Horror trip (original) (raw)
footpad vengeful
October 23 2012, 00:21
My journey back to Switzerland is heavily delayed because some abject little scrote thought it would be a good idea to throw stones at the train, breaking a window. Impressively enough, the Deutsche Bahn managed to get the window replaced in less than an hour, but the delay to my journey is much longer because I was on the last clean connection through to my home in Switzerland.
Unfortunately, the abject little scrote didn't have the common decency to autodarwinate themselves by, say, throwing the stones from directly in front of the train while it was doing 300 km/h. I should probably be ashamed to express such disregard for human life, but let's be honest about it: I'd settle for an even longer delay if I knew it meant that the little shits had had their little shitty entrails distributed over three quarters of a mile of ICE track, mercifully curtailing what will otherwise presumably be lives lived solely to the detriment of all decent human beings.
I don't usually care much for horror movies, but tonight they perfectly suit my mood. I wonder why that is.
Let The Right One In (2008):
A chilling yet oddly gentle tale of the selflessness of the first stirrings of sexual attraction, and of how the bonds of love can come to override even the most fundamental quandaries of good and evil. Even when its subjects are at their most inhuman, Let The Right One In remains a deeply humane film, with deep and complex characters who always remain believable, even up to their final, deadly choices.
Five elegantly blood-splattered snowdrifts out of five.
Drag Me To Hell (2009):
I'm a primate. I have a lot of complex emotional and endocrine reflexes. One of these is that, if you unexpectedly show me an image that resembles the face of an angry or terrified primate, or an attacking predator, then I'll get a fright reaction. If you play a roar or a scream then that'll frighten me too. I assume this is an evolved response to stimuli which, in the wild, would presage an immediate and desperate fight for survival—a fight which I'd be a bit more likely to survive if I was kick-started by a hefty jolt of adrenaline.
Film-makers, of course, can exploit this reflex gratuitously to increase the emotional impact of their films. Unfortunately, if the film has no other meat to sustain it, then it swiftly becomes meaningless and catatonically boring. Drag Me To Hell has nice production values, I'll give it that, but otherwise it's vapid meaningless pap.
One and a half staples to the forehead out of five.
It's quite impressive how two films can fall under the same genre, and both be very well regarded by a broad selection of reviewers, yet one can be wonderful and insightful while the other, in your reviewer's humble opinion, is meaningless crap that does absolutely nothing but pander to evolutionarily ingrained panic reflexes. If you're into that kind of crap, go ride a rollercoaster—equally gratuitous thrills, but with the added benefit of healthy fresh air.