Weekly Cinemeh

Hello, and welcome back to Weekly Cinemeh, where this weeks theme was monster movies. I have loved monsters since I was a kid, and monster movies have always been some of my favorite, be it supernatural or Kaiju or something in between. We had a lot of fun this week, so without further ado, to the list!

1: Trollhunter
This is a great Norwegian film about a bunch of college students filming a documentary about bear poachers. Along the way they start to follow a suspected poacher only to find out that he is actually a troll hunter.  After this revelation, the group follows him to learn about trolls and get the word out about them. This movie is fantastic. I love the idea behind it, and the mythology they set up is super fun. The acting is good, and the trolls are well designed. The only problem I have with it is the shaky cam thing that all of the mockumentary monster/horror movies use for realism. Its not bad enough to make the movie unwatchable, it just makes a couple scenes odd, though they also do some fun stuff with it. I would go into that, but I don't want to spoil the movie. Watch it, its great.

Eshi: Trollhunter is everything I like to see in a monster movie. I dig that the trolls have always been a thing, people just don't believe in them. I enjoy the complexity of the world environment and the individuality of the trolls. I agree with Brian that the shaky cam shit is annoying but I've certainly seen worse. There are also some really beautiful shots of the Norwegian countryside, some of which are made metal as fuck by giant rampaging fucking monsters.

2: Thale
Another Norwegian film, though this one was shot for almost nothing. For a movie made for only $10,000 it is amazing, and even without knowing about the budget it was a good movie. Its a movie about a couple guys who clean houses after people die in them. The two main characters get called to a house out in the wilderness and start to clean it out when they stumble across a secret basement with a strange naked girl in a bathtub named Thale. Slowly they start to realize that she is not normal. The woman in the movie is a Hulder, a mythological being from Norwegian folk tales. I don't know a lot about the folklore behind the Hulder, so I can't speak to that, but the rest of the movie is cool. It feels like the setup to something bigger, as there is some underground organization hunting Thale, but it doesn't go to far into it. I found out that they are making a sequel, and I am looking forward to it. This isn't the best movie ever made, the dialog feels a little forced at times and switches gears very quickly from one topic to a completely different topic for like no reason. Other than that, its a good movie, and I hope that the sequel continues what this movie started.

Eshi: I was originally drawn to Thale because of my love for mythology, its pretty fucking difficult to find a good folklore based movie sometimes and Thale came in the midst of a dry spell for me. It delivered exceptionally. There are some pretty ham-fisted cliches but they manage to not actively detract from the film. I'm a bit giddy for the sequel.

3: The Host
This movie is a Korean movie about why industrial pollution in water is bad. It revolves around a mutated fish-monster that starts rampaging around the Han river in Seoul killing and capturing people. During its initial rampage it kidnaps a kid and apparently releases a virus that starts to contaminate the populous. The father of the girl it kidnaps starts to look for her along with her grandfather, aunt and uncle so that they can rescue her before the monster kills her. This movie shifts in tone a lot. It goes from silly to tense very quickly. I have a strange love for Korean movies. I don't think I have ever seen one that isn't a little sad in the end, and that's okay. This movie falls into that as well, but it wasn't bad. The Host was fun and tense and well worth watching. A couple bits of the story seemed a little odd, especially surrounding the story of the virus, but other than that it was a good movie. Watch it.

Eshi: This is the story of a starry-eyed giant fish-monkey trying to get by in a crazy, messed up world after being mutated by formaldehyde. There are very few actually serious moments in this film, and yet still no one can be happy. The prologue is pretty ridiculous, but not really that far out of tone from the rest of the movie. Also, the design for the monster is fucking bad ass, which is always high marks for a monster movie.