Prolixity, or a tendency to be wordy, can be seen either an effective stylistic device or as unnecessary bloating of language. The decision often rests with the reader. -Wikipedia
Prolixity is about gaming, geeks, genre movies, pop culture, design, and whatever else comes to mind. We are frequently cranky and often armed with dictionaries.
So I can’t really post the image directly here because it will ruin the gag, but you should follow this link: Amnesia is a pretty scary game. (Safe for work!)
I am a huuuuuge fan of zombie movies, but even us fans have to admit that there’s been an over-saturation of zombies in the last decade. A few of these movies have been really good or at least fun to watch — like [REC] and Resident Evil! — but we’ve also been inundated with complete crap — like [REC2] and Resident Evil 2!
As a quality control measure, I swore off English language zombie movies a couple of years ago. It’s not that aaaaaaall English movies are bad and aaaaaaaall foreign movies are good, but usually avoiding English movies weeds out the worst of the Zach Snyder-esque “movie-as-music-video” pieces*. At least with a foreign movie I’m likely to get a little sense of another culture and some scenery at worst, and a neat intellectual piece at best. (Yes, basically I am just a huge movie snob.)
The point of all this is to say that I plan on breaking my pledge for The Curse of the Buxom Strumpet, starring Ian McKellar, Dame Judy Dench, and Gillian Anderson. The movie will “follow a 1700s town in England that becomes overrun with zombies”. Period costumes! Strumpets! JUDY DENCH KILLING ZOMBIES. Yes. Please.
On the topic of zombies, here’s someone’s list of the 15 most badass deaths in zombie movies, which is amusing if not entirely accurate. (A tree is not a zombie.) And if you’re a zombie over-preparer like me you might be tempted to buy this “Z-SAT Zombie Survival Aptitude Test” from ThinkGeek.
I wrote this about six months ago for another website, but it seems equally appropriate for Prolixity. I have seen a lot of scary movies since I wrote it, but I’m not sure any deserve a spot more than the movies that are already here. Bunhongsin (The Red Shoes) was extremely well done, but I can’t say it keeps me up at night. La Horde, a French zombie movie, would be another candidate, but I need to see it another time or two to be sure.
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It was actually pretty tough to make this list — I ended up with 15 good movies and had to winnow out the weakest entries. My final standard of recognition was how long the movie sat with me after I turned it off. Did it haunt me that night? Was I still chewing over the ending at lunch the following week? Do I still to this day worry about finding… well, just wait and read the list.
The most influential horror movie of the last 10 years has to be Saw. It spawned a million sequels, revitalized indy horror, and really gave a name to the torture porn genre (link is safe and informative!). That being said, I generally loathe torture porn movies and you won’t find Saw or any of its ilk on this list. Instead we have an unsurprising 5 zombie movies, 3 generally supernatural titles, and 2 plain ol’ human killers.
And so, in alphabetical order:
… or how I learned to stop worrying and love the fast zombies. This had everything you could ask for from a serious zombie movie: “who is the real monster?” philosophizing, a solid origin story, devastating urban wasteland, and a true crushing sense of being alone. I walked out of this movie with the sense that I had just watched the most realistic portrayal of a zombie apocalypse since Dawn of the Dead classic.
Frailty talks a lot about god, has a twist ending, and stars Matthew McConaughey, and yet it improbably all comes together in a very satisfying way. I almost can’t say anything about the movie without giving away a bit of the magic. Let’s just call it an interesting take on the line between religious fervor and insanity. If you enjoy psychological thrillers more than blood’n'guts, this movie is for you.
Okay, let’s get this out of the way up front: I hated the end of this movie. The twist? At the end? Arrrrgh. Crappy crappity crap crap. But up until that point, High Tension lived up every bit to its name. The movie oozes terror from every pore. Plus it’s French, so if you watch it with subtitles it also counts as a cultural experience.
I debated internally for a while about whether this is actually even a horror movie. And really, that says a lot about the quality of this film: it has a vampire and more than one horrible bloody death, but at the end you are left with a sense of poetry and perverse whimsy that transcends the genre. Hollywood made an American remake of this, of course, those buzzards. It’s titled “Let Me In”, which makes me think right off the bat that someone doesn’t understand the true message of the original.
