Back at it again with my bullshit!

A Reminder of The Plan:

#35-#21 Best Horror Films of the Decade

According to this list

(bolded = watched this week, * = favorite)

• It Follows (2014)
• Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010)*
• Guilty of Romance (2011)
• Upgrade (2018)
• 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)
• Bone Tomahawk (2015)
• Tumbbad (2018)
• Good Manners (2017)
• Annihilation (2018)
• Shin Godzilla (2016)
• Kotoko (2011)
• Raw (2016)
• A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
• November (2017)
• Climax (2018)

Thankfully, there are a couple of films on here that I’ve legitimately been meaning to watch. And, since I pushed back the publish date for week 1, that means this one will go up on… Christmas Eve? Fuck. If you’re reading this, you know when this was published but I really didn’t think this through. Anyway-

Unofficial Musings

Apparently, I’ve now seen 2/3 of the movies in Sion Sono’s “Hate” trilogy, since I watched Cold Fish (2010) last week and watched Guilty of Romance (2011) this week. All that I have left is Love Exposure, which, since it came out in 2008 will not be featured on this list. Completionist that I am, I’m probably gonna watch it at some point.

Upgrade (2018) has almost the exact same plot as Mandy (2018) that I saw last week. This time, however, instead of being every stoner boy’s wet dream (a la Mandy), Upgrade is every techie’s wet dream: guy watches his wife be killed in front of him, is paralyzed, with new experimental technology regains use of his limbs, plus nearly supernatural powers, and exacts revenge on the guys who jumped him. I’ll level with you: Upgrade isn’t that bad. It’s just not a horror movie. It’s an action movie. I don’t want to split hairs about what does and doesn’t count as horror, but this definitely doesn’t.

Which is kinda how I also feel about Bone Tomahawk (2015). Not only is the movie pretty racist (“this savage tribe of natives kidnapped my wife and plan to eat her!”), it’s also just a Western. The last 30 minutes or so push it into “horror” territory, but considering the movie is over two hours long, is that enough to count it as “horror”? Personally, I don’t think so. Plus, it’s just dumb. Like, so dumb.

I tried. Really, I did. But Kotoko (2011) is literally impossible to find in the US. It wasn’t available to stream. It wasn’t available to rent. My only option would be to purchase a DVD copy, and I refuse to play into their game. So I guess I have to disqualify this one? Which is probably for the best, since this one is supposed to feature some pretty graphic self harm scenes and that’s one of my only hard limits.

I also really tried to like November (2017). I wanted to be all cool and be like, “yeah, one of my favorite movies is this black and white Estonian film, you’ve probably never heard of it. It personifies the plague and the devil and farmers build self-aware automatons to perform basic tasks for them”. But it was just. So. Boring. There’s, a love triangle, I guess? I really could not call this horror, even with the plague woman and the devil and the witches in the woods. It read so much more clearly as a period drama to me, with some magical realism tossed in.

~ If you’re curious about one of the movies I didn’t talk about (or if you’re interested in one of the movies I’d already seen before, reach out to me! Just because I didn’t write about it doesn’t mean I don’t have thoughts about it ~