Weekly Cinemeh

Hello again~
This week's theme was horror movies that are also bottle movies. For those of you who don't know a bottle movie is a movie that takes place almost or completely in a single location. Combining this with horror seems like a great idea, and it was. There are a lot of "fuck that" moments in movies, and that make for entertaining watching (for me at least). So, without further ado: the list!

1: Leviathan
This is a movie about robocop fighting sahagin. Not really I guess, but there are robot suits and Peter Weller does use one. This is a fun movie about a bunch of people trapped in an underwater mining facility after one of them gets infected with a gene altering sickness that turns them into fish people. This was a fairly standard monster movie, and for a minute I thought that they might break the trope and let the black character live through the whole movie, but then they kill him for like no reason in an end scene that bordered on the ridiculous due to the amount of danger they cram in around 30 seconds (oh no, we might not get saved. Oh shit, sharks. Oh shit, sea monsters). Not great, but a good movie to watch with friends while drinking.

Eshi: Brian went with Robocop and sahagin but to me this movie can't help but be Buckaroo Bonzai vs the Deep Ones. This movie is chocked full of nope, deep sea mining? Nope. Reanimating corpses full of gene manipulating virus type thing? Fuck nope. Spending time isolated underwater with Keith David? ... Maybe, but I don't see that going well. I agree with Brian pretty whole-heartedly on this one, get a good buzz going before you hit play on this one.

2: Below
A movie about a WWII American submarine rescuing a hospital ship's crew after it gets attacked. Soon after shit starts to go down on the sub when a ghost starts messing with everyone. If this movie didn't rely so heavily on the jump scare it would have been far better. The general idea was kind of cool, and there are some genuinely unsettling scenes, but to often did shit have to pop out of nowhere to try to scare the audience. The acting was better than most horror movies, but still a little shaky at times. Another good movie to watch with people while you drink and poke fun at it (it occurs to me that this is true of every movie). On a side note, I have never seen a movie where Holt McCallany didn't play an asshole.

Eshi: I always like a movie where the asshole gets some poetic justice and this movie is all of that. None of the characters are particularly likeable and most of them are either fucking idiots or dickbags. I've been feeling pretty cthulian lately so I was deeply disappointed that this was a ghost movie. That said it was still pretty good, worth watching on a slow evening anyway.

3: John Carpenter's The Thing
I really love this movie, as it was one of the first horror movies that had me guessing constantly as to what was going to happen when I watched it as a kid. The base premise of the movie is designed to make everyone in the movie untrustworthy and that creates a good level of tension for the audience. It does horror well, and that doesn't happen enough. If you haven't seen this version, you should watch it.

Eshi: The Thing is a classic for a reason. I have a colossal nerd on for practical effects and this movie does practical effects insanely well. Other than some unfortunate puppy violence and my general disapproval of Kurt Russel this is a damn fine film. We are, for the record, talking about the 1982 version for those too paranoid to click a link. It is the best version. If you haven't, see this movie. Do it.

Honorable mention: Crash Course
A great channel on youtube that seeks to educate people in an entertaining way. I have recently finished the history section of the channel and am focusing on the astronomy side of the channel now, but there are plenty of other subjects covered. There is a lot of focus on understanding the global/universal contexts from where things arise, and that makes it a step above the rest. These kinds of things help you understand why something happened, which is often just as important as the thing happening if we are to avoid the mistakes of the past.

Eshi: Yay Nerds!