HorrorDVDs 11 most overrated horror movies #2

[Hellbilly]

The votes are counted, Dario Argento's Suspiria got the most. Here's our first from planned 11 most overrated movies:

http://cover6.cduniverse.com/MuzeVideoArt/18/184118.jpg

01 Suspiria (1977) (9 votes)
02 The Blair Witch Project (1999) (6 votes)
03 The Beyond (1981) (3 votes)
03 Army Of Darkness (1992) (3 votes)
05 A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984) (2 votes)
05 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) (2 votes)
05 Scream (1996) (2 votes)
05 The Devil's Rejects (2005) (2 votes)
05 Poltergeist (1982) (2 votes)
05 Cemetery Man (1994) (2 votes)
05 The Evil Dead (1981) (2 votes)
12 Inferno (1980) (1 vote)
12 The Legend Of Boggy Creek (1972) (1 vote)
12 The Sixth Sense (1999) (1 vote)
12 The Funhouse (1981) (1 vote)
12 The Last House On The Left (1972) (1 vote)
12 Cabin Fever (2002) (1 vote)
12 The Last House On Dead End Street (1977) (1 vote)
12 28 Days Later (2002) (1 vote)
12 Black Christmas (1974) (1 vote)
12 Madman (1981) (1 vote)
12 Dawn Of The Dead (1978) (1 vote)
12 Night Of The Living Dead (1968) (1 vote)
12 It Waits (2005) (1 vote)
12 Saw (2004) (1 vote)
12 Evil Dead II (1987) (1 vote)
12 Halloween (1978) (1 vote)

My pick for today:

Naked Lunch (1991)

Not really horror but kinda heading in that direction. Again, no hate for this film but yow, I think it's overrated.

[bwana the clown]

Army Of Darkness.

[evildeadfan123]

It Waits.

[chinoev]

Madman

[dirkwu]

Martin. Wayyy overated.

[Crystal Plumage]

Driller Killer for me today.

[Bobbywoodhogan]

Add my votes for:

The Blair Witch Project
Scream
The Sixth Sense
Cabin Fever
28 Days Later
Saw

[SaviniFan]

Army of Darkness

I remember going to a Fangoria convention which Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell attended and they had a discussion panel. One of the questions from them was what fans wanted to see in the 3rd Evil Dead film. More gore was a popular request. Seems to me that they totally ignored the fans the 3rd time out. I don't mind the three stooges antics in Army of Darkness, but it definitely could have used a bit more grue.

[soxfan666]

28 days later

[Ash28M]

Suspiria? It's only the greatest European horror film ever made. Some of you guys need to hand over your horror freak badges.

Cabin Fever.

[zompirejoe]

the devil's rejects

[Fumi]

Shaun of the Dead. Everybody seems to love that film, but it did absolutely nothing for me. Maybe because I watch a lot of British comedy? I dunno. I've also seen that listless slacker thing done 10 times better in a couple of other movies, where the film makers made me like the characters in spite of them being losers, not because of it.

[17thJuggalo]

The Wicker Man.

Despite all the praise this movie received, I thought it was incredibly boring with an ending that didn't pay off at all.

[walkingdude]

The Wicker Man.

Despite all the praise this movie received, I thought it was incredibly boring with an ending that didn't pay off at all.
If you mean the original I agree totally.
The Wicker Man

[bigdaddyhorse]

Blair Witch.

[Anthropophagus]

Shaun Of The Dead.

[Shokk]

Blair Witch

[dwatts]

Wicker Man (original)

[DeathDealer]

You guys suck. Suspiria is sooo good...

[DeathDealer]

Jaws.

[Ash J. Williams]

Devil's Rejects.

[Katatonia]

The Blair Witch Project

[DeathDealer]

Suspiria is a damn masterpiece, I agree that your horror badges should be taken away. You guys can't just sit back and attack both Suspiria and The Beyond.

For all of you that hate The Beyond, you don't understand the film.

