham it up. Other than that, I found th...

Now, I've seen my fair share of Stephen King adaptations. As far as they go, this isn't quite Kubrick's The Shining in terms of cinematography, and it isn't half as terrifying as 1408 (that movie is sincerely underrated in the scare stakes). It does what the most successful of King's short story adaptations do, which is emphasizing the small scale and focusing on the psychological rather than trying to create spooky specters - a matter of preference, of course.  Gerald's Game is all about a woman torturing herself. Well: it's about a couple whose misguided foray into bondage is derailed by the man's heart attack, leaving his wife handcuffed to the bed with no escape route in sight. Jessie, the woman in question, is played by Carla Gugino, and her portrayal of the character's withdrawal from reality is easily what makes this movie worth watching. You get hooked in with the "this could really happen" 127 Hours type premise, but you stay f...

October horror madness continues with something from 2013. Ah, 2013. The year I graduated, and the height of the unnecessarily 3D movie. Texas Chainsaw 3D is the epitome of that redundancy - there is literally no reason for this movie to be in 3D. There is some blood that flies and at one point someone throws a chainsaw. That's the quality of 3D movie we were pumping out in 2013. For all its flaws, I love the original 1974 Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It's a great example of the Big Fucked Up Family movie. For some reason, I was under the impression that this Alexandra Daddario led movie was the remake, rather than a direct sequel. If you ignore the fact that none of it makes sense temporally, it's a pretty interesting way of doing the usual "same idea but this time 3D" sequel. Daddario plays Heather, who as a baby was taken from the Sawyer household as the town's citizens set upon them in vengeance for their penchant for murder (Leatherface, most notoriously)...

I know I've mentioned before my personal affinity for Big Fucked Up Family Movies, but I hate how often they neglect the exploration of the actual family dynamics and instead try to pile shock on shock. It's very much Alexandre Aja's modus operandi - he directed this remake along with 2003's  High Tension  - as he seems to thrive on creating movies that push the limits of "too far", but does so with choices that are often hard to track. As a big horror fan, I like to see people in movies get confronted with impossible situations. I want characters' limits tested. Aja's take on Wes Craven's 1977 movie follows the same story, where a family traveling through the desert find themselves stranded and under attack from a family of (sigh) mutant cannibals. I haven't seen Craven's movie, though it is generally agreed that the remake is superior; my issues with this movie come more from the carnival of horrors way the antagonists are deployed, not...

Sometimes I watch a movie and a joke is made in the first few minutes that lets me know that there's going to be a sense of humour present that will just not gel with me. In this particular Netflix original, it was probably the excess of jokes about "taking it out the butt" and calling the main character a pussy. For all of the times when we might not agree about what "funny" is, there are flashes of something special in The Babysitter . It makes the other stuff even worse. Oh, horror comedy, you tricky little nut of a genre. The Babysitter  follows a kid as he learns that his super hot babysitter is also a super devout devil worshipper who might be sacrificing people after he's gone to bed. Fun plot, generally well executed. Samara Weaving is great as the titular babysitter, and the teenage actors are remarkably un-painful. In fact, once the movie gets over how great it thinks it is, it ends up being pretty good.  I've mentioned that I like my horro...

Let's Be Evil is the cinematographic embodiment of a downward spiral. I was lured in by interesting visuals and then everything from there was a mess. But while I'm on a horror movie review kick for October, let's nut this one out! The premise deserves credit for trying to use creepy kids in a different way. A top secret operation employs three cash hungry twenty somethings to be caretakers for a bunch of genius kids in an augmented reality brain training facility, but complications unsurprisingly result in a plot that is focused on trying to look cool and be different rather than tell a human story.  The major issue I had with Let's Be Evil was that so much of the plot and the character emotions are told through outright dialogue, rather than shown through action. It’s stuff that your screenwriting teacher would have rolled their eyes at - characters straight up saying “It’s a puzzle. Like that one from earlier.” Give your audience some credit. The visual medium ...

Happy Friday the 13th! Apparently people talk about horror movies in October? It's about Halloween, right? I'm Australian, and I'm honestly unfamiliar with the whole tradition. We aren't big on Halloween. We do like binge drinking and ignoring our deep systemic issues, so that's kind of the same thing.  What I am a big fan of is the horror genre. It started with my fascination and terror over The Ring , which I was first exposed to through its parody in Scary Movie 3 at a sleepover when I was much too young. All the while an avid reader of the Goosebumps books, this visual embodiment of fear was something new to me, and something I found absolutely petrifying. The idea of a ghost girl climbing out of the VCR had me sleepless for weeks. I hid my scariest Goosebumps books in boxes buried under clothes in the back of my wardrobe so that whatever monsters might ostensibly climb out would at least have to battle through a few layers of cotton. At some point, my fixati...

