Pointing out The Virgin Spring connection reminds me that I’ll have to rewatch a lot of Bergman. I did like him, except for Wild Strawberries which is one of those art house classics that just puts me to sleep.

Craven directed the Scream sequels up through the fourth film in the series, so there’s that. None of them come close to the original. Neither does the seventh, which I just paid $9.99 to see in theaters. Plus tax.

Okay, but does the Night Of The Living Dead bit show the intestines being PULLED OUT? I remember the severed arm being bitten into. I guess I should have been more specific about gore. There’s a crappy looking decapitation in Four Flies On Grey Velvet in 1971, which was a year before Last House, but I didn’t want to count that. We also had the beheading in Polanski’s Macbeth.

Evil Dead - The tree rape bit was pretty oogie. I don’t know that I’d DELETE it but…well, like I said, no rape scene is easy to watch.

28 Days Later - Do you agree the second half was weaker than the first? I don’t know how I would have done the second half better. I never saw the sequels though the recent ones are getting good reviews, apparently Cillian Murphy’s character comes back in the recent one. Whether that’s due to Murphy’s recent popularity or not I’m not sure.

The cops are not good in Last House On The Left but have few scenes. Really nobody is all that good, one of the girls seems to be a teenager but her friend (the one who gets disembowelled) looks about 31. I never get tired of bringing up 30 year old teens in the movies.

Joe Bob Briggs discussed Ebert’s review in his commentary and claimed that the guys laughing at the rape scenes in ISOYG were doing it to distance themselves from the ugliness of what was happening. The retarded guy really does ruin a lot of it though, it’s hard not to laugh at how pathetic he is, both as a character and an actor.

Re: Ebert - I think I forgot to mention rewatching Blue Velvet, that should have been in the original post. I like the Dennis Hopper scenes more than the rest of it, but have perhaps been too hard on the rest of it. Ebert complained too much about the 1950s small-town satire, but that stuff was done better in Twin Peaks. Which of course I prefer to BV by a wide margin. I also think Isabella Rossellini gives kind of a bad performance in BV this time. I’d up my score for BV to two and a half stars, but I’m still annoyed that all the Lynch stuff I like now seems to be just TP and Mulholland Dr.

I don’t think Pitt ruins 12 Monkeys but his performance is weird. It’s notable that most of his film roles up through 1995, including Se7en, seemed to involve playing immature pricks. It’s notable that the best bit in Brazil, to me, involves the bit at the end where Jonathan Pryce is being interrogated by the guy at the desk, and you see shadows of people being executed on a conveyer belt or something behind him. Then you hear unearthly screams and two figures in baby masks rear up before the camera. It’s a great startling moment.

The acting and action sequences in the Snyder DOTD easily beat the original if you ask me, but I don’t want to defend Zack Snyder much since most of his films since then have been headaches.

Ebert loved Mean Streets from the beginning and it’s from him that I got the “it’s about Catholic guilt” thing. I don’t know who all else adored the film in 1973. I chose to start with it before watching the others back in 2005, but thought Taxi Driver blew it away when I finally watched that. I’ve seen a few random lists in recent years calling it his best film, but I can’t remember which ones they were so the hell with it.

Argento has a few other okay-ish films, the only one I feel really strongly for at this point is Deep Red which has its cheesy moments too, but which is a far better “mystery” than Suspiria. Suspiria also has a hilarious trailer. The cutoff point for Argento with me is Opera in 1987, everything after that was shitty, shitty shit. Just bad. He had an acting role in an acclaimed movie a couple years ago, now in his mid-80s.

If you’re not going to watch the Suspiria remake, and I don’t recommend it, go watch the climactic scene in the film when the witches’ lair is discovered by the heroine, which depicts a lot of ugly sex acts and creatures bloodily exploding all over the screen while a sad Thom Yorke song plays over it all. It’s the worst movie scene I can think of in recent memory.