Movie-Mania! (Including Yet Another Horror Movie Marathon!)

I've been watching my fair share of movies lately.  Seriously, between movies and watching videos online (The Spoony Experiment and The Cinema Snob being my current fixations), I've put off finishing the video games I've been playing as I've given up on New Super Mario Bros. Wii for the time being (damn ice world) and haven't even touched Yakuza 2 on the PS2 for about a month now.  Anyways, to help get 2010 off to a good start, I spent New Year's Day trying to stay awake by going to Best Buy and spending whatever else I had left on my gift cards on movies.  I ended up walking out with Inglourious Basterds (the 2-disc edition), Sukiyaki Western Django, Let The Right One In and Martyrs.  Of course, you should know by now how much I loved Basterds seeing as I ranked it the best movie of 2009 and, even though I finally got around to watching it again last weekend, my high opinion of it hasn't changed.  Sukiyaki Western Django was a movie I've been wanting to see for the past couple years now, especially considering its a Takashi Miike film and I'll watch pretty much everything he makes.  Basically, it's a Japanese twist on a Western, which has the actors speaking in slightly-broken English throughout the movie (the only non-Japanese member of the cast being Quentin Tarantino himself), so it's pretty off-kilter meaning it's a typical Miike film.  But what I was most impressed with is the fact that it's basically a remake of Django, which in turn was a "ripoff" (for lack of a better word) of A Fistful of Dollars, which in turn was a remake of Yojimbo.  So, in a way Sukiyaki Western Django kinda took all those films and combined them, yet made the whole thing go full circle.  Oddly enough, I was really wanting to seek out those movies after watching Sukiyaki, which is quite a feat because I don't consider myself a fan of Westerns at all.

Anyway, I'm not here to talk about Inglourious Basterds or Sukiyaki Western Django but the other two films I bought, Let The Right One In and Martyrs, which ended up becoming a little sequel to my Christmas Day Horror Movie Marathon as I played the two back-to-back in a doubleheader a few weeks back.

Let The Right One In tells the tale of Oskar, a 12 year old boy who is routinely picked on by bullies and thus channels his anger through his knife collection and reading about crime scenes in the newspaper.  Clearly he's a bit messed up but he seems to have a kindred soul in Eli, a peculiar 12 year old girl that just moved into the apartment next door with her father.  Over the course of the movie, the two become best of friends and the fact that Eli's a vampire doesn't seem to bother Oskar much.  But when Eli's father gets caught during a routine feeding session and sacrifices himself instead of revealing their secret, Eli has to fend for herself, which becomes even harder once the townspeople start getting suspicious.  Does Eli stay with Oskar, who is getting a newfound sense of courage from his new friend, or does she leave him behind forever so that she doesn't get caught herself?

Now, I will say that I don't really consider Let The Right One In a "horror" movie.  Yes, it has to deal with vampires and such but it never scared me.  Of course, that doesn't mean it's not a good movie.  Due to the bleak atmosphere and lack of music, it takes a little while for the movie to catch on.  But when you have a movie that deals with the vampire mythos in similar fashion to Near Dark and a tender love story between the two kids (seriously, I almost cried at certain points), you have an overall moving film.  It's quite easy to say that it's a much more sincere love-story-involving-vampires than the Twilight saga.  Then again, I consider I Spit On Your Grave to be a more sincere love story than the Twilight saga so that's neither here nor there.  Let The Right One In is getting tons of accolades from various film festivals and deservedly so, including a recent BAFTA nomination (the UK equivalent of the Oscars) for Best Film Not In The English Language.  But there's a downside...it's going to be remade.  Yup, due to mainstream Hollywood film studios' perpetual lack of creativity, we will be getting a remake later this year, simply called Let Me In.  As far as I can tell (as there's been little info released about the movie), it's going to follow the same premise.  Only instead of 1980's Sweden (which I honestly didn't realize it was in the '80s until I watched the Special Features, I just thought they were stuck in a middle-of-nowhere section of Sweden), it's going to be set in current day New Mexico.  Yeah, you're replacing bitter cold with sweltering hot but I'm sure New Mexico is just as desolate so I'm gonna give it a pass.  Honestly, the thing I'm worried most about is the fact that they're keeping the kids the same age.  Let The Right One In hinged on these two kids and they played their parts perfectly.  However, in an age where George Lucas thought that Jake Lloyd would make a good Anakin Skywalker, I'm not entirely convinced that the casting director will be able to find kids able to pull this off as well as the original but I'm willing to hold my reservations.  Then again, I just looked on IMDB and realized that the girl playing Eli (or rather Abby in this case) is the same girl playing Hit-Girl in the upcoming Kick-Ass, so it might work out.  Fingers crossed.