Of all the movies on my list, I predict this one will cause the most groans. (Stuff it, Max!) I stand by my decision, though. Rodriguez (and I suspect a bit of Tarantino) smooshed up all of the greatest genre cliches into one rollicking ride of a movie. It has hot babes, dastardly men, military intrigue, cheesy over-the-top special effects, and a LEG GUN. I’m not saying it’s a pinnacle of art, but much like another movie that almost made it on this list, Zombieland, Planet Terror is two hours of good fun American movie-making.
From a raucous American movie to reserved Canadian content! This is a small, subtle movie with approximately 3 sets, 5 actors, and one giant idea. What if a deadly disease isn’t spread through biting or airborne molecules? What if instead it is spread.. through speech? A linguistic virus — it’s a fascinating concept. In a press interview at the time the director (Bruce McDonald, famous Canadian!) said that his movie doesn’t have zombies but instead “conversationalists”. Conversationalists. Love it. Love it! Love love lovelovelololololooooooooooooooo……
So there I am, sitting in my dark apartment by myself, watching a cinéma-vérité-style movie about zombies in a dark apartment building. It was TERRIFYING. And you don’t have to be in an apartment to find [REC] scary — this Spanish flick excels at being horrifying without showing its hand. The characters are confused, they’re scared, they’re in the dark, and things want to eat them. Plus: subtitles, so again you can feel all cultured.
Interestingly enough, despite having seen many of them, the only Asian horror movie on my list is.. an American remake. And don’t get me wrong: most J- or K-horror remakes are abominable, but The Ring somehow manages to keep the heart of a good atmospheric ghost story with just a dash of North American dazzle. Plus, it has that scene. You know the one, with the TV? Possibly the most horrifying 10 seconds EVER. (I also spent way too long thinking about who I would pass my Evil Video Tape to if I got Ring’ed in real life.)
David Caruso is frequently scary in a oh-god-why-am-I-watching-CSI-Miami way, but he delivers a subtle little performance in Session 9. This movie is definitely a psychological horror, with an abandoned asylum, mysterious patient tapes, and ambiguous flashbacks. Probably the best flick on this whole list for the squeamish.
Well duh.
Always a bridesmaid: Cloverfield, The Decent, Pulse (yes, Pulse), Tale of Two Sisters, Zombieland.
Look, I’m just going to say it: I have a PVR full of Criminal Minds episodes and I will watch them all, possibly within days. (I tend to go on TV benders and just do marathons of whatever interests me.) I should probably be ashamed to admit this in public but instead today, ladies and gentlemen, I am here to defend Criminal Minds as a guilty pleasure.
There are many reasons why I shouldn’t admit my sordid affair in public: Criminal Minds is a procedural FBI drama on network television (shock!). Easily 75% of the episodes play out like this: In the intro someone is kidnapped or killed. The body is found after the credits and the team goes to investigate. Halfway through the hour one of the townsfolk go missing. The team kicks it into hyperdrive, catches the bad guy, saves the last victim, and Hotch gives a meaningful quotation in voice-over.
The Wire, it ain’t.
But the next time you’re flipping through rerun alley, here’s why you should choose Criminal Minds:
While the structure of each act rarely differs, the crimes are usually truly hinky. The show doesn’t stray away from the gritty, and there is usually a point in each episode where I am genuinely creeped out. However, although horrible, terrible things can happen to people each episode, the show rarely goes with the salacious sex crime angle, usually instead focusing on more unique pathologies like cannibalism.
The guest stars. Wil Wheaton, notorious nice guy, is a crazy rapist. Keith Carradine, C. Thomas Howell, and Tim Curry are terrifyingly evil in their plotlines, while now Oscar-winner Melissa Leo, Nicholas Brendan (Eeeee, Xander!), and Jane Lynch show up at points on the side of the law. It’s a character actor heaven, and great material for playing “Hey, it’s that guy!”.
The bromance. I love bromances! There is something just so appealing, to me, about seeing two or more people bond together and become family and fight adversity together. (I also love this aspect of Community.) Criminal Minds not only has this tight-knit group, but for most seasons three of them are women. They are smart, professional women who work their asses off and sometimes make mistakes and don’t date in the department. I think it would even pass the Bechdel Test, at least in the earlier seasons.
