Taking You to a VHS Wonderland

Good lord. I guess you're teetering dangerously on hipster territory when you find yourself using the VHS half of your dual player more than the DVD half. But in my defense, when I first got a TV for Christmas and didn't have anything to hook it up to, my friend Steve (bet you're feelin pretty popular at this point, Steve) gave me his roommate's dual player out of the kindness of his heart. Only we discovered shortly after plugging it in that it was more of a VCR than a dual player.

Disclaimer: Does not actually play DVDs. We were just kidding.

However, I am not one to turn up my nose at any movie, no matter how grainy the picture is and no matter how silly looking those tapes appear (hehe tapes...).

No, my friends. For someone who will literally watch the movies of mini vans on the Garden State Parkway trying to figure out if it's a movie she knows and where they are in the plot, this VHS tape nonsense was no blow. Actually took me on a pretty fun journey to the past (Anastasia? Anyone?).

So I raided everything, guys. Goodwill, thrift stores, my parents' house, the cabinets, the attic, my roommates' movies, everywhere. And now I have the most kickass movie collection from ten years ago that anyone would ever wish to have.

Some might call this excessive. I would call it having options.

Speed, Jurassic Park, The Others, Indian in the Cupboard, The Mask of Zorro, The Matrix, Moulin Rouge, Monster's Inc, The Wedding Singer, Cape Fear. You'd be jealous of me in 2002, man. So jealous.

But honestly it was the non-blockbusters that really had me giggling when I was hunting down these babies. Movies like Mars Attacks, Troop Beverly Hills, Smoke Signals, The Prince of Egypt, Muppet Treasure Island, and (omg) The Haunting.

So I popped The Haunting into my new used ($35 at Goodwill, fools) dual player the other day and holy crap. What an inexplicable display of whole-hearted movie attempt. Honestly I don't even know where to begin, so I guess I'll begin with the plot (plot?).

The movie starts off with Eleanor (Lilli Taylor), who has just been told by some sort of relative that they are taking her dead mother's house, where she has lived as her mother's caretaker for what I can only assume has been her entire life. Then Eleanor, left with no place to go, gets a phone call and checks out this insomnia study that some doctor is conducting. Only the audience finds out seconds later that the insomnia study is a ruse, and that Dr. Marrow (Liam Neeson) is doing a study on fear and is trying to create an incredibly suggestive environment in which to do it. Other co-testers include Theo (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Luke (Owen Wilson). After their arrival they hear a brief story about who built the house that they're staying in, a house which looks like some sort of baroque castle.

Shmancy.

Apparently some dude named Hugh Crane got rich off his textile mills and wanted a bunch of kids, but his wife kept having stillborn babies. Then eventually she killed herself, he threw himself into the construction of his home, and people in the village kept getting creeped out cuz they'd hear kids coming from the house. Standard.

Right off the bat weird stuff starts happening (of course). When they're having dinner the first night some chick's eye gets cut by a wire off of the piano and she has to get taken into town. The rest of the film is filled with ghost children asking Eleanor to help them for some reason, the house attacking the various occupants, and Hugh Crane's ghost personally messing with all of the main characters.

So I know this movie is supposed to be scary but honestly it just ends up hilarious. First and foremost, Eleanor's character makes no sense. She keeps getting personalized messages from these ghost children complete with bloody footprints and is just kind of like "Huh, that's weird. Boy I love this house. Guess I should help these creepy ghost children since they like talking to me so much." A reaction completely contrary to anyone in a sound state of mind.

"Oh don't mind me. Come find me later. I might be alive, I might not, no big deal."

And since Eleanor is the only character that the audience really gets to see for most of the movie, it gets pretty funny watching her run around the castle house trying to make sense of what has happened to these children. Of course she finds out that Hugh Crane kept kidnapping kids from the mills and killing them for some reason and no one believes her. And then the movie gets totally carried away with itself and it involves part of the house being her mom's old room, her being related to Hugh Crane, and the children somehow being sent to heaven by her getting sucked into a door for five minutes.

