Couples and Tunnels

I've been AWOL for a little bit recently, mainly due to working more than usual as well as visiting Liverpool and London, which is why the blog's been light on updates.

I've still been watching as many films as I can but I just haven't had the time to put together a decent, thorough review for any of them. I'll try my best to get some finished and published soon.
My main priority right now is working on making a post that ranks every film I've watched from 2013. I've got a list of films that I feel like I need to watch and add to my ranking before I publish it, but I'm excited to put that together.

On top of that I really want to take part in Sati's awesome Spin-Off blogathon, and Ben over at The Movie Man has been kind enough to nominate my blog for the Liebster Award so I need to post my response to that and pass on my nominations.

You can find my Tumblr here and my Pinterest here.

Romance and Aliens

You can find my Tumblr here and my Pinterest here.

30 Days of Horror | Day 23

Graphics That Pull You Out Of The Movie
Mama

*This post contains plot spoilers for Mama*

The difficulty in choosing a focal film for this post was that it's too often the case that horror films are the go-to genre for truly awful special effects. I had plenty of choice but wanted to choose a film where the graphics had a majorly detrimental effect on my viewing experience.

I wrote a small review of Mama not long after seeing it, which can be found here, and touched on the low quality of the effects used in it, and this is the film most fresh in my memory whereby the graphics were too bad to enjoy. The concept of Mama as a mysterious presence that is only mentioned for the majority of the story requires a great deal of suspense and pay off in order to be effective. Instead, Mama is revealed quite clearly, in all of her hideously rendered glory, within the films prologue. While showing the antagonist so early in the film is a pretty self-destructive mistake it would have been less of a problem if it weren't for how bad the character actually looks.

Mama is a bundle of emaciated, dirty limbs topped with a gaunt, wild-haired face. She floats above the ground and holds the painful looking posture of a broken spine. Aside from the floating, which was a new development from the short film this is based on, there is nothing about her that could not have been achieved through practical effects and we all know how effectively scary body distortion can be when you can see that it's real. Hell, the movement tests from the films special features is miles scarier than anything from the finished film. 

The decision to render Mama as a completely digital presence seems to only allow for some of the films more 'impossible' body distortion scenes which actually come off as more ridiculous than scary, so that was clearly a good decision. Even when we see Mama in her 'human' form she is CGI, which seems completely absurd but is probably due to no actual human possessing a face the size of the one they pasted onto the ghostly being. Mama is built up as a shadow dwelling, malevolent force and had she been created in a way that matched her reputation the film would have been much stronger, but as it stands her digital mug is given far too much screen time for something so shoddy. I won't even begin with the digital 'skinnied' children, I'll just let the picture below speak for me on that one.

Mama's script was never going to allow it to be a great film, but better graphics could have at the very least made it a scary one. 

Hauntings and Infections

No trailer post this week as Monday was a lot more hectic than I originally thought it would be, so to make up for it here is a super-sized review post.

As I was selecting films to put together for this micro-reveiw post I was aware that I could make a single post dedicated to a single genre. I am aware that a high percentage of the films I've reviewed on here so far have been either a part of, or closely related to the horror genre, but I felt that it would possibly benefit you readers if these posts were a little more organised into themes or genres than they have been so far. I can't promise that every post will contain films that are completely related or compatible but I will try my best to make them a little more cohesive in the future.    

I also just happen to have watched a pretty high number of horror films recently, so there's that too!