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Post by Calenture on May 14, 2008 8:42:47 GMT
I thought last night's A Real Friend was really excellent. Young Estrella isn't afraid of the dark because she has her friends to keep her company - friends like Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a seriously weird Nosferatu. The usual shadowy settings were mostly dropped in favour of gorgeously photographed sun-drenched Spanish locations, and Goya Toledo and Nerea Inchausti made attractive dual leads. The hackneyed vampire storyline that the TV magazines had me expecting never happened. After the film ended, I realised that young Estrella was even less in touch with reallity than I'd thought. Now this is my idea of 'brainy horror' - and I can't imagine many people feeling they'd been short-changed! P.S. Don't despair, Craig. I recorded it.
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Post by bradstevens on May 14, 2008 9:12:33 GMT
Interesting how many of the films in this series posit the family as a source of horror: violence tends to come about because of members of one's own family, or, in TO LET, as the result of attempts to perpetuate familial structures. This seems to be a recurring theme in recent Spanish fantasy cinema (it's there in PAN'S LABYRINTH as well), and is probably a reaction to the years during which Franco's government (in a manner typical of right-wing governments) defined the family as the source of all good.
Of course, America's horror cinema went through the same phase in the 70s, and it was nice to see A REAL FRIEND making such prominent use of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, one of the key works of American family horror.
Another theme that turns up more than once is the way fantasy cinema can be used as a guide or companion in the fight against real life horror: the zombie film in THE CHRISTMAS TALE provides the children with information on how to deal with a real zombie, the fantasy icons in A REAL FRIEND come to live to kill the girl's abusive father. In both cases, the world of fantasy is seen as a healthy alternative to an everyday reality which is either banal (THE CHRISTMAS TALE) or brutal (A REAL FRIEND), a theme explored, in a somewhat different form in SPECTRE, in which the women branded a witch turns out to be an abortionist who is murdered by the intolerant 'normal' villagers.
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Post by weirdmonger on May 14, 2008 15:37:13 GMT
I thought last night's A Real Friend was really excellent. (...) Now this is my idea of 'brainy horror' - and I can't imagine many people feeling they'd been short-changed! Yes, great brainy stuff. But not so good as TO LET which took my brain out and stamped on it. des
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Post by Johnlprobert on May 14, 2008 19:35:52 GMT
Just caught up with TO LET - frenetic, blood and rain-drenched atmospheric and marvellous, and to cap it all it starred Macarena Gomez from Stuart Gordon's DAGON.
I'm still working out A REAL FRIEND, but presumably it's the first purely psychological episode of the series?
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Post by Calenture on May 14, 2008 19:40:53 GMT
I'm still working out A REAL FRIEND, but presumably it's the first purely psychological episode of the series? A REAL FRIEND was only the second episode I saw, John. I didn't get the end at first, but when I woke up next day and looked at the beginning again, suddenly it made sense... Estrella's one hell of an imaginative girl.
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Post by bradstevens on May 26, 2008 16:39:32 GMT
FILMS TO KEEP YOU AWAKE ends tomorrow with Alex de la Iglesia's THE BABY'S ROOM. Advance reports suggest that the best may have been kept for last, since several people rate this as the series' finest hour.
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Post by Calenture on May 27, 2008 21:17:02 GMT
FILMS TO KEEP YOU AWAKE ends tomorrow with Alex de la Iglesia's THE BABY'S ROOM. Advance reports suggest that the best may have been kept for last, since several people rate this as the series' finest hour. Just a reminder that this will be starting at !0:30 on BBC4 THE BABY'S ROOM
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Post by bradstevens on May 27, 2008 22:49:37 GMT
THE BABY'S ROOM was absolute perfection. It reminded me of Robert Hamer's 'The Haunted Mirror' episode from DEAD OF NIGHT, with the alternate world viewed in the mirror/on the television screen providing an unrepressed glimpse of the tensions evident within the supposedly perfect marriage in the 'real' world.
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Post by Calenture on May 27, 2008 23:03:49 GMT
THE BABY'S ROOM was absolute perfection. It reminded me of Robert Hamer's 'The Haunted Mirror' episode from DEAD OF NIGHT, with the alternate world viewed in the mirror/on the television screen providing an unrepressed glimpse of the tensions evident within the supposedly perfect marriage in the 'real' world. One thing you didn't mention here, Brad. It was BLOODY SCARY!
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Post by weirdmonger on May 28, 2008 17:21:55 GMT
One thing you didn't mention here, Brad. It was BLOODY SCARY! It was a great film, not as great as TO LET. I have only just started 'The House of Leaves' by Mark Z. Danielewski, but parts of this novel and 'The Baby's Room' remind me of the other.
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Post by Johnlprobert on May 28, 2008 19:20:09 GMT
Brad I'm with you. I thought this was PERFECT. A combination of The Door from From Beyond the Grave, Nigel Kneale's ability to use physics to try and explain things but actually make them scarier, the 'corner of the retina' horrors of MR James and the graphic violence of Lucio Fulci
Perfect, perfect, perfect
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Post by Johnlprobert on Jun 18, 2008 18:43:32 GMT
I've only just caught up with Narciso Ibanez Serrador's contribution to this fine series. Did anyone else ever get to see 'Blame'? I thought it was quite unsettling & in keeping with the other movies
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