A true masterpiece of cinema, and is way fucking more then just a cheap, horror, schlock type film. People hate what they don't understand.

Trying reading this, and understand why Fulci does what he does, it's a fucking fantastic read and gave me a whole new found respect for both the film and director:

The booklet is roughly the size of reader's digest (slightly bigger than a TV guide) and was printed on glossy paper with many b/w pics along with a few in color. All in all in totaled about 67 pages.


"...and you will live in TERROR!"
JOHN MARTIN explores THE BEYOND

This is a rather rare booklet to find these days as I doubt very many were ever printed so enjoy ...

LUCIO FULCI QUOTE
"In my next film I wanted to tackle Hell with a more metaphysical elaboration than in CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD" explained Fulci: "my idea was to mount a true hommage to Antonin Artaud ..." (see sidebar) "... thus was born THE BEYOND. My idea was to make an absolute film, containing all the horrors of the world, a film without a story. There's a house, with people, and dead who return from The Beyond ... that's it. There is no logic to be found in it, only a succession of images."

SIDEBAR ABOUT ANTONIN ARTAUD (1896-1948)
Born in Marseilles during 1896, this French actor, director, poet and theorist entered the theatre in 1921. he was a member of the Surrealist movement (contributing to "La Revolution Surrealiste") from 1923 until 1927, when he was expelled by Andre Breton. Between 1926 and 1929 he produced performances for the Theatre Alfred Jarry, which he had co-founded with Roger Vitrac and Robert Aron. His collection of essays, "The Theatre And Its Double" (1938), established the principles of The Theatre Of Cruelty, i.e. "to jettison language in favour of symbolic gesture, movement, sound and rhythm, in order to disturb the viewer and impel him to action". The prototype of the tortured artist, he exalted suffering and believed that theatre should be "like a Medieval plague", making stronger those it did not kill. In 1935 Artaud directed his own play "The Cenci", based on Shelley source material (which would also inspire Lucio Fulci's 1969 film BEATRICE CENCI). The production collapsed after only two weeks, Artaud subsequently travelling extensively in Ireland and Mexico before suffering a complete breakdown and spending most of his later years in asylums. "In the search for the absolute and for ecstatic states his speculations carried him to the point of mental derangement" wrote Patrick Waldberg, and Artaud's drug-fuelled decline was starkly recorded in Gerard Mordialliat's recent biopic. He died in Ivry, near Pairs, in 1948.
Peter Brook's notorious staging of Weiss's Marat/Sade in 1962 is often cited as the paradigm of an "Artaudian" production, but his influence on THE BEYOND cannot be ignored. "THE BEYOND is pure Artaud ... no plot ... a person comes to live in a house that's been built on one of the Seven Gates of Hell ... and that's where the scenario stops", in the words of Fulci: "I studied Artaud originally because he had become a popular name to drop in Italy, though in reality very few people were actually reading him. His influence is evident in much of my work". Fulci was found of quoting such Artaud maxims as "life is always somebody's death" and "a language that stems from signs, from cries, is not a language of words, but a direct impression upon the senses". "In this sentance", Fulci believed: "is contained the whole essence of cinema. Artaud was fundamentally a cinema man rather than one of the theatre. I remember well when I met him, over forty years ago ... he stared at me with those mad eyes ... the years in which I really embraced the ideas of Artaud were the early 80's, when I was working with absolute freedom".

LUCIO FULCI QUOTE
"I place the camera so that the audience is complicit in a cinematic crime. They are now past the point of simply being aware of a brutal act - they have become the perpetrators."

and another quote that might explain Fulci's love of extreme close-ups and use of "eye gore":

"The eyes are the first thing you have to destroy ... because they have seen too many bad things!"

