I love Russell Crowe so much. His performance is akin to Cushing and Lee in the Hammer Horror films, gravitas and charisma and weight in a very, very silly movie about demons and God.
Light on real scares, character driven, great performances, it's just a bummer that the story is paint by numbers, and the sets only feel half complete. If this movie had the atmosphere and oozing Gothic-ness of The Nun, this movie would be an instant 4 orโฆ
"Drop dead!"
"Too late!"
Part of getting older has been revisiting movies that I loved as a kid, wElL aKsHuAlLy'd as a shitty 19 year old, and now realize are just swell in my 30's.
Dean's steady hand behind the camera is always welcome, Horner does his schmaltzy shtick with the score, and the sets look spectacular, they're weirdly a harbinger of the kinds of sets and production designs we'd end up seeing in Thirteen Ghosts, Scooby-Doo and The Haunting,โฆ
Una O'Connor's histrionic screaming never fails to make me cackle. Her identification of Frau Neumann just from her screaming is great too. ๐
I truly love Karloff and Lanchester in this, they're so expressive and funny and tragic, it's incredible.
It's fine? Lol thank goodness for Sutherland, she always knocks it out of the park, and Tepov is a lot of fun as well. Awesome designs on the coffins and Vampironomicon, I just wish we could have dug more into them. This feels like a plot line out of the Strain or Hellboy, but missing all the gas of a plot.
You know what, fuck it, my birthday is in a few days, 2020 sucks, I'm a little tipsy. I officially declare an early beginning to spooky season.
What else do you say about one of THE landmarks in horror cinema. There are always arguments about what movie demarcates the BEFORE and the AFTER. In my humble(who am I kidding, I'm a jagoff with a film blog) opinion, this is the movie that marks the line. 80's horror starts here. Thereโฆ
Lot more yikes going on this time. Kurt's little incel-y breakdown over getting shot is hysterical and says a lot more about the movie than anything else Quentin is saying. Everything else flip-flops between perfectly fine and fucking cringe inducing. All the stunt driving is pretty great though.
Still like it overall, but definitely a merp.
