Ahira's Hangar

Saving Private Ryan has verisimilitude in spades. There is a sense of immediacy and intensity in the depiction of battle that has not been achieved in any other war movie I've seen. It's not just the Normandy sequence that conveys the war so well, but the smaller scale fights too.

I was surfing channels late last night and happened to catch most of Silent Hill, a movie adapted from a video game (which I have not played). It does have gore and violence, but not to an extreme degree. I give it credit for trying to present a haunting story rather than just a bloodbath. Some of the images are fairly disturbing. For a horror flick, you could do a lot worse than Silent Hill. It doesn't surpass any of the films I listed in my earlier post here, but it's still worth a viewing.

I've always loved Clive Barker's Nightbreed. It makes it even better if you know about the conflict between the Cenobites as representatives of ultimate order, (although they don't appear in the film) and the Breed as representations of natural chaos.

--A

Having caught a couple of the SAW movies on late night TV, I think it's fair to say that the Saw series may be the most gruesome mainstream horror flicks ever made. For the amount and variety of appalling things done to the human body, Saw surely has set a new standard in cinema - or reached a new low, depending your point of view. I could be wrong, as I'm not a horror film aficionado, but I don't think I'm that far off.

I say all that with a certain degree of admiration for the Saw films, as examples of brilliant filmmaking. Horrific though they are, the Saw movies possess an intelligence that I respect. And I can't deny that the films are gripping to watch, despite the graphic violence. You become emotionally invested in the characters. I don't think I would call the Saw films a "favorite," because I'm really not that eager to buy them and watch them again. But they were worth my time.

The movie that gave me the most memorable creepy sensation is a B-movie I saw on TV, years and years ago, called "Mr. Sardonicus."

I think the last horror movie I saw was "Zombie". Or "The Fog". Yes, it's been that long....

I think my all-time favorite creeped-out-by movie would have to be The Exorcist III. I've always been a fan of George C. Scott (I also enjoyed the HBO ghost story The Changeling, which he starred in). Plus, Brad Dourif did an excellent job of playing a demon.

dw

Dukkha!

To this day, I have not seen Exorcist III. I'd only be willing to watch it if I caught it on TV, but it rarely gets aired compared to the other two films.

Exorcist II: The Heretic we all love to hate, of course. It's a train wreck of a movie, though I will say that seeing it first as an impressionable kid, some of its imagery did freak me out. Anyway, I'm convinced that its director, John Boorman, is one of the most overrated filmmakers around. In my opinion, his only truly good-bordering-on-great film was Deliverance - which, in its way, just happens to be creepier and more disturbing than almost any horror film.

The original Exorcist remains one of the greatest horror films I've ever seen. It has a very unsettling quality. And it has nothing to do with whether or not I believe in the Devil; this movie simply knows how to press the "Scare" button.

Deliverance did rock.

--A

I can just picture you as the Burt Reynolds character, Av. Outdoorsy survivalist type, heh.

Watched In the Mouth of Madness again, while in the hospital, fairly funky, compared to movies nowadays-but it still holds up pretty well. Need to re-watch The Serpent and the Rainbow...