Um...what?

Dat shit cray.

It also doesn't help that looking at CGI effects from 1999 is a laugh riot. They make the film lose any credibility that it might've had otherwise. If you're trying to ease your way into watching scary movies, this is your ticket!

Haha, I give it a 3 out of 10 for pure humor.

Thirst: A Vampire Priest's Journey Into Self-Discovery

So a while back in May, I had the extreme good fortune to witness a Blockbuster shutting down. Not that seeing a place where rental movies are sold is anything awesome really. To tell you the truth I kind of wish there were a few more left around, but I guess that's what Redboxes and libraries are for (I mean really, any rental under $2 is frickin bomb, I don't care who you are). No no, the reason that Blockbuster shutting down is awesome is because I got about ten movies for $10.

Sad? Maybe. But can you smell the savings through the screen? I know I can!

I went back three times. Ironically, though, then summer started off with a bang and I never got the chance to watch any of them because...well actually I'm sure I had plenty of chances to watch them, but I kind of forgot about them. Oops.

But anyway, since recently budgeting my funtimes (it's a word) money, I've been diving right into these puppies and finding a whole bunch of interesting films that I completely forgot I had.

Number one today was a movie called Thirst (Bakjwi in original Korean).

Fun fact: They edited something out of this poster cuz it was too suggestive apparently

Directed by Chan-wook Park, master of the messed up and responsible for fascinating skin-crawlingly disturbing movies such as Oldboy and Lady Vengeance. Let it be known, he makes no exception for Thirst.

Thirst follows the story of a priest getting turned into a vampire. Father Sang-hyeon is a really nice guy, playing the recorder for dying people, working in a hospital, trying to help people. But he is made sad by how many people he can't help. So what does he do? He volunteers to be a medical experiment, testing a vaccine against a disease called EV. Side effects of the disease are skin blisters, fingernails fallin off, and vomiting blood (can you say FUN?). So the vaccine they're testing doesn't end up working and he ends up gettin a blood transfusion and then dies.

OR DOES HE?

He's not quite dead...

Sang-hyeon soon finds out that the blood donated to him was laced with vampire blood, making him not only immortal but a new creature. He starts to question his religion and his celibacy after meeting Tae-ju, the wife of a man he healed. After being invited over to Tae-ju's home (which she shares with her mother-in-law as well as her husband), there are some heavy graphic shenanigans between she and Sang-hyeon. Faced with new ethical questions after not only breaking his vow of celibacy, but also drinking human blood and committing various murders, the movie becomes almost more about the morality of being a vampire than the actual usual horror story.

Doesn't get much more classic than stories about human nature does it?

Much in the same vein as films like Let Me In, Thirst seems to focus more on questioning the humanity of vampires. Since they are technically inhuman and practically immortal, how does this change the nature of their being? Sang-hyeon goes from being a genuinely nice person to an adulterer and even a murderer, trying to find out how to survive without hurting people at first, and then slowly giving into his animalistic tendencies. As Tae-ju asks at one point "Is it a sin for a fox to kill a hen?", and the film really seems to play with that idea. Since they need blood to survive, is it really immoral to be killing these awful people around them if it keeps them alive themselves?

Perhaps the only thing that bugged me in this movie (and, really, most of Chan-wook Park's movies, if I'm being honest) is the awful squealing, selfish girl who ends up being Sang-hyeon's love interest. I don't know if it's the language barrier or her attitude in general, but she ends up being a rather selfish and sociopathic person who does nothing but cause trouble.

Don't look so innocent, you know you screwed shit up.

A very thought-provoking movie that studies human nature, morality, and sacrifice. Also it's South Korean, which (if you happened to see my entry on foreign horror) happens to be one of my favorite nationalities for foreign movies. Check it out!

6 outa 10 stars.