as if to prove that netflix is for homebody losers, the local hipster video store has been offering free beer on tuesdays. and wandering around, being indecisive about movies was already one of my favorite pastimes…
because the new takeshi miike movie the great yokai war was checked out, i settled for renting the pang brothers’ re-cycle and another johnny motard recommendation shallow ground’.
"that has to be a bad translation" my girlfriend said of the title for re-cycle. after watching it for twenty minutes or so, it dawned on us that this horror movie was actually about recycling.
although horror might be an unfair category. i think the pang brothers have the same problem that stephen king does, where they can’t write a straight up fantasy in a mind-bending alternate world without it being marketed as ‘spine tingling terror.’ although admittedly there were a lot of zombies. and admittedly my girlfriend jumped up and slapped me for touching her during a particularly tense "what’s going to jump out now" sequence (don’t tell her, but i was actually trying to hug her to comfort myself in my girly terror).
maybe i’m getting old, but i’ve been actually scared by some horror movies recently. even an american super-low budget film like shallow ground. john assured me it wasn’t a slasher film, which i think are the most boring pieces of crap you can imagine. when they have to use gingerbread men and snowmen as their villians, you know that the genre is scraping the bottom of the creative barrel. john was right, it wasn’t a slasher film, although you could almost say it was a slasher film imbedded in a much better japanese horror film that just happened to have an american production. i was prepared for the naked, blood covered boy that walked out of the woods at the beginning of the film, but when the boy was handcuffed to the stove in the remote sheriff’s cabin, that’s when i got the sort of discomforted feeling one get’s when the horror movie is breaking the rules. there were times while watching this that i had to sit as far back from my laptop as the headphones would allow.