I'm pretty sure everyone who watched the trailer for this movie got the gist of the plot: it's Groundhog Day , but with murder. Of course, our lead - played by the film's absolute standout actor, Jessica Rothe - has never seen Groundhog Day  and has apparently never heard of it, because it takes her an absurdly long time to try to be a better person. Instead, she spends a long time trying to solve her own murder by a weird person in a creepy baby mask. So her own murder happens again and again and again. Happy Death Day  definitely has flashes of greatness. As a murder mystery, it is far more effective than as a horror movie. You really want to know whodunnit. They really do set up everyone as a suspect, and they do so in a way that actually kept me guessing. I kept reading real answers as red herrings and misleads as the real deal. The final resolve ended up being quite disappointing, but I think that's because as a movie lover, I kept wanting the killer to be bigger...

I get recommended a lot of terrible, terrible horror movies, so I've learned to take any recommendations from the internet with a grain of salt. I had absolutely no idea what to expect from the relatively small film, Spring . It was directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Scott Moorhead, and while I own Resolution on DVD, I've never actually watched it? How did it get there? Is it any good? I should probably watch Resolution , right? I should definitely watch Resolution , because if Spring is any proof of what Benson and Moorhead can do together, they're a great team. I was actually shocked that this was recommended to me on horror forums, because it's such a non-horror movie. I'd actually call Spring a romance first a foremost, with monster movie leanings. Think Colossal , but less sophisticated and about love instead of people systemically destroying each other , and really the only similarity is the monster thing. Apparently I just like monster movies that are di...

Needle is an Australian horror movie inexplicably set in America, wherein half of the characters have terrible fake American accents and the other half are just explained away as Australian expats or exchange students. It’s fine, guys. You can actually set a movie in Australia. It’s really important that it’s set in America, for some reason.  I mean, it’s probably more important that I tell you what this movie’s plot is: fake-American college boy inherits a wacky mysterious machine from his father, which ends up getting stolen and is subsequently used to torture everyone he cares about. Say, a slasher film if Michael Myers was never actually there and just killed everyone with voodoo dolls.  Nothing new or unique, but it does offer up some cool potential - the second kill (or third, if you include the opening sequence) is some great, over the top splatter fare and was probably my favourite sequence in the movie, if I’m honest. Other than that, and the whole discussion I’m...

I never wrote a review for Friend Request when it released in Europe in 2016, mostly because it was one of the most thoroughly underwhelming, by-the-numbers, ill-produced pieces of horror garbage I'd watched in a while. It wasn't the kind of bad that was fun to write about: it was just an indistinct blob of horror on a screen.  Pre-Halloween seems to be the prime time for those indistinct blobs of horror that the film industry has been saving away. Got a movie saved up that wrapped filming in 2014 and released in Europe in 2016 but hasn't technically had its money-making potential squeezed out of it? Go for it. The US release reminded me that I should probably get some thoughts written down, however brief and aggravated. I can't tell you much about the plot of Friend Request because I remember watching it and having all of the details dissolve from my mind almost immediately. It's a fitting review to follow the conceptually bloated and allegorically confused...

After a brief flirtation with serious pop cultural critique, I'm back to reviewing the horror movie rubbish that no one else has seen (and for good reason). What better way to settle into that niche than to watch one of the many hundreds of Saw copycats on the market? It's my own personal white noise. Saw itself is one of the most problematic and ideologically iffy film franchises around with one of the best first movies, and I'm unapologetically hyped for the next movie to come out. The ripoffs, however, are...something.  In my time watching blatant Saw ripoffs, I have seen some utter garbage. Even I, the most dedicated terrible movie watcher, could not sit through the monotony and bad acting of 2011's Vile . I struggled through 2006 Thai thriller 13 Beloved , even when it made me near gag, or 2014's Circle , even though I nearly fell asleep . Over time, I've enjoyed the occasional movie in this specific set up: I didn't mind the divisive Would You Ra...