SERGIO SALVATI QUOTE - Cinematographer of THE BEYOND and many other Fulci films
When asked about the opening sequence of the film:
"Initially, it was to have been filmed in black and white to simplify the whole operation but then I opted for the soft yellow, almost golden filter which blended in well with the torches and the flashes of light and was reflected in the clothes worn by the inquisitors and the burnt lime on the painter's face. What I was trying to recreate was the effect of an old, yellowed photograph, some thing outside time, putting a gap between the present day story and the prologue as though they were two separate films, divided by an infinite arc of time, a long bridge, like the one that takes Sarah to meet Emily, the blind woman ... in the Dimension of the Afterworld. I discarded the usual sepia - the color of memories, since there are no relationships between the characters based on memory, instead, THE BEYOND is a horror film which lies outside time and space".

LUCIO FULCI QUOTE
"In Italy we make films based on pure themes, without a plot, and THE BEYOND - like INFERNO - refuses conventions or traditional structers ... people who blame THE BEYOND for its lack of story don't understand that it's a film of images, which must be received without any reflection."

Now we get to the "real meat" ... the following critique of the film is entitled "LET'S GET METAPHYSICAL" and is rather fascinating:

Frequently cited as Lucio Fulci's finest zombie movie and even held up as some kind of ultimate in graphic cinema violence, there is actually so much more than gore to THE BEYOND ... and those zombies turn out to be almost an incidental part of the narrative equation. Pierre Patina in MAD MOVIES #22 identifies Fulci's "fascination for putrefaction" in this film as a mere Macguffin, before proceeding to sabotage his own peice (intended to hail Fulci as a "poet of the macabre") by describing those legions of shabling deadsters as "a mere pretext for Fulci to elaborate a sort of catalogue of atrocious, original deaths, just as Mario Bava had done in his necrophilic manifesto, BAY OF BLOOD". Mais non, Pierre - there's more going on here than eyeballs popping and entrails unravelling ... no less than the creation and fall of man according to Lucio Fulci.

In his book NIGHTMARE MOVIES, Kim Newman dismisses THE BEYOND in perfunctory fashion, complaining of: "doorways to Hell into which the dumb protagonists blunder and which, in lieu of more imaginative supernatural manifestations, disgorge shambling hordes of flesh-eating zombies". Aside from straightforward factual inaccuracy (at no point do we see zombie eating flesh ... maybe he hadn't actually seen the film when he penned this review, indeed how anyone possibly see THE BEYOND and conclude that it "lacks imaginative supernatural manifestations"?). Newman's cardinal error is his ignorance of the fact that the all-too solid portal through which those zombies eventually traipse, obviously foreshadowed in Michael Winner's THE SENTINEL (1976), can be traced back, through a long artistic and literary tradition to Homer's ODYSSEY (if not earlier). In this respect we can draw a parallel between Fulci and the aforementioned Mario Bava, the Italian horror legend whom he idolised, and who once described himself as "more pagan than Christian, more heretic than Catholic". Fulci told me in 1994: "My most important films are about the intervention of doubt in the mind of a Catholic. They're all terribly pessimistic, becuase I have come to believe that God is a God of suffering" (1)

*** The (1) represents a footnote. Here is that footnote:

David Warbeck told me: "When I asked Fulci how he came up with all this horror, y'know electric drills through people's eyeballs and so on, such extremes, so horrendous - he said, "David, life is so much more horrible than anything I could ever come up with.", and I realized that he was absolutely right. Fulci himself has suffered through his own private hell, he went through a bad separation, bad health, the deaths of loved ones ... all of this is common knowledge, so I feel at liberty to talk about it".

