Sunday, May 13, 2012

The Weekends

I've been so busy when I had free time I slept. I slept through a lot of horror movies I wanted to see. And I wasted a lot of time.

I ended up reading Phantom of the Opera. Despite it's reputation, it's a gothic romance drama. The horror element is lacking because the horror befalling Christine is relayed to Raoul by Christine in essentially six paragraphs. It's still a good read which led me to watch a movie version of it?

Which version did I watch? Maybe the classic with Lon Chaney Sr. Peerhaps the version with Claude Rains. Nope. I chose Dario freaking Argenta's version. I like Julian Sands. Anyway the version was very different. And badly done. A lot of the things he changed around, I could have handled, but certain things were messed up.

Spoil Alert:

It especially got jumbled at the end. Like the rat catcher playing a bigger part, okay. But the rat catcher (suckish actor here) in a time of horse drawn carriages made a *coughmagicalcough* rat catching/killing car. He crashes and is knocked unconscious.

Wandering around, he is attracted to the phantom's house by Christine's (it feels wrong to call her character portrayal slutty in this context, by she kind of was before) screams of 'No No No Stop' or rape. After Christine escapes (because the phantom is into rat bestiality) she goes to Raoul and makes him promise to protect her from Erik (the phantom's name in the book, I'm not sure if was actually called that here).

So somehow the rat catcher stumbles on stage during Christine's performance and accuses her of being a murderers whore. First , how could he no see it as rape? Second, he hadn't any proof that Erik killed any one. The one body in plain sight wasn't exactly a conventional killing. It could be taken as an accident.

Next, Erik obviously kidnaps her. While kidnapped she bashes him in the head and immediately apologizes and professes her love of him. Raoul manages to find them, to which Erik and him agree that if they stay, the police will kill Christine. Okay. . .

Christine and Raoul escape into a boat, but Erik stays behind to buy them time. While Erik does nothing provacative, all policemen aim to kill, forcing him to defend himself. He dies, Christine cries.

Fin.

Anyway speaking of Italy, I watched an Italian version of Turn of the Screw, called Whispers in the Dark.
The basic plot of a rich family has a ghost that is staying attached to the world through the children. The rest of the movie differs. The main differences are the parents are with the children. The ghost is the deceased brother of the children. The trouble starts when after a few malicious pranks and bad luck befalls the house, the parents decides their son Marco is too old for his imaginary friend.

It was a pretty good movie, but the ending got to me, because they made it seem like it was over, but then it wasn't.

I also watched Vacancy and The Gift. Vacancy is an awesome slasher-ish movie because of a build up of suspense. It showed well a high pressure situation, but gave opportunities so the rationalized thoughts our protagonists planned out were believable.

The Gift is done by Billy Bob Thorton. He does awesome movies. This one is about a psychic who stumbles into a murder investigation. She is also in hillbilly hell where rednecks everywhere want her burned as a witch.


That said I'm signing off with my monster winner being: zombies. I've been into them lately

1 comment:

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