Saturday, May 15, 2010

Splinter

Last night I was watching the 2009 film Drag Me to Hell, directed by Sam Raimi. The film tells the story of a young loan manager, Christine (played by Alison Lohman) who refuses to grant an extension on a mortgage for an elderly Gypsy woman, causing her to be evicted. The elderly woman places a curse on Christine, in which she will be subjected to three days of increasing supernatural terror before a demonic creature arrives to drag her to Hell. It's a really fun movie that's kind of a contemporary take on the M. R. James short story "Casting the Runes". Alison Lohman, who was cast at the last minute to replace Ellen Page, was an attractive lead.

Later on I watched another film, from 2008, called Splinter, directed by Toby Wilkins, which was a very low-budget horror film in which a young couple on a camping holiday are carjacked by an escaped convict and his drug-addict girlfriend. When they need to stop to fill up the car at a service station, they come under attack from a gruesome parasite which grows inside the host, which the parasite pretty much tears apart with long spikes and bizarre contortions. The movie is slightly similar to The Mist in certain ways , in that it's one of thse "seige" horror films. It is a pretty effective, and very gruesome horror film, and it's short enough that it keeps the tension up.

The finla of last night's movies was a 1997 film called In the Company of Men, directed by Neil LaBute. The film is a very darkly comic drama about two complete bastards: Chad (played by Aaron Eckhart) and Howard (played by Matt Molloy) two thirtysomething businessmen who have recently been dumped by their girlfriends and are heading to a regional office in another city for six weeks. Bored and angry at the world, especially women, Chad decides that they should exact "payback" on womankind by finding a vulnerable woman whom they will each seperately romance and date over the course of the six weeks before dumping her. When they meet deaf typist Christine (Stacy Edwards) they believe that they have found the perfect target. The film is intense, disturbing and bitterly funny, with Aaron Eckhart producing one of the most disturbing corporate sociopaths since American Psycho's Patrick Bateman.

Today I went out to the city centre to get aborthday present for my Dad. I got him a book called The Edge of Madness by Michael Dobbs, and a birthday card. I also got a book for myself called The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. On my way home I stopped off to get some groceries for the coming week.

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