*** NOW back to the MAIN TEXT:

THE BEYOND has been described by its director as "pure anarchy in a religious environment". Indeed the film, like CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD (1980) and THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY (1981), is less a sequel to the commercial smash ZOMBIE (1979) than a vehicle for Fulci's introspected agonising over his own perverted Catholicism, in which notions of "the resurrection of the flesh" are taken to their variously logical, absurd and chilling conclusions. Fulci prided himeself on being "a generic terrorist", who re-wrote the rule book of every genre he worked in (i.e., just about all of them). For such an incorrigible iconoclast, it was but a small step from this to recasting the canons of Christianity. So "the book of Eibon" (a manual of Gnostic know-how concieved by the fertile imagination of Lovecraft acolyte Clark Ashton Smith) supplants The Bible, and the consolations of the Twenty-third Psalm are replaced by the altogether less reassuring prospect of "exploring a Sea of Darkness". There are Old Testament-like plagues of spiders, showers of blood and of acid; the appearance of Stigmata; and an alarming practical demonstration of "an eye for an eye" by Joe the plumbing prophet. Crucially, in the place of an omniscient, omnipotent Judeo-Christian Godhead, Fulci sets a crazed demi-urge, feverishly constructing the canvases which, it is ultimately revealed, constitute the bleak universe through which the desperate characters struggle towards their inevitable damnation.

Zweik the painter (and putative occult adept) is a misunderstood martyred misfit in the grand Fulci tradition of "Martiara" (Florinda Bolkan) and "Bob" (Giovanni Lombardo Radice), previous redneck victems in DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING (1972) and CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD respectively. Fulci once famously described the trepanning under gone by Radice's character as "a protest I wanted to launch against a particular type of fascism", and he later elaborated this point to me in the following fashion: "My family has always been against fascism, which is why my grandfather's tomb was desecrated by fascists. I made sure my children were educated against fascism. My film SODOMA'S GHOSTS turned out to be rather prophetic, because now the ghosts of fascism really are back., there are fascists in the Italian government. Those of us who lived through fascism don't want to see it recover its grip on Italy ... Radice's character in CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD was a sort of a 'Forrest Gump' character, who was killed by this girl's father, a typical American redneck bigot, because he disapproved of the strange boy's relationship with his daughter. SODOMA'S GHOSTS has the same theme. The reason I portray violent lynchings in my films is that I detest mob violence ... I am seeking to exorcise it" (witness also the savage mob beatings handed out to Franco Nero in Fulci's MASSACRE TIME (1966) and even Hollywood icon Edward G. Robinson in his OPERATION ST PETER (1967). For Fulci, fascism is just a 20th Century manifestation of the same eternal, monolithic forces of oppression that are manifested in his 1969 film BEATRICE CENCI as "the power of the Popes, during the Middle Ages, to condemn not only your body to the flames, but your soul to eternal damnation in Hell".

Fast forward from the Middle Ages to 20th Century New Orleans, where of course they know a thing or two about lynching. The ol' black desk clerk in the lobby of the Seven Doors Hotel seems wholly justified in his apprehension (Fulci treats us to repeated close-ups of his eyes rolling in their sockets, but this is no racist depiction: everybody's eyes swivel madly in ultra-close up at some point during THE BEYOND) as the rednecks roll up to torture Zweik. "You damned warlock" they admonish him, before the chain-whipping commences: "Because of you, this town is cursed forever". But their self-righteous religious zeal is just a pretext for pig-headed intolerance of nonconformity, and ironically, it is their own actions that are condemning them to perdition, for in Fulci's scheme of things, The Divine principle is the Creative principle, the preserve of the "outsider", and Original Sin is not the sin of rebellion, but that of soul-destroying conformism, the philistine herd instinct that reduces men to their all-too perishable flesh, staggering around satisfying its base instincts ...

Philip K. Dick, whose polymesmeric science-fiction turns on the notion that the reality we percieve is "only apparently real" ("seen through a glass darkly", to paraphase St Paul) expressed - in his collection of essays, "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" - the characteristically cooky conviction that the passage of time is an illusion, transcendent reality being forever fixed on Mount Calvary at the moment of The Crucifixion. Similarly in THE BEYOND, the clock stopped forever when Zweik was massacred. The time is always the time and the place is always the place, the same players forever going through the motions of the same eternally repeated drama (a la Antonio Margheriti's DANCE MACABRE from 1964). So - despite Fulci's later protestations that zombies were only belatedly added to the brew, for the benefit of the German market - their presence in fact contributes to the precise symmetry that underpins this most formally elegant of horror films, as the drab grey deadites bumping around the hospital's corridors find their coutnerpart in the pre-titles goon squad (the aforementioned eye-rolling negro from 1927 also turns up as a gurney-pushing orderly in "the present day")