Dr. Spencer Reid. He has whimsical hair and genius smarts and is so emotionally distant that he would never, ever give me the approval I so desperately need. He’s, like, my perfect man.
Criminal Minds is available on DVD (not Instant Watch, boo) on US Netflix and reruns from the last six seasons are probably showing on your local channels at some point. As usual with television, the first three seasons are arguably the best.
Speaking of ARGs, if you’re not familiar with Marble Hornets then you are missing out on one of the joys of the Internet. Marble Hornets is a series of YouTube videos that started in 2009. They, ostensibly, tell the tale of an amateur filmmaker who is … well … let’s just say he’s not alone.
Above is the first video in the series. I would recommend working up through the beginning of the Marble Hornets Twitter feed (avert your eyes and scroll down until 2009!), which links to all applicable videos in the correct order. There is also a Marble Hornets wiki, of course, but it has many spoilers.
The MH series is based on The Slender Man mythos, which was in turn cooked up by those mad bastards on the Something Awful forums. (Seriously, pretty much all internet culture leads to SA or /b/, which is kind of awesome and terrifying to think about.) The Slender Man is .. tall, faceless, and wears a suit. And waits.
Written, directed, and edited by one Ti West, this movie is certainly a labor of love. Mr. West set out to recreate a typical 80s horror movie, complete with techno soundtrack, rotary phones, and that favorite boogyman of the 80s, Satantic cults. Attention is paid to every detail, and one certainly forgets that this is a recent film.
And that’s the problem, really. House of the Devil is a pitch-perfect replica of the disposable horror genre, and the result is… disposable! The plot lacks depth, the ending is ludicrous even by schlock standards, and most importantly I was never scared.
I mean, it was clearly a nice artistic endeavor, and to be fair there is the faintest scent of solid old school Black Christmas-style horror. However, at the end of the day an homage that doesn’t add anything to the original is just a boring old replica.
Put away that acid wash, because I give this movie a mere: ✚✚✚✚✚
This movie is often inaccurately billed as a horror movie, I guess because it’s easily marketable that way. That does Cure an injustice, however — it’s more a psychological thriller than anything, and one with some genuinely interesting points to make. Yes, people die. Yes, there is some blood (but not gore). But this is not a horror movie!
Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (who also directed one of my favorites, Pulse) does an amazing job of making the world claustrophobic in a way that’s reminiscent of Kubrick. The movie is tense and creepy, and meditates on how much we can control our own behavior. Plus, check out the neat Japanese movie poster!
I watch a lot of Asian horror and I will fully admit that a lot of the appeal is the grody exploitation factor. In this case, however, Cure is a genuinely great movie that was clearly put together with a lot of care and thought.
So let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: the shoes are pink. It’s not your screen… they’re pink. Not red.
Okay, so that aside I figured that this would be your average Asian ghost movie and it turned out to be much better and much twistier than I expected! The characters were good, the directing was excellent, and it was much more than the standard “oh no, hair!”. I was even surprised by the ending, and I am one of those smug bastards who loves to guess the ending ahead of time.
This was much more fun than it should have been. It has a slightly suspicious cast — Ving Rhames? Elisabeth Shue? Jerry O’Connel? — and cameos by Richard Dreyfus and Eli Roth. (And no, I didn’t think I’d ever write a sentence with those two names.) There are boobs. So many boobs! And gore. Ohhhh, soooo much gore. Ludicrous amounts of gore and boobs and gory boobs.
Those factors alone would probably put the movie over the top enough to be a good watch, but it additionally there’s a … merciless quality. Director Alexandre Aja seems to have an almost palpable hatred of “young American” culture, and it oozes through the reels as beautiful blondes and boozy boys are literally torn to pieces before the might of the all consuming piranha horde.
Basically if you’re going to watch a killer fish movie, make it Piranha 2010!
On the topic of zombies, here’s someone’s list of the 
There are many reasons why I shouldn’t admit my sordid affair in public: Criminal Minds is a procedural FBI drama on network television (shock!). Easily 75% of the episodes play out like this: In the intro someone is kidnapped or killed. The body is found after the credits and the team goes to investigate. Halfway through the hour one of the townsfolk go missing. The team kicks it into hyperdrive, catches the bad guy, saves the last victim, and Hotch gives a meaningful quotation in voice-over.
I think it would even pass the 
