Watched a couple the last few days.
The Neon Demon: Alright, I'll admit it does look really good and all, but where's the fucking plot? There's at least the vague sense that the movie's trying to build up to something in the beginning, but then somewhere halfway through it all just unravels and ends up feeling more like a collection of random events strung together. Also, how is this a horror movie or a thriller in any way exactly? It doesn't feel like anything TRULY horrifying happens until like the last quarter of the movie. I guess the movie's main message is supposed to be something like 'the fashion industry is inhuman and it will chew people up and spit them out without a second glance' or something like that? Wow, truly revolutionary and profound, never heard that opinion before in this day and age :^)
I'll still give it a 6/10, mostly because I'm always easily swayed by stylish visuals, but.. eh.
Oh, one more thing: the dialogue feels like it was written by somebody who's never actually had a conversation with a real person before
End of the Line: Crazy Christian cultists start massacring people in order to 'save' them. Movie follows a bunch of people trying to survive the attack in an underground subway system. Has some pretty okay gore and special effects work. Waste of some pretty cool creature designs though, terribly underused. I felt like there's sort of a shift in tone in the movie between like the first 20 or 30 minutes and the rest of it, and apparently other people who've reviewed it also seem to feel the same. Personally, I was actually almost feeling the first part, but things start to fall apart rapidly as the movie goes on. One of my main gripes w/ the movie is that it pulls the LOL LOUD NOISE SPOOKY JUMPSCARE shtick just a bit too often for my tastes. Moreover, some of the acting is... questionable, to say the least. It also kind of annoys me that it FEELS like the movie is setting up potentially interesting characters (ie the reluctant middle-aged cultist) and then ends up not really doing anything with them at all... Also, I found the finale to be utterly ridiculous. I guess this is an okay way to pass the time when you're REALLY bored, but at the same time, I feel like I could've spent that time much better... I guess its like a 4.5 / 10 or something
We Are What We Are (2013): Apparently this is supposed to be a remake of a Mexican movie, although quite a few details have supposedly been changed. Since I haven't actually seen the original, I can't pass any judgement on whether or not this remake is any good by comparison. Still, taken on its own, I REALLY enjoyed it. Not exactly 'horror' in the conventional sense, I feel it's more somewhere between a thriller and drama. Movie's about a reclusive family living in a small town somewhere in the US, trying to cope with the death of the family matriarch and carrying on with the family traditions. Unfortunately, those traditions involve.. cannibalism. Trouble's approaching both from within the family and from the outside, as the daughters become reluctant to continue the family traditions (much to their increasingly deranged father's dismay) and a persistent storm has started to uncover the plot of land where the family's victims are buried. Overall, where the movie really shines in my opinion is the acting. Almost all of the actors (except the little boy, because lol child actors) perform REALLY well. Also, there's this constant slow-burning, all-encompassing gloomy atmosphere that starts with the torrential downpour in the beginning and doesn't really let up.
7/10