Well I gotta say I was really looking forward to this since it’s supposed to be a spiritual successor to Re-Animator and From Beyond, but I was extremely disappointed. It’s more weird 90s low budget softcore TV movie than 80s campy body horror. A lot of it had “filmed in the directors house” vibes, which is fine, but the acting is atrocious. I don’t know if they were going for that or not but it was distracting how bad it was. Heather Graham, who isn’t Meryl Streep by any means, but is usually pretty good, had the same expression and tone the entire movie. Even when she was “possessed” by the other entity. She sounded like she was reading off cue cards the whole time.
The premise was decent, based of a Lovecraft story, but I found it pretty boring. I was hoping having Barbara Crampton in it would be a highlight but she was just…there. I’m usually pretty forgiving about character actions in movies. I’m a big believer in that people don’t make smart decisions in stressful situations and can often do incredibly stupid things. That being said, no one in this movie acts like a human. They just go along with things when people wouldn’t and they argue against things that they can plainly see.
The biggest thing for me, and this is probably a very biased opinion because I am a staunch supporter of therapy and have been in different kinds of treatment for a long time, but the way Heather Graham’s character is shown as a psychiatrist was so behind the times and ridiculous that it just infuriated me. Early in the movie she meets a potential patient and talks to him for all of 5 minutes, then goes home and tells her husband all about him and give him a diagnosis of multiple personality disorder. She also hypnotizes a patient to try to help him overcome violent outbursts but she’s able to put him under in seconds and he gets stuck that way while she talks to another person and it’s just too over the top for me. I know the movie is supposed to be campy and silly at times but it just left a super bad taste in my mouth the way they portrayed psychiatry and therapy. But like I said my personal experiences are probably making me take it more personal than I should.
But overall it was pretty generic and disappointing and I wouldn’t recommend it. I really wanted to love it especially seeing it have such a high rotten tomatoes score and lots of critics loving it but it feels like another moment where I’m watching a different movie than everybody else watched.
I just hate the wet noises that accompany it. Same thing with kissing scenes where they have a shotgun mic basically inside their mouths. It drives my sensory issues up a wall.
Somehow gen z’s early exposure to porn has made them more prudish than the religious. Literally. I’ve Seen so many posts on Reddit and had real life conversations with gen z people where they’ve said that they hate when couples publicly say their trying for a baby because it means they’re being “creampied” and that’s awkward for them.
It’s weird for two reasons. One, if you struggle to get pregnant it puts a lot of external pressure on you and you’ll have to go back and let people know you’re potentially infertile. Two, talking about biological things isn’t appropriate in some settings. I don’t want to hear about your colonoscopy. I don’t want to hear that you’re raw dogging your wife. I don’t want to hear about you surgery. Sir, this is a Wendy’s.
That sounds lonely. We all live together. Sharing is a much better default than walling everyone off and judging everyone for sharing really basic parts of life is kind of sad. Obviously there are limit, but “we’re trying to have a baby” and “I’m having surgery” shouldn’t be something that we’re pressured to not share.
I find it more weird that your coworkes talking about trying to get a child results in you imagening them “raw dogging”.
When one of my coworkers had a child born i also didn’t make a point of imagening the delivery process. I just congratulated them and asked them jokingly how much sleep they caught the last night.
Reminds me of some post I read on Reddit regarding a Rimworld sex mod. So many people thought it was completely immoral and had no place in the game.
A game in which you can kidnap and cannibalis children, make clothes of their skin and sell it, a game where you can strap people to a bed, steal all of their organs, cut of their lega so they cant escape and keep them as a blood transfusion slave for ever. Missionary sex between a married couple in their own bed room is wrong and immoral.
That was definitely one of the weirdest takes I have read in a while, still is.
This i can understand though. It is not that the sex itself would be immoral. It is that putting the sex into the context of this violence is immoral.
And i have to say i find this important. Sex to me is an expression of affection with my partner and “sacred” for that. I don’t want it tainted with the banality of pornography or the psychotic issues that make people connect sex and violence.
The new UCLA “Teens and Screens” study, conducted by the Center for Scholars & Storytellers, found that across 1,500 members of Gen Z, ages 10 to 24, young people wanted to see platonic relationships between onscreen characters, and many felt sex wasn’t necessary for story plot. (Only the respondents ages 13 to 24 were asked about sexual content.)
“While it’s true that teens want less sex on TV and in movies, what the survey is really saying is that teens want more and different kinds of relationships reflected in the media they watch,” said Yalda T. Uhls
YESSSSS! I've been saying for years that it's time for a Highlander reboot. The original series is hard to watch now because TV writing, special effects, and stunt choreography is so much better now! A Highlander series would be amaaaaazing today! SO PUMPED!
