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The Descent | 100 Movies Bucket List

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  This is a re-watch that I was really looking forward to. I love this movie and have seen it multiple times so I was really glad to see it on the list. And as always, I loved it on this re-watch too. It hits you over the head from the very beginning. That opening scene is so brutal, and comes so out of nowhere that you have no idea where the film is going.  It's nice to get to know the characters, but we don't get to know them enough to easily differentiate between them. Before they get into the cave, a lot of them are interchangeable, and in the cave with low light, it can get way too easy to get people mixed up. We get into the cave quickly, and once we do, the anticipation never really lets up. Even on a first time blind watch, with no idea what could happen, the atmosphere alone is so tense and unsettling that you're just waiting for something bad to happen. A lot of the dialogue feels inauthentic or hits the ear wrong, but because the plot is so strong it doesn't ...
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Hokum | Film Review

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  A novelist (Adam Scott) staying in a remote inn in Ireland is forced to confront his dark past after hearing tales of a witch haunting the honeymoon suite. This has been such a great year for original horror. Whether the movies are good or not, I've been really enjoying getting to see them all! Unfortunately, I didn't love the movie. That being said, the main character, Ohm Bauman, is a great example of how to create an unlikeable character that you still want to follow and stay interested in.  The beginning feels very odd and discombobulated. It's quite hard to get into or take seriously, and then it starts to feel like a fever dream. The scenes feel disconnected from each other in a way that makes it hard to stay interested in. Though this does add to our impression of the character's state of mind. It also adds to the horror atmosphere. The horrors are overt from the very beginning, which feels original. They come thick and fast, and they don't really let up. T...
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Candyman (1992) | 100 Movies Bucket List

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  This was a re-watch that I was looking forward to. I'd only seen the film once before this watch, so many years ago that I couldn't remember it, and even the 2021 sequel doesn't stick in my mind, so I felt like I was going into this one fresh-ish. I really like this movie. Not enough horror movies make use of urban legends, and it's such an easy topic to create a scary movie out of. This one does a really good job of creating a myth around a figure, and actually making it scary, before we really get into the story. It moves slowly, but you become so invested in the story that you don't even notice, or really care. You become so wrapped up in the legend of Candyman, and the writing does a really great job of creating it in a way that gives the whole story a tense and creepy undertone without us having to see him, or even knowing if the legend is really true. But they also do a great job of making the story powerful. The scene where we are told the story of what hap...
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Psycho Killer | Film Review

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  After her husband is murdered, patrol officer Jane (Georgina Campbell) sets out to find the killer. I knew this film would be bad. I saw the ratings, I read the description, I went into it with my eyes completely open. I mainly watched it as a fan of Georgina Campbell, but also because I do genuinely like to occasionally watch bad movies, even if it just makes me appreciate how good the good ones are. So this was completely as expected. For a start, you can kind of tell it's going to be bad with a name like this. This is the absolute worst title to give a film about a psycho killer. The story itself isn't the most entertaining. It doesn't do enough to make us care about the characters. At the beginning I thought it might - the opening scene gave a lot of promise, but things quickly went downhill from there. The weakest scenes are the scenes with the killer. Not only do they feel totally unrealistic, but they're not even entertaining to watch. The movie tries to be bot...
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Book Review: Not Quite Dead Yet by Holly Jackson

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  Jet is a procrastinator, still waiting for her life to begin. But after a violent attack on Halloween, Jet's time has run out. With doctors certain she'll die in seven days, she decides to finally do something worthwhile, the last thing she'll ever do - solve her own murder. I'm a fan of Holly Jackson and have read all of her novels, so reading this one was a no-brainer. But the premise itself was so interesting that I probably would have picked it up anyway. It took me a while to get into this book, but when I did, I absolutely loved it! One of my main issues at the beginning of the book had to do with Jet as a character. She felt a lot younger than she actually was, and while I really like reading books about protagonists in their late 20s and older, reading this still felt like reading YA, which felt a bit jarring. You don't really get to know most of the characters, and of the few that you do, it takes a long time. And when you don't know them, it's ha...
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Hangover Square | 100 Movies Bucket List

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  This is another film that I'd never heard of before the bucket list, and I didn't really know what it was about before putting it on so I went in blind. I liked this movie. It gets right into things from the very first second, immediately engaging the audience in a really effective way. We don't know the context of the situation or who these people are, but we don't need to. The story is really compelling. We're thrown into this world, with a character who could be either a victim of a villain, and neither we as the audience, the characters around him, nor he himself, really know which one he is. The characters are great to watch. Between the 'horror' moments, the film kind of plays like a drama. We get to see the different relationship dynamics, we get to know who these people are, and the more interested we are in them, the more invested we are when the 'horror' moments happen. Because the film is so short, there's a limit to how much can hap...
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In The Grey | Film Review

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  A team of specialist operatives work together to retrieve a billion-dollar fortune. I was wary about this film, not just because the premise was quite vague, but because I don't tend to enjoy Guy Richie movies (with a couple of exceptions). But because of the cast, I wanted to give it a try. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, I didn't love this one. From the beginning, nothing about the film felt particularly original. The concept of the mission, and the characters, felt like amalgamations of other things that have already been seen. The voiceover was telling the audience way too much, rather than letting us figure things out by ourselves. The movie never tries to make the audience care about the mission. It does try to make us care about a select few characters, but even then this isn't particularly effective. It moves really quickly and is more than happy to leave the audience behind - it doesn't care if we catch up or not. Throughout the film some of the acting cho...
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