Even after watched this movie, I find it hard to believe that it is a movie that managed to get released in 2017. If you like your horror generic and driven by two sentence horror stories from old reddit threads  and you're really into Nazi plotlines, I guess, then this is a hoot. The problem is that this is a whole movie built around one scary shot - a scary shot that has been explored before, and that is shown in the trailer - and it spends the rest of the run time not knowing what to do with itself. Nearly half an hour of this movie from the beginning set up a backstory, wherein an overprotective father (did I mention he's a NAZI?) tries too hard to keep his daughter sheltered. It is the kind of thing that overexplains and leaves no ambiguity for the audience, so that when the modern day characters are undergoing spooky happenings, we all immediately know about the Nazis and the daughter and the history that the characters are exploring. Speaking of characters, it's ge...

When Julia Ducournau's Raw   was first released, it gathered a lot of hype thanks to its reputation in regards visceral imagery and pretty confronting cannibalism story. I was worried that I would watch it and be let down, because reviews seemed generally positive and I'm always here for horror tinged plots driven by female directors and female protagonists. On finally watching Raw , I can tell you that it is barely a horror movie and barely a cannibalism movie at all: it is a thinly veiled allegory for burgeoning sexuality alongside themes of sisterhood and coming of age, all wrapped in the skin of cannibal tropes past. I loved it.  The story of Raw is not anything revolutionary. Someone (in this case, a first year vegetarian veterinary student named Justine played by Garance Marillier) gets forced to eat meat, and develops a taste for human flesh. There is nothing subtle in the way it is told - Justine's cravings for meat evoke a sexual awakening and echo her transfo...

2009′s  The Stepfather  is a remake of the 1987 thriller with Terry O’Quinn (Locke-from-Lost) with both focusing on a serial killer whose MO is worming his way into the lives of single mothers before going on to the serial killing thing. It’s a real long play.  It’s pretty clean when it comes to scares and kills, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but coupled with the smattering of overacting and the heavy passing back and forth of the idiot ball and the whole thing stands true to the reputation of PG-13 horror.  For all of its cheesiness, it does boast a surprisingly recognisable cast (Penn Badgley and Amber Heard as highschoolers, the latter constantly in a bikini which is both sleazy and so pleasing to my little queer heart; Dylan Walsh as the serial-killing-step-father and Sela Ward from my sneaky CSI days as his current target) and the cat and mouse game is quite a fun ride, but it never truly escapes or even embraces the stupidity of decisions made or the ...

The Rezort  is…Most Dangerous Game, but people pay to hunt virus induced zombies on the island rather than still-breathing humans, and it does that plotline decently.  The acting is not going to win any awards and the exposition throughout the movie is clunky as all hell, and my god, there is a lot of it. I did, however, enjoy the ways they tried to integrate exposition to break the monotony, despite not having a lot of success. I liked some of the ideas that were touched on, but felt that the best ideas - mainly linked to HUMANS BEING THE REAL MONSTER (you may notice a theme of that being one of my favourite horror tropes) - were not given enough care and were barely explored. Zombie style movies are so ripe for exploration of ideas - look at 28 Days Later , for example  - that it just felt even more lazy than usual. If you have the ideas, at least express them. Don't just mention them and then act like you've done your job. If you want to invoke some kind of social c...

I decided to finally watch this movie, the trailer of which gave me nightmares when I was in year six because I was a baby (come on - the whole “have you checked the children?” thing put me on edge when babysitting for years).  It’s an adaptation of the film of the same name from 1979, where a girl is babysitting and starts getting calls from the titular stranger, and things get more threatening from there. This movie is like a straight up time capsule to the early-mid 2000s and my entire childhood: there are boot cut jeans and Motorola flip phones and getting in trouble for going over your minutes. It's only been a bit over ten years and already it feels uncomfortably dated. Already bracing my face for cringing, it didn’t help that the acting was similarly grating - atrocious at times, at best it is bearable. The plot plods along pretty predictably, and I remember the big twist being spoiled by the trailer of the time (the big wham line was one I actually remembered as soon as ...

I’m not going to pretend that this is a good movie.  In fact, it’s garbage. It’s derivative, predictable, poorly performed, ill thought out and bland. It lacks self-awareness and creativity and instead draws entirely from the canon of better movies that came before.  Our evil entity is called the Bye Bye Man, for fuck’s sake, but if you think about him or speak his name, the concept gains strength and takes over your mind. Our three sprightly college students learn this after moving to a new house and discovering the legend hidden on a nightstand. Scary things happen, but they’re just in people’s heads! Time passes strangely - almost as strangely as the accents that characters slip in and out of! The Bye Bye guy appears in shadows and reflections with scare chords, accompanied by some weird spectral hound! No one has any character development or backstory whatsoever! The lighting is truly atrocious and I spent half the movie wondering what was actually happening on screen...