Also, Henry Cavill is SUCH A GOOD CHOICE! He's a huge nerd that takes his roles very seriously and loves to keep the show lore accurate and deep!
I hate sex scenes in movies. By far the worst sex scene I’ve seen was sthe end of Sausage Party. I felt physically ill from it. I watched the movie with my parents and they thought my disgust was hilarious. Now I rarely watch movies other than superhero movies with them.
I can’t watch many movies from the 80s and 90s because of the cringe sex scenes. My parents think that time was the best time for movies and they’re just wrong lol
The other thing about watching at home is the comfort level. Regardless of breaks, if I’m in my big comfy chair with no distractions from other movie-goers, it’s easier to be immersed and watch for longer periods.
That being said, his “unbound genius” needs to get reined the F in. I got flamed on Reddit back in the day for suggesting The Irishman was too damned long, but you could pick any random point in the middle of it and cut 45 minutes and nothing would be lost. If you feel the need as a director to make movies this long and bloated, just make it a miniseries for god’s sake.
At the very least, don’t get pissy when theaters want to give people a stretch/bathroom break.
I suspect that is true as well. Most of the really dramatic girls I’ve known have been super into romcoms and reality TV. If not causing the behavior they are at least reinforcing it.
A Boomer here, and I’m finding these comments to be very interesting–mostly because I’m realizing I agree in many cases! Far from prudish, just last night I fast-forwarded past the sex scenes in the first episode of a new streamer series. “Yeah, yeah, I get it…you’re hot for each other. Can we move it along, please?”
There it is again. People acting like genZ are the first to say no and protest to things…. This simply isn’t true.
Genz didn’t invent this idea of protesting it . Women against pornography was formed in the 60s. So we know people have been bothered by it for more than one generation and people have tried to act against it.
I don’t think this should be a generation topic. Film makers are by far and large trying to get people to watch their shit using gags and named actors. they use sex and violence in film like capitalists use sugar and salt in food to get people to consume it. It’s a crutch.
I find this so funny, how a lot of “Boomer media” makes such a fuss about discovering that Gen Z ist also just normal people, with some more progressed ideas and ideals but also tired of being overloaded with information and media.
I think part of it now is that they also realize that half of the fads they have been making up about how the youth of the 2000/2010 era with how sex, violence and drugs craving it alledgely was, were just bullshit.
Apparently I’m the only one that likes being titillated by movies. I don’t get the “it adds nothing to the plot” complaint. Tons of movies have action scenes and gratuitous violence that add nothing to the plot, yet i don’t see complaints about that. 90% of John Wick is gratuitous violence that added nothing to the plot, but I still love it.
I think this says more about American prudishness and people’s unhealthy attitudes towards sex than anything.
Bunch of unnecessary death? Cool and fun! An unnecessary titty? Awkward and gratuitous.
Fuck all of you. I want more nudity and sex in my movies and the comparative lack of it compared to the 80s and 90s feels like we’re going out of our way to exclude a huge part of life from art because it makes the prudes out there uncomfortable. But those same people are happy to watch nameless dudes get creatively and graphically killed for half a movie’s run time.
I want more gratuitous sex and less gratuitous moral pandering
I don’t want porn. I want art to stop awkwardly excluding a major part of life.
“Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny.” It’s like movies these days are all set in this weird Twilight Zone world where sexuality just isn’t a thing. I find this far creepier than the gratuitous sex scenes of the 80s.
This is because some people aren’t on the spectrum and ignored. They deserve representation. If you find that weird this is more a problem with you because maybe you have been submerged into sexuality for far too long that anything lacking sex is weird. It’s like being addicted to a food taste and realizing there are other types of food and you think it’s weird that other types of food exist , well then : you’re the weird one.
Porn is super easy to access. There are more hours of porn recorded than there are hours of my life left.
R-rated sex scenes are literally competing with a host of just better options.
Not once has a fake sex scene in a movie not trigger cringe in me. It’s nice to see the actresses’ titties but that is it. Fade to black, imply they fucked and move on. Pornhub literally is a click away.
The fact that you only equate sex and nudity to porn shows the problem. Sex and nudity can be fun, dramatic, scary, or funny depending on the context. It wouldn’t be “competing” with porn.
I can’t suspend my disbelief when media pretends sexuality just doesn’t exist or isn’t relevant.
It’s not 100%, someone else brought up Crank which has a hilarious sex scene that I wouldn’t cut and it’s vital to the plot.