Whereas in BEATRICE CENCI Fulci had dislocated the viewer's sense of time by means of a Chinese box-type arrangementof flahbacks within flashbacks (audiences apparently responded with cries of 'kill the director', though Quentin Tarantino's deployment of an identical device in PULP FICTION recently met with considerable acclaim), in his zombie films he achieves a more subtle sense of disorientation by juxtaposing two parallel worlds, which touch only tangentially ... most effectively of all, in THE BEYOND one world of appearances (ours) is imprinted upon another one that is somehow "more real" ... a world of ideals, in the Platonic sense. The omnipresence of this other world (that lies beneath and informs our own) is emphasised by such characteristic directional tricks as abrupt focus switches, by the revelation that the hospital and hotel basements are joined (in Peter Nicholls' phrase) "by some quirk of Lovecraftian geometry", by the moment when a character moves out of shot to reveal a corpse filling his outline behind him (a shot reprised in Argento's TENEBRAE shortly afterwards, though to more prosaic "shock" effect) and the scene in which Liza appears only as a reflection in ghost girls Emily's mirror.

"We blind see things more clearly" the blind girl tells the heroine, and proves that this is no mere metaphorical construct by effortlessly navigating physical obstacles in Liza's world. Emily consistently tries to warn Liza of the very real peril that she is facing but, their perception limited to the material world that they believe they inhabit, the protagonists are doomed. They're literally going to Hell on a rail, their itinerary marked out on the grid-lines of the underworld. The long, straight road that Emily dramatically appears on, the path through the cellar that Martha marks out "especially for Joe", the hospital corridors through which Liza and the Doctor are relentlessly shepherded ... all roads lead to The Beyond ... the charnel hourse ... the Sea of Darkness ... the Door to Silence.

SPECIAL THANKS TO JOE COLEMAN FROM DVDMANIACS FOR ORIGINALLY POSTING IT.

[maskull]

The Devil's Rejects

[maybrick]

The Legend of Boggy Creek

[RyanPC]

I agree with Hellbilly about Naked Lunch, but I still gotta go with Blair Witch. :nervous:


Suspiria is a damn masterpiece, I agree that your horror badges should be taken away. You guys can't just sit back and attack both Suspiria and The Beyond.

For all of you that hate The Beyond, you don't understand the film.

A true masterpiece of cinema, and is way fucking more then just a cheap, horror, schlock type film. People hate what they don't understand.

Trying reading this, and understand why Fulci does what he does, it's a fucking fantastic read and gave me a whole new found respect for both the film and director:

*snip*

Dude, chill out. I agree with you about Suspiria and The Beyond, but posting a huge-ass article on the brilliance of Fulci in an attempt to "prove" that The Beyond is not overrated isn't going to do a damn thing. It's a message board, for chrissakes, not the end of the world. Don't let other people's opinions offend you so much--not everyone will agree with you in life. That's just the way it is.

[DeathDealer]

I agree with Hellbilly about Naked Lunch, but I still gotta go with Blair Witch. :nervous:




Dude, chill out. I agree with you about Suspiria and The Beyond, but posting a huge-ass article on the brilliance of Fulci in an attempt to "prove" that The Beyond is not overrated isn't going to do a damn thing. It's a message board, for chrissakes, not the end of the world. Don't let other people's opinions offend you so much--not everyone will agree with you in life. That's just the way it is.
Yeah, I guess your right.

[dwatts]

These polls don't carry any significance, so it's wise not to take them seriously. However, I'm all for excellent articles being posted, so I thank DeathDealer for that. I too love The Beyond. it's one of a handful of films that I've wanted to write about for ages - years - but I'm too intimidated to start since it would take several days to get my thoughts down. It's a monumental film.

