Movies We Love

My inaugural foray into the Horror Squad Movie Club kicked off with the French thriller Ils, a little home-invasion flick often overshadowed by what I felt was the utterly predictable The Strangers. Of course, this film is approached in a much different way than Bryan Bertino's theatrical thriller, and while it all comes down to subjectivity, I personally feel Ils carried with it more tension and suspense than The Strangers, and for a variety of very important reasons.

Like Peter and Alison, I will forgo discussion questions and highlight what I feel are the most important aspects of the film, those crucial decisions made by the film-makers that resulted in a film that is wholly different from the big budget thrillers. Instead, I will discuss these aspects and why I feel they all add up to one Hell of an impressive little thriller, and one that surely does not receive the recognition it deserves among dyed-in-the-wool horror fans and casual fans alike.

Beware! Spoilers dwell within!

Amidst the brutally violent À l'intérieur, Frontiere(s), and Martyrs, which have come to represent what has been deemed the "New Wave of French Horror," there exists a little film called Ils (Them). Eschewing egregious amounts of blood in favor of real tension, this home invasion thriller by David Moreau and Xavier Palud has remained relatively glossed over, often in favor of the widely released The Strangers, which came out two years later and sported the same home invasion theme but with the unfortunate addition of Liv Tyler. Although clocking in at only 77 minutes, Ils is a relentless film from its horrific start to its brutal, yet subtle climax, and as such serves as a delightful respite from jump-scare laden thrillers and ridiculous remakes.

Ils has come to represent precisely what I look for in a horror film: real fears approached in a minimalistic fashion that rely, in part, on the subject matter, as opposed to jump scares or a hackneyed score to frighten the viewer. Ils is pure, unbridled tension, and for that very reason it makes my inaugural film for the Horror Squad Movie Club.

I was in a rented lodge in Park City, Utah, several years ago, and since the snow was really bad (or maybe the Sundance options were really meh), I opted to dig through some screeners from "the other festival," Slamdance. (That's not meant as a knock. I adore Slamdance.) I was in town to review some films, so when I came across one screener that indicated a running time of 47 minutes, I got skeptical.

A 47-minute film, you see, is not a short film, nor is it a feature. So while I'd normally be elated to review a film called The Call of Cthulhu, it just didn't seem like a practical choice for "work." But I watched it anyway. And then I wrote my review about 18 minutes later. Months after that I ordered a copy of the film, and it still holds a firm place in my horror collection. Also, it's probably the finest, coolest, and most "faithful" H.P. Lovecraft adaptation I've ever seen. No disrespect meant to Stuart Gordon, but his awesome Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Dagon are "loose" adaptations, at best, whereas Andrew Leman's The Call of Cthulhu feels like it fell right out of 1931.

So what's all this got to do with you? Well hey, if you happen to be a Netflix subscriber (and I don't feel like a shill for saying you oughtta be), then you can enjoy the 47-minute Lovecraft love letter all by yourself. I'll even include the link: There. Enjoy! And then you can hit the official site and see what sort of lunatic passion inspires folks to make a 47-minute film in a resoundingly "feature friendly" universe. Hats off to the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society for putting this fine film together.

Hello, friends. We're trying out a nifty new chat service that will allow our writers and our readers to join hands in blissful movie geekery. For example, we're hoping to do our Movie Club with this service, but before we can do that ... we want to see how this Cover It Live program actually works!

So in a way, you're like Horror Squad beta testers! Go put that on your resumé!

The topic of the evening shall be "slashers," so feel free to share thoughts, links, pics, and videos to the discussion. If you have ANY questions, comments, complaints, or council (I wanted the four-way alliteration) just let us know. Here's the doo-hickey!

The Horror Squad Movie Club is a new weekly feature where we pick a film, watch it and then discuss it. Feel free to read our introduction for more info.

Judging from Saturday's Twitter exchange (thanks for using the #hsmovieclub hash tag!), I think it's safe to say that many of you felt that Night of the Demons 2 wasn't a perfect film, but it was a hell of a lot of fun. Most of you kept comparisons to the original at a minimum, and no one has changed my mind -- for me, Brian Trenchard-Smith's version of the Halloween party at Hull House is where it's at. Like Peter, I don't particularly have any discussion questions for the group, but I'll highlight some of the things I enjoy about the film, which if you didn't get a chance to watch over the weekend, just watch it when you can and come back here to leave a comment. The rest of you, speak up after the jump.

