5th Annual N&G 31 Days* of Halloween (2023)

8. Patient Zero (2018)

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With the cast this should have been half decent. It was not.

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10. The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)
💀💀💀🦴

This easily could have been much better than it was, but it'll certainly get another viewing. I think I'd have liked this as a limited series more than a movie. Still, I'm happy to see a serious attempt at the Dracula story that focuses on a different part than is typically done. It mostly made me want to rewatch that great show they did a couple years ago on Netflix.

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Getting back into my "Subtitle Saturdays and Sundays" mode. Excited to have and extra day this weekend to chip away at my growing list of foreign language films.

Scrolled down to some of the earlier additions to my Shudder watchlist and landed on Dearest Sister, an earlier film from Laotian American filmmaker Mattie Do, the director of one of my top 2 movies of 2022—The Long Walk.

In Dearest Sister, a struggling family sends their teen daughter to earn money as a caretaker for her wealthy blind cousin who experiences dark, supernatural visions. What follows is a little bit Parasite, a little bit The Eye. A slow burn for sure, but great if that's your bag (like me).

💀💀💀🦴

(If you haven't watched The Long Walk, please do! It's a fascinating and brilliant blend of spiritualism, subtle sci-fi, and serial killer thriller.)

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The sorry state of Cube 2: Hypercube has kept me from racing to finish the trilogy with Cube: 0, but I figured it's worth giving the Japanese reboot a shot in the meantime. Cube (2021), a Screambox Original, is competent, but makes the mistake of treading too closely to the original's necessary establishment and struggles to offer much else.

A ragtag group wakes up trapped in a deadly maze of cubic booby-trapped rooms and must try to escape with their lives.

It's fine, which makes it better than Hypercube, but I feel like they could have done a lot more with characterization (on a script level) to capture the engaging dynamic of the original ensemble.

💀💀🦴

(Screambox has proven a valuable platform for its price—one of the more affordable of the bunch. They're raising their fees on Oct. 2 to $6.99 per month or $59.99 for the year, so now's a great time to join before the hike. As a sponsor of the seasonal HoopTober challenge over on Letterboxd, they've got an active free month trial/promo for new subs available. There's plenty of new content slated for both Sept. and October including a RoboCop docuseries.)

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Jesus, where do I even begin with Project Wolf Hunting? It's like 5 blockbuster movies, one after the other, and somehow it all works. That, and it's an ULTRA violent bloodbath. 🩸🩸🩸

South Korea charters a cargo ship for special extradition of a group of escaped violent convicts from the Philippines. As you can imagine, things don't go as planned. The series of left turns that follows is totally bonkers in the best way.

Project Wolf Hunting is on Screambox (see trial link in my previous post above) and possibly on Hi-Yah via Prime. (It's also $5 to buy on Prime.)

💀💀💀💀🦷

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EvanBenner said:
The sorry state of Cube 2: Hypercube has kept me from racing to finish the trilogy with Cube: 0, but I figured it's worth giving the Japanese reboot a shot in the meantime. Cube (2021), a Screambox Original, is competent, but makes the mistake of treading too closely to the original's necessary establishment and struggles to offer much else.

A ragtag group wakes up trapped in a deadly maze of cubic booby-trapped rooms and must try to escape with their lives.

It's fine, which makes it better than Hypercube, but I feel like they could have done a lot more with characterization (on a script level) to capture the engaging dynamic of the original ensemble.

💀💀🦴

(Screambox has proven a valuable platform for its price—one of the more affordable of the bunch. They're raising their fees on Oct. 2 to $6.99 per month or $59.99 for the year, so now's a great time to join before the hike. As a sponsor of the seasonal HoopTober challenge over on Letterboxd, they've got an active free month trial/promo for new subs available. There's plenty of new content slated for both Sept. and October including a RoboCop docuseries.)

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Well fudge, I tried to sub for the free month and accidentally did the year, lol
 
Hemotep said:
Well fudge, I tried to sub for the free month and accidentally did the year, lol
Click to expand...
Ah shoot, at least you get it for the lower price! Did they not auto apply the hooptober code?

Hopefully there's enough to justify the sub for you. It's a rather eclectic selection and growing quite rapidly (something that gives me hope since Shudder has been slowing on content since the AMC cuts). There's even a handful of under-the-radar foreign remakes of classic franchises (Scream, Fright Night, and The Eye) that I've been eyeing.
 
EvanBenner said:
Ah shoot, at least you get it for the lower price! Did they not auto apply the hooptober code?

Hopefully there's enough to justify the sub for you. It's a rather eclectic selection and growing quite rapidly (something that gives me hope since Shudder has been slowing on content since the AMC cuts). There's even a handful of under-the-radar foreign remakes of classic franchises (Scream, Fright Night, and The Eye) that I've been eyeing.
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I'll definitely watch enough to justify the price. It's not bad for a year at the lower price. But it didn't auto apply the code. At least not once I entered my info and clicked through. No biggie just funny I messed it up.
 
12. Subject

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The first half of this had real potential with an Old Boy style plot that could have gone a lot of different ways. The way it did go was ... odd? On one level it's a psychological deep dive, or at least tries to be, and that works. But it should have stayed at metaphysical horror for the effect to work. Instead it goes for creature horror and doesn't really pull that off.

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EvanBenner said:
Using the holiday to whittle away at my long neglected Netflix backlog.

Apart from a few small flourishes that made me go, "Hey, that's interesting," Viking Wolf is let down by how painfully typical it is for a werewolf movie.

💀💀🦴

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Ah, damn. This was on my list. There aren't many werewolf movies and despite the title this one seemed to get decent reviews.
 
Hemotep said:
Well fudge, I tried to sub for the free month and accidentally did the year, lol
Click to expand...

EvanBenner said:
Ah shoot, at least you get it for the lower price! Did they not auto apply the hooptober code?

Hopefully there's enough to justify the sub for you. It's a rather eclectic selection and growing quite rapidly (something that gives me hope since Shudder has been slowing on content since the AMC cuts). There's even a handful of under-the-radar foreign remakes of classic franchises (Scream, Fright Night, and The Eye) that I've been eyeing.
Click to expand...

I was tempted to try a year, but they don't like Canada.
 
Hemotep said:
Ah, damn. This was on my list. There aren't many werewolf movies and despite the title this one seemed to get decent reviews.
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Yeah, I think that's why I feel most let down by it, because it gives the promise of a regional take on the werewolf mythos, but it doesn't make that integral and then fails to use its characters to any depth.

For comparison, I enjoyed Troll much more because the regional content was integral to an otherwise typical kaiju movie.
 
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