Still, for a casual little poll like this, where the first film chosen is silly, I say go with the flow matties :)

[Myron Breck]

Dude, chill out. I agree with you about Suspiria and The Beyond, but posting a huge-ass article on the brilliance of Fulci in an attempt to "prove" that The Beyond is not overrated isn't going to do a damn thing. It's a message board, for chrissakes, not the end of the world. Don't let other people's opinions offend you so much--not everyone will agree with you in life. That's just the way it is.

I agree that it isn't going to change anyone's mind but at least he is trying to help those of us who may not be "properly appreciative" of some of Fulci's films by giving us something scholarly in scope. I'd rather someone dig up a good article than just type a paragraph of personal opinion.

Thanks, Death Dealer. I enjoyed the article.

[Myron Breck]

Oh yeah, I am offering the original WICKER MAN as my vote this time around. I liked it but it didn't resonate with me the way it seems to with most people around here. Maybe because the ending was already ruined by the cover art? I'd still recommend it for completists or anyone unfamiliar with the story, which still may be many since the remake tanked so hard.

[DefJeff]

Evil Dead

[satans-sadists]

Blair Witch Project.

[Luna]

The Blair Witch Project

[allmessedup]

ARMY OF DARKNESS never did much for me, so that's my vote.

Parts of SUSPIRIA are great. But as a whole, it doesn't measure up to a lot of other films that are great all the way through.

[Ptflea2]

Suspiria? It's only the greatest European horror film ever made. Some of you guys need to hand over your horror freak badges.

Cabin Fever.

"Badges, we don't need no stinking badges!"

[Cujo108]

I'll third Shaun of the Dead. It's barely average, and I get more laughs over the notion that it's something special than I do from the film itself.

[dirkwu]

Crap. Can I change my vote to wicker man?

I loved the tits though.

[dwatts]

:lol::lol::lol:

Those were cliche, mate :lol:

[indiephantom]

"Suspiria"??????? Who the fuck is handing the crack out around here?:lol:

The Blair Witch Project

[MorallySound]

Friday the 13th. It's decent, but in my opinion way way overated. Part IV is where it's at!

[YottNik]

I can see where some might think Friday the 13th is overrated when looked at from today's standards. But when it came out in 1980, it was awesome. But that's probably another discussion for a different thread.

[Paff]

DeathDealer's post made this one easy:

The Beyond

[Rockmjd]

I'll go with Blair Witch Project. We need to get that shithole out of the way in the early rounds.

[onebyone]

Definitely The Beyond.

[thrashard76]

The Last House On Dead End Street

[Agent Z]

The Beyond!!!

Spiders with pipe cleaner legs baby!!! :banana:

[MrKateB]

Blair Witch Project
Army of Darkness
Anything by M. Night Shamalama
Most of the AmJap instant remakes (like The Grudge, The Ring etc.)

[Luna]

So Blair Witch Project then? :lol:

[Ash28M]

The Blair Witch Project might be the only film that would make both an most underrated and most overrated thread.

[old-boo-radley]

The Beyond... overrated? Somebody besides me and three other people rate it highly?!?!

My vote goes for Night of the Living Dead '68.

[Damed]

My vote goes for Night of the Living Dead '68.


Now that's crazy talk.

I vote for The Beyond as well. I enjoy it, but it doesn't work well at all on the "story" front. The gore is good, but it has no real sense of fear/terror to it.

[zombiecraig]

My vote goes for Night of the Living Dead '68.

Ooohhh! That's a serious shit stirrer!

My vote goes to Martin. Not a bad film, but as a horror film? Vastly overrated.

I also want to throw The Sixth Sense under the wheels and have people keep it in mind for next time. Oh my God! A twist ending! No other movie in film history has ever done that before! Right?!? Right?!?

[Ash28M]

We need to start an underrated Thread. All this Classic bashing is getting me depressed.

[indiephantom]

We need to start an underrated Thread. All this Classic bashing is getting me depressed.

great point! I'd be all over that idea.

[maskull]

I'm sure Hellbilly has that thread planned next. :)

[Fulcilives2004]

The exorcist