Beware of yonder spoilers!

For my first Horror Squad Movie Club pick, I wanted to choose a movie that I would invite a huge group of friends over to watch with me. I needed to choose a flick that had all the right things to keep the crowd entertained with gore, humor, violence and lots of un-PC behavior. It was then that I realized that Brian Trenchard-Smith's Night of the Demons 2 could be my only answer.

Yes, I enjoy Kevin Tenney's original Night of the Demons; it has a decent amount of gore, Linnea Quigley and the sexypants dance scene to Bauhaus' Stigmata Martyr, but you get bigger and better gore with Trenchard-Smith's version, better pacing and an abundance of laugh out loud moments. Not only is there a badass, snarky demoness (Amelia Kinkade), but also a kick ass nun (Jennifer Rhodes), a wacky gang of friends including one named Mouse (Merle Kennedy) and a whole lot of naked shenanigans at a Catholic boarding school and at the creepy Hull House. What more do you need people?

[click read more to find out how to participate in the movie club discussion...]

Well, the inaugural Horror Squad Movie Club kicked off this past weekend with Eduardo Sanchez' rednecks-kidnap-an-alien flick Altered. Judging from people's reactions in the comments and on Twitter (thanks for using the #hsmovieclub hash tag, by the way) most people seemed to have never seen it and enjoyed it for the most part, so mission accomplished (though I do think it's safe to say I still love it more than most).

Unlike my pick for the Sci-Fi Squad Movie Club, Altered States, I don't particularly have any discussion questions for the group. I do, on the other hand, have a few aspects of the film I'd like to spotlight beyond basics like performances and overall package (it's a shame this ended up straight-to-DVD considering how consistently above average the whole production is).

If you're still susceptible to Altered spoilers, it's best to turn away now.

You watch horror movies, right?. That's weird...we also watch horror movies. Hey! We should watch horror movies together!

Allow me to introduce you to the brand spanking new Horror Squad Movie Club. Here's how it will work. Every Friday a HS staffer will make their pick for the weekend's movies, offering up a little guidance on why they like it and why you should too. If you're game, you'll have the weekend to watch it and then on Monday said staffer will be offering up a discussion post of sorts, elaborating on their love (or hate) for the flick.

What's the point of all this, you ask? Well, hopefully you'll get to learn the particular tastes of our writers a little better, but the ultimate goal is to hopefully make you fall in love (or hate) with a film you may otherwise have been indifferent to. Oh, and if you're not particularly in the mood for horror (who are you?), Horror Squad sister site Sci-Fi Squad and papa site Cinematical will both be starting up their own respective movie clubs (and don't forget mothership hub Moviefone has one going on as well at Inside Movies).

So, what's on tap for this weekend? Click on to find out.

Welcome back to another installment of "Death Scenes We Love", a recurring feature here at Horror Squad where I wax poetic about some of my all-time favorite scenes of cinematic carnage.

Today we tackle one of my most beloved of Japanese cult films, Ryuhei Kitamura's Versus. Kitamura went on to direct some other very cool films (I happen to love Sky High--and no, that's not the film about the superhero kids at school...) and is best known to American audiences for his work adapting Clive Barker's Midnight Meat Train a few years back. However, amongst hardcore splatter fans and cult Japanese cinephiles, I think Versus is his most revered work.

I first stumbled on to it back in late 2000 or early 2001. I was a frequent customer at San Francisco's Le Video (one of the greatest video stores on Earth...) and the guy behind the counter saw me walk in and immediately told me I had to watch this movie. What he handed me was a bootleg version of Versus (because we were still a ways off from Tokyo Shock getting around to releasing it on DVD at that point--hardly anyone here had ever even heard of the film). I took it home, popped it in, watched it all (and you know it's a great bootleg when the movie runs just over two hours and someone dubbed it at SP speed and it cuts off the last minute or so of the credits) and was immediately in love.

Jump past the break, where I'll regale you with tales of why I was so smitten.