The second half of the double-header belonged to Martyrs, a film I was really anticipating due to its brutal nature.  Oddly enough, some of the most gory and violent horror movies have been coming out of France, of all places.  Hell, Martyrs starts off with an optional introduction from the director, who basically apologizes for making the movie!  The whole thing starts off disturbingly so as a young girl escapes from being tortured and is promptly put under psychiatric evaluation.  Fifteen years later, that same girl grows up and storms into a house, slaughtering a family with a shotgun as she believes the mother and father to have been behind the torture that had permanently damaged her psyche.  Her friend that she made while in the psychiatric hospital tries to help her out and clean up the mess but isn't completely sure if she had truly gotten her revenge, especially since the specter of another girl she had failed to save still haunts her after the killings, which manifests into self-mutilation.  Soon enough, the girl goes mad and ends up killing herself by slitting her own throat, leaving her friend to believe if it was all a sham.

***SPOILERS AHOY!***

Turns out the girl was right on the money when her friend finds a secret underground passage to a torture chamber underneath the house, where she finds the same tortured girl that haunted her friend's psyche.  Soon enough an agency storms in and cleans up the mess by tossing the girl into the torture chamber, but not before explaining that this particular agency specializes in torturing young women as an act of martyrdom as they are apparently more susceptible to transcendation and therefore able to see what lies beyond death.  That results in the girl being tortured for the final half-hour of the movie.

***SPOILERS OUT!***

I know, I know, this all sounds really horrible and it is.  But I don't know if I've been desensitized (which is very possible) or if the hype surrounding the movie was too much but I didn't think it was all that bad.  Yeah, there were some pretty gory parts and the half-hour torture scene near the end was kinda too much but I've honestly seen worse.  But once again, that's not to say that this is a bad movie, far from it.  I think this is a rare case of horror movie where the story very much outshines the brutality.  For the first half, you had the whole thing of trying to figure out whether the girl had killed the right people or if she was just plain crazy.  And then in the second half, you had something much more existential than your average horror flick.  But I don't think it's one of the most brutal movies ever like some people are claiming.  Then again, I've seen movies where people get their guts pulled out and their dongs ripped off.

So yeah, there's my most recent Horror Movie Marathon.  I'm actually thinking about holding another one considering that I was able to snag the Ringu Anthology from the Wal-Mart Bargain Bin for a whopping $4.  That's like a dollar a movie!  For those that don't know, Ringu is the Japanese movie that was later remade into The Ring for American audiences.  To be honest, I've never seen The Ring but I have seen the first Ringu movie and I wasn't all that impressed.  But considering the horror fans on the WrestleCrap forums (my current forum of choice) are big into Ringu and Ju-On (the Japanese version of The Grudge, which I also was indifferent to), I decided to give it another chance.  So I might not hold an actual Ringu Marathon or anything, just probably pop a movie in when I'm bored.

In other news, I found out that the Blockbuster Video down the road from my apartment is closing down and thus they're selling off their stock!  I went last weekend and didn't see a whole lot I was interested in.  But I might have a bit more money to spend this time and the movies are a few bucks cheaper now so hopefully I'll be able to find something worthwhile.  Actually, when I went last weekend, I didn't even buy any movies as I ended up walking out with a swank Inglourious Basterds print for my wall (the one with Brad Pitt standing atop a pile of dead Nazis) and a Boondock Saints II poster (which I promptly turned into a Retarded Death Wish 3 poster in tribute to The Cinema Snob).  And there was still another wall print that I wanted of painting of the main characters in Fight Club that I had to pass up.  If they don't have much left, I'm half-tempted to call up the other Blockbusters in town and see if they're going out of business too.  I plan on going tomorrow so I'll keep you guys posted in case I walk out with a sweet haul.