1: Funny Games
2: The Possession
3: Don't Look Now
4: High Tension
5: I Spit on Your Grave (1978)
6: Dead Snow
7: Don't be Afraid of the Dark (2010)
8: Audition
9: I Saw the Devil
10: Suspiria
11: Frankenstein and the Beast From Hell
12: The Wolfman (1941)
13: Session 9
14: The Corridor
15: 6 Souls
16: Grave Encounters
17: The Woman in Black
18: The Bad Seed
19: The Prophecy
20: Maniac (2012)
21: Stake Land
22: Blood for Dracula
23: Repulsion
24: Grave Encounters 2
25: The Conjuring
26: Night Watch
27: Mama
28: Pet Semetary
29: In The Mouth of Madness
30: The Fog (1980)
31: V/H/S/2
The Best of the Bunch
I Saw the Devil
I Saw The Devil was without a doubt the best movie I watched in this experience. Its a South Korea Revenge Thriller about a government agent whose fiance is killed. So he takes a week off from work, hunts the killer down and begins torturing him. The two quickly escalate things into a cat and cat game where they're both just trying to do as much damage as possible to the other and its fantastic. Some of you will even recognize the actors as the Government Agent was played by Byung-hun Lee of Red 2 and the G.I. Joe movies and the Serial Killer was played by Min-sik Choi who you might recognize as Oh Dae-su from Oldboy. I can't recommend this one enough and if you've got any interest in Revenge Thrillers, South Korean movies or even just really well done insanity then check it out. Its even on Netflix.Suspiria
This wasn't a movie it was a god damned experience. The sound and color in it were like almost nothing I've ever seen before. I'd love to see a good, high quality copy of it in a theater so that I can fully immerse myself in it instead of the sort of crappy You Tube rip I got to watch it on.Repulsion
Roman Polanski is one of my favorite directors but for some reason I've never seen him as a Horror director, despite all the evidence that piles up. This movie was dark and disturbing, not because of the rapes or the arms stretching out of the walls but because of just how mundane it was. This girl didn't go insane from some horrible trauma or dark incident. She was just ignored and shoved aside. She was unstable and when left to get own devices she decided to hang out with a dead rabbit and kill the only person that showed any real level of concern. And as we see in the news it happens fairly regularly. Some people need help and we just ignore them, going about our lives. And then they do something terrible.Maniac
Elijah Wood is creepy. Very, very creepy. And here he manages to improve on the original Maniac while spending almost no time on screen. See this version is shot almost entirely in first person. We're in the killers shoes at every turn, feeling his awkwardness with women, his inability to connect, his jealously and rage and his sickness. Its excellent.The Worst of the Bunch
Grave Encounters 2Now I normally look at Horror movies as films where you get to see characters making bad decisions. And that's fine as long as it makes some degree of sense why the character would do what they did. This movie should have been subtitled "What are you, a moron?" for how little sense its protagonist made. He's a film school student that comes to believe that the movie Grave Encounters actually happened. Which is pretty stupid, but then he hunts down the asylum it was supposedly filmed in, breaks in with his friends and camera equipment and decided to spend a night there himself filming it. You know, like the people that you think died doing just that. And I don't blame his friends for following. They were promised Film Credits and for film school students that's like offering crack rock to a junkie. But the lead? He's accepted murderous ghosts are real and then puts himself and his friends in their path. Its incredibly stupid.
High Tension
I know a few people who have a high opinion of this movie and I probably would too it it wasn't for one thing: the terrible twist ending at the end of the film. See at the end of the movie we find out that our Heroine has a split personality and that she's the one who killed everyone and kidnapped the other girl. And that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense given what we've seen. It also robs a lot of the previous scenes of their tension and kills rewatchability. The worst part is that without the twist we'd have had a highly effective slasher flick that incorporates a cement saw. Which is pretty cool!
Audition
This is another one that people seem to love and to that I ask: Why? The first three quarters of it is fairly dull and depressing and the final act is almost nonsensical peppered with horrifically disgusting imagery. Maybe I just don't get Takashi Miike. I'll freely admit that this isn't the first film of his that I've watched that I came out of thinking "What the hell was that?" I'd really like someone to tell me what is supposed to redeem this movie.
I really enjoyed doing this, even if I did have to scramble some to get to some movies that I haven't seen. Next year should be even more interesting.
