NECA - General Thread

Felonious Monk said:
I didn't know Amy Madigan was in Weapons, now I'll have to check out the copy of the film someone gave me a while ago :sneaky: Loved her since Streets of Fire.
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She's the best part! Even if you haven't seen the film, I'm surprised you haven't seen a screenshot or something of her character (maybe you have and just didn't know it). She's great in the film. You'll have to let us know what you think after you watch!
 
I looked her IMDB page up and I wouldn't have recognized her in this role anyway. I saw the trailer when it came out, but it did nothing for me, so it wasn't a high priority as I have sooo much I'm currently watching.
 
Felonious Monk said:
I looked her IMDB page up and I wouldn't have recognized her in this role anyway. I saw the trailer when it came out, but it did nothing for me, so it wasn't a high priority as I have sooo much I'm currently watching.
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Yeah, the trailer necessarily held a lot of stuff back. I saw it because I liked Barbarian a lot and I really liked that central weird-creepy image of the kids Naruto running into the dark streets. I didn't even really know Madigan was in it before I saw it, and I love Streets of Fire. But man, she really created something unique with that character.
 
I do hope that it starts to turn the tide on horror when it comes to awards contention, even a little bit. Toni Collette not being nominated for any of the big awards for Hereditary still feels criminal. Then again, people thought that Demi's nomination last year would change things, and it doesn't seem to have, at least that much.
 
Good point. I suppose the better hope would be that people just start to take it more seriously as an art form. There's plenty of stinky slashers out there, granted. Horror does seem to be one of the more "cathartic" genres- just seeing horrible things happen to people as a way of processing life's horrors; but like with animation, I think a lot of people write off some really good movies just because of the genre its in. The tide is definitely turning with A24 and all the more artsy and thoughtful horror movies, but it's still got a reputation to shake.
 
Honestly, I think A24-style elevated horror has become just as formulaic in its own way as slashers (and I have serious stylistic and/or thematic criticisms for at least a few of the major filmmakers in that space, especially Ari Aster, who at this point could only make me happy with his next film if it was a one-take, first-person perspective of being launched from a catapult). And the problem is you have to be really, really good to make good elevated horror because the aims are higher and the nuance and complexity required are greater, while a bad or even just mediocre one is just the most boring thing. A good slasher has a lower ceiling unless it's a Carpenter or Craven level talent, but the floor is way more watchable.

Cregger at least is conversant with a few less obvious influences (like the passage of Barbarian that reads like an extended tribute to Angst) and he's good at deploying comedy and absurdity in unexpected places in ways that heighten the impact of the horror, which is something that I feel like a lot of the elevated filmmakers attempt but they're just not weird or fun enough to make it work. The climax of Weapons was the funniest thing I saw all year until the First Lady scene in Good News, but now I'm just getting sad thinking about an Amy Madigan/Jeon Do-yeon team-up film that will never happen.
 
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Totally fair! Every genre has its ups and downs. Horror especially has always been pretty experimental and played it far less safe than a lot of other genres. Sometimes it hits, sometimes it's a big miss. As long as we keep getting cool action figures from it all, I'm down for whatever!
 
One great thing about horror though is that even the worst movies can still be incredibly entertaining. A bad comedy or a bad drama just stink, but a bad horror movie can be almost as enjoyable as a great one due to the unintentional laughs.
 
Not to drag arthouse horror too much, there's a ton of it I like (one of my January project recs for my movie Discord was Memento Mori, which is basically a South Korean nonlinear sad lesbian school melodrama but with ghosts; in other words, the perfect movie), but that's an unfortunate thing that it doesn't have access to the good-bad failsafe. When you're underplaying the drama and scares, aiming for a slower burn with a desaturated emotional palette, you tend to lose the absurdity. It's like how there's a ton of a lousy mumblecore films out there but none of them are really memorably bad unless we're really stretching the definition to sneak The Room into the genre.

I think if you've managed to make an arthouse horror with a character design and persona so instantly identifiable you can realistically get an action figure and Halloween costume out of it, you've done something pretty special. That arthouse/populist divide is hard to bridge, especially in horror where fans can be resistant to any subtext or flourishes perceived as pretentious (even though I could go on for hours about what Nightmare on Elm Street REALLY MEANS) - I don't think it's coincidence that years of A24 discourse coincided with the Terrifier series, which is a DBZ-level escalation of slasher film tropes and literally nothing else. So respect to Zach Cregger and Amy Madigan on that. The more I talk about this, the more I want that Gladys Toony.
 
Asked Blaine about the Home Alone Toonys.

He gave a VERY promising answer, when asked if they were still coming:

"I don't know, not sure if the orders were there for them".

So...
 
If they're still coming it won't be until next Christmas at this point. Wouldn't surprise me if they don't though. The Toony stuff doesn't seem to do that well and the Ben Cooper stuff has almost taken over their niche.
 
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