This week Forest & Cory take a trip to Italy to drink in a pair of giallo films from famed horror filmmaker Dario Argento. Forest revisits a favorite of his, Deep Red and Cory checks out Tenebre.
The horror duo also chat about Forests weekend "ca-brewing" trip, Owen Wilson's new film No Escape and remembering the life and works of horror legend Wes Craven. All this and the guys wonder, "Is Dario Argento a maniac?".
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5 comments:
so the scream TV series was so bad Wes Craven died just to roll in his grave hu.
seriously though my favorite movie of his was scream, my friends dad bootlegged it and it was a crappy copy but it was still one of the best nights of my young life thanks Wes you magnificent bastard.
Answer is Dracula, with Bela Lugosi.
I honestly haven't seen that many Wes Craven films. I haven't seen any of the Scream movies, or Last House on the Left (probably never will see that), and I couldn't stand to watch the entire Swamp Thing movie. But I have seen Nightmare on Elm Street, Cursed, Red Eye, and The Serpent and the Rainbow.
Those aside, my favorite film of his that I've seen is Shocker. You can bash on it all you want saying, "This film is so dated and so a product of its time," but I enjoyed the hell out of that movie. The first 50 minutes is masterfully paced with the plot progression. The actor playing the villain was fantastic and just having a ball in his role. The middle portion of the movie, I'll admit, was mostly meh. But the final 20 minutes makes up for it because it gets so batshit insane and ludicrous and cheesy, and makes no logical sense, but it's also so damn fun. Plus it has a possessed 8 year old girl dropping an f-bomb. I mean, come on, how can you not be entertained by this film? If there's any Wes Craven film I would ask you guys to review, it would be that one, but it sounds like you've already seen it and passed it off as a forgettable B movie. Oh well.
Next favorite runner up is Wishmaster, mainly for the cool practical effects that are in it, and the concept wasn't too bad either. Main female actress got on my nerves at times though.
Great selections for this week, guys. I just finally added "Deep Red" to my collection this past week. I can't watch it with the English Dub. Far too jarring. It's Italian with English subs all the way. Both of these films have some of Argento's best stuff. I think "Deep Red" has his best murder scenes over-all, even if the crane shot in "Tenebre" is his most impressive shot overall, IMO.
As for Craven, big loss, even thought I'm not a major fan. My favourite films of his were not his more famous ones. "Swamp Thing", "The Serpent and the Rainbow", "The People Under the Stairs" and "Red Eye" were more what I was drawn to. Honestly, I don't consider him as being one of the greatest horror directors of the last 40 years, as many do. Top 20, sure, but not in my personal top 10. I don't even think he wanted to be a horror director so much as he got slotted-in as that with his early work. Still, he lasted longer in the horror game than a lot of his contemporaries. Much respect for him.
Wes Craven will certainly be missed among all of us horror fans. Obviously his earlier iconic works like Nightmare have already emerged as classics that refreshed the horror genre in a way that terrifies viewers to this day.
I liked Cory's pick of Scream as a favorite. Craven pretty much rescued the entire struggling horror industry by producing a hit with that movie. Can you believe the horror genre was almost completely dead in the 1990s? Craven succeeded by retaining that meta awareness that made New Nightmare so unique while bringing it forward in a witty and scary take on teen slashers. Scream made horror hip -- which isn't very easy to pull off.
You can read a pretty awesome homage to Wes Craven from Bob Weinstein that gets to the heart of it here.
The music played is from the ballet "Swan Lake" by Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky was a gay, tortured musician as depicted in that movie "Deep Red". An excerpt from "Swan Lake" can be heard in "Dracula", "The Mummy", and "Murders In the Rue Morgue". The theme can also be heard when Lugosi died in "Ed Wood", and in "The Exorcist III".
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