Most sex scenes just have this feel of “the director wanted to see actresses’ naked and had the power of authority and money to make it happen”. It doesn’t feel fun it has an air of exploitation to it, which I’ll admit lots of porn does too, but not all. The best porn is when everyone involved likes it.
I think a sex scene in an otherwise not-pornographic film needs to be second guessed. Does cutting it ruin the plot? Could it just be implied and move on?
I just think they really need to justify it more than normally do.
I just think they really need to justify it more than normally do.
Why? Why can’t they just have it for fun like any other type of gratuitous scene in a movie? I agree it’s not usually done well, but that doesn’t mean it can’t or shouldn’t be done.
99% of previous attempts have been, what I would call “weak shit”. It’s up to the writers/director/actors to bring their A game and prove themselves, because so far, I’ve yet to see one i wouldn’t mind being cut out entirely.
Because one of John Wicks main reasons for existing is choreographed violence? And the violence is sort of character building in the way it shows John Wick’s skill as a killer. There is a case to be made here where sex is sort of superfluous, because unlike John Wick, choreographed sex generally does not contribute to story beats unless it’s a porno. And there’s nothing unhealthy about being uncomfortable watching an intimate moment unless your porn addled brain has made you desensitizes to sex.
I’m not saying I want a movie with non-stop sex, that would obviously just be porn. I’m saying the “it doesn’t progress the plot” complaint about sex in movies is bullshit when those same people watch other movies that are full of gratuitous shit that doesn’t move the plot (violence, action, contrived drama).
Movies have been all but stripped of sexuality other than clumsy attempts at pandering to lgbt people. I think some of it is an overcorrection from Weinstein and Me-Too, some of it is just America’s puritan cultural hangups that have always been there, and some of it is the effect of Gen-Z growing up with an abundance of porn and now they can’t associate sex/nudity on a screen as art (or even just fun).
Violence and action do drive plot. They can build character and be narratively cathartic. Sex in movies does not do that because sex is a subjective experience between two people.
violence is not the same as sex. it’s expected to see violence in an action movie. it would be expected to see sex in a porno. i’m not surprised people don’t want sex in their action movies
You’re right, it’s way worse. And it’s disturbing that we’re culturally encouraged to find fun in violence but sex needs to be cordoned off to a containment genre and excised from mainstream art. I’m not saying it needs to be in every action movie - but its been obvious for a while they’re going out of their way to avoid it even in places where it would make sense or be fun.
With all due respect, have you read the article? Attributing this to prudishness misses a lot of what’s actually being said: that shoe-horning in romance or sex for no reason is the problem, as well as lack of attention being given to developing platonic relationships. Exploring non-romantic or sexual relationships better doesn’t necessarily mean cutting out sex and romance, and imo, would likely lead to better sex and romance in TV and movies.
But I agree with you also, that gratuitous sex and nudity can be used to great effect. Another user lemmy.world/comment/4888355 (don’t know how to link comments, hopefully this will work) posted a link to the article “Everyone is beautiful, no-one is horny” above, and this really highlights the problem on this side of things, in my view
After reading the article it looks like they aren’t being prude. They just wanted to see more healthier relationship spectrums. I think that’s a fair call. Not all story points have to be about sex.
Plus representation matters.
There are asexuals. And many other sexuality types in the world. Violence is not making a point on that so I don’t know where you’re going with that.
There is also echoing healthier relationships between men and women. I’ve known far too many people who cry friendzone and watch complete shit like friends and HIMYM and the various sitcoms that echo very dehumanizing, simplistic, unhealthy relationships between men and women where they stubbornly won’t relate to each other and sexuality is used as a tolerance or payoff of each other’s existence.
So whiile we could debate gratuitous violence has an impact, I think bad relationships and how they have been presented as a template has had a different impact they are trying to discuss.
I’m fine with asexuals and representation. But currently it feels like 99% of media is catering to either asexuals or homosexuals.
And I bring up violence to point out the double standard. When it comes to nudity people scrutinize if it’s relevant to the plot - but don’t tend to do that with violence or clunky moral preaching.
oh please you don’t need representation because you don’t want to have sex. that has been a thing for as long as can be and no one has a problem with it. the worst oppression you might face is family members asking you when you will be having a child
when did i say it takes anything away from me? I’m just saying it’s not particularly important every single minor facet of life needs to shoehorn representation for such a minor thing as not wanting to have sex.
Someone needs to remind Scorsese that he makes an entertainment product, one of many, he is not redefining the meaning of life itself. Hell, here is a hot take, the old Jim Carrey movie “The Mask” is a better movie than anything Scorsese has ever made. I can say I go back to watch The Mask more anyway. He needs to stop huffing his own farts.
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