Sunday, May 17, 2009

Lars Von Triers Antichrist

It's preview time y'all. This time, I've got no long list of upcomming horror movies, although I probably could make one. No, I pretty much only have one movie to talk about, and boy, I must say I am pretty psyched about this 'un.

The movie in question is Lars Von Trier's latest project, Antichrist. When it comes to the title, it's a bit of a turnoff, since the title conjures Omen-ripoff imagery in my cliche-addled brain. Luckily, my pessimism was yet again proven wrong. Antichrist is the story of two people going to a cabin in the woods to try to patch up their relationship, and then things start going bad for them. Exactly how is a bit vague from the trailer and released material, but that's good. After all, nothing is more annoying than a movie that is more or less entirely given away in the trailer.

Well, for my take on Antichrist, one thing that struck me was that on the films imdb page, there's only credited two actors. That is, I must say, even more extreme than the character-conservative The Strangers, an underrated gem in my opinion, which is rather impressive. Well, I enjoyed the extreme focus on a pair of people, so that's a good start. As far as the religious horror elements go, well, I don't really think there's Fire-And-Brimstone Satan involved. Sure, some Old Scratch-like evil presence is probably out there, it might even be some sort of "old druidic evil"-thing, I dunno. I won't speculate too much, Von Trier has surprised me before, and probably will again.

Trailer:


So, since my fingers are still a bit twitchy, I'll just gush a bit about the director. Lars Von Trier is, in short, awesome, easily the biggest filmmaking artist in Scandinavia. The first I saw of him was bits and pieces of Dogville, but it wasn't untill I saw Riget. For the uninitiated, Riget is like a mix between E.R. and Twin Peaks, and it incidentally has one of the best theme songs out there. There even is a nice little dance to it. The show is kind of short, but then again, so was Doctor Horrible's Sing Along Blog, and it does not overstay its welcome. In fact, it kinda leaves you wanting more, which is a good thing for a show, agonizing as it might be for fans, such as yours truly.

Another thing that defines Von Trier is that he has balls of steel. Or rather, courage and determination by the buckets, as I am completely in the dark about his actual testicles. Weird asides aside, Von Trier does things most other filmmakers wouldn't even think of. Make a movie with only a black stage with white house outlines? He did it. Challenge another filmmaker to make his most famous short film again five times under different conditions? Sure. Make a 11 million dollar movie with a grand total of two credited actors? Check. I mean, the guy practically oozes breaths of fresh air.

Well, that's pretty much it. The Too Long, Didn't Read version: I'm excited for Antichrist and Lars Von Trier in general.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Movie horror: The internet strikes back

My my, these entries are growing rather rare, I'd hate to disapoint my loyal fans, hehe. Anyway, I recently found out that the internet is a very scary place. Surprisingly enough, this is not a result of visiting various for now unnamed message boards, but rather an honest-to-Bob attempt to scare and/or freak internet users out.

As an introduction, fans of H.P. Lovecraft have many times encountered unnamable abomination and reality-wrapping madness, however, most film mediums have so far failed to portray these abominations of existance, until now. Without further ado, welcome to the Mindfuck:



This Earthbound/McDonalds-mashup is nightmarish to say the very least, much thanks to very basic appliance of basic video manipulation tricks, seriously, I've used webcams that can do much of that job automatically. Still, it's very effective, mostly because it, like most clowns and clown-related things, make little to no sense and seem to not be bothered by it. In fact, the good Sir McDonald makes it appear that he quite enjoys it.

The nightmarish mindfuck that is the video kinda feels like an alternate battle background for the final boss in Earthbound, which is apropriate given the actual music being used for parts of the fight and on the account that it's hard to grasp the nature of McDonalds moves, if you pardon the reference.

The complete breakdown of any kind of established logic isn't nearly as common in horror as it should be. Sure, standard interpretation of the basic elements of reality ain't half bad, but if you really want to mess people up, going all Un Chien Andalou isn't half bad a choice.

Alternatively, fire up another jump scare, people probably aren't tired of those yet.