Hellraiser

A while back, I watched all the Hellraiser movies. But now there’s another one! So I have to watch it.

It’s gotten middling reviews, but that’s a lot better than most Hellraiser movies, so…

As everybody knows, they have a very limited colour palette in Serbia.

But now we’re back in the US and they have colour there.

It’s a new configuation!

Tee hee

Then they forgot the colours again, and they’re not even in Serbia.

But … this is like so much better than every Hellraiser movie since the second one, there’s no competition. It’s like a real movie, you know? Good actors, professional cinematography, an apparently intriguing plot that is slowly revealing itself…

I’m sure once everything is clearer, it’s gonna turn out to be really stupid, but so far, it’s really good. Like an old fashioned horror movie.

Uh-oh.

This is still good, but the one mis-step so far is…

the design of the Cenobites. I think they wanted to take it a step further — in the original movies, it was people in leather with some S&M stuff. This time around, they seem to go with flesh sculpting? Which just takes it from “eww!! scary!” to “eh? is that CGI or is it latex?”

The colour grading on this movie is just… excessive.

OK, it was kinda grisly towards the end, but at least it wasn’t torture porn.

That was… kinda good? It could definitely have been more scary, but it was creepy enough. And they managed to make excellent use of what little Hellraiser “mythos” there is — it was definitely the most well-developed movie in that dept of them all.

So… Good job. That’s not an easy thing to do, as all the previous sequels show. It’s not without problems — it doesn’t really feel too long, but it could have been snappier? And the colour grading could have been less boring? But… If I’m rating this on a Hellraiser scale, I have to give this a:

Hellraiser. David Bruckner. 2022. ⚄

Qaqqat alanngui

Five years ago (oo, it feels a lot longer ago…), I had a blogging project where I attempted to watch one movie (and make one cocktail) from every country on Earth. (So that’s about 200.) For Greenland, I wanted to watch this movie, but ended up with Inuk instead. And the reason was that it was only available on Greenland — and nobody there wanted to sell it to me — and in the Greenland embassy in Denmark (and the guy who was going to buy it for me forgot to when he was over there).

But today! I got this in the mail! Thank you, Adam! (Along with another movie by the same director.)

So now I’m watching it.

This is very pretty. The actors are obviously not professional, but they’re doing a good job.

Oh! I’d forgotten that this is a horror movie! That was a scary scene.

It started off like a serious, social drama kind of movie, so the sheer surprise of suddenly turning into something else was a lot of fun.

The guy playing Piitaq is good.

Immer dabei.

They’ve got the classic slasher cast of protagonists — the smart girl, the nerdy guy, the goofy guy, the jock, the doomsaying girl…

So I guess the final girl is The Final Girl?

NOOO DON”T PEE ON THE SACRED ANCIENT BURIAL GROUND

And: That’s some splashing.

I think they’re aiming for “day for night” here but didn’t quite know how to do it? They’ve basically just turned the contrast and saturation way down, so it doesn’t look… it doesn’t look like anything.

I quite liked the pacing for the first half of the movie — things moved slowly, but it made sense in a way: We got to know the characters and it was building tension. But now that we’re in the horror part of the movie, it just drags. It should have a sense of urgency, but instead it’s just… very… slow…

So many scenes like this that are like they just didn’t want to miss a single frame of footage when editing. Or did they switch genres? Suddenly now it’s a comedy horror movie?

I think the first hour of this was fine, but after that, it just dragged. I mean, really.

But there’s a lot here that I liked anyway. Good cinematography, and the editing was swell in some scenes, some good performances and some nice plot twists.

Not much of an imdb score, but:

51 people really, really liked it!

(I don’t know how many of those appeared in the film.)

There’s lots of extras on the blu ray, but they’re not subtitled, so…

Qaqqat alanngui. Malik Kleist. 2011. ⚂

Horse Girl

I watched Baena’s Spin Me Round yesterday, at it was awesome, so I ordered all his films on bluray — except this one, which is Netflix only. So I’m watching that now.

So this has basically all the same actors as Spin Me Round? I like that.

But what is this? Spin Me Etc was a sarcastic look at Olive Garden and rom coms… is this a sarcastic take on horror movies?

That’s the guy from Search Party?

Molly Shandon is awesome.

I’m still not sure what this movie is — the protagonist is working at er like Yarn Barn, but a parody one, and everything is like wha and amusing — but is this going to be like a serious thriller / sci fi thing? I was expecting more funny and less strange.

But with shots like this…

I still don’t know what to make of this! Just when I think it’s a parody of a horror movie (see above), the next scene is apparently played straight. But perhaps I’m missing what Baena’s being sarcastic about.

I’m really enjoying this superpositioned feeling of is it/isn’t it?

OK, this is just so sarcastic.

But then it turns out that he thought they were kidding around and then he’s shocked to find out that she’s serious!

THIS IS SO COMPLIMACATED

Even just the wig…

Well, this was a lot of fun. If I’m to make a guess, I think the director saw Serial Mom obsessively as a teenager and then decided to model his film career on distilling the snark from that movie into everything he does… So it’s beyond meta and back into sincere and then past that again.

So what did the critics make of this?