Just taking this opportunity to say hello to all of the new folks who've come to check this thing out from Trial By Ordeal - come for the horror commentary, stay for the impenetrably obtuse attempts at cultural examination!
But seriously, just a few things...
American Horror Story was good. Damn good. I'm glad it got renewed. My attempts to recap it episode by episode during my busiest time at work? Not so good. I plan on tackling the show as a whole in a Reconsidered post soon.
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So awhile back I was all mad that this movie The Devil Inside - a found-footage take on demonic possession - was being referred to as a "micro-budget franchise-starter,"mostly for reasons I outline here. Well, it finally came out, and early responses are pointing out that it, well, it doesn't really have an ending. Apparently, just as shit is getting real, there's a smash cut to black, a title card with language to the effect that "the case remains unsolved", and a URL for the movie website, where moviegoers can go to "find out the rest of the story."
Oh, sweet Christ on a bike.
I can't even call it the worst cop-out possible, because it's so wrongheaded top to bottom that it defies expectation. "Possible" implies that this is an option that would come up when thinking of various optimal and non-optimal outcomes. Who thinks it's a good idea to deny moviegoers a conclusion to the story in which they've invested themselves for 90 minutes or so in favor of a website that's really not much more than a bunch of YouTube clips?
Now, I'm no marketing guru or anything, but I'm pretty sure you use the viral website to build hype for a movie, not the other way around.
The worst part (I mean, come on, shitty movies get made every day) is that it got a huge marketing push, so enough butts got put in seats to give the movie the strong opening weekend it needed. It's already made enough money that it's pretty much a lock that this is indeed a "franchise-starter", even if the word of mouth on the terrible ending kills any momentum it has.
I'm not especially interested in the money side of the film industry, but this is how shit continues to get made, shit that continues to clog theaters and pretty much serve as the public face of scary movies. And people wonder why horror isn't taken seriously as a genre often enough?
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No matter how many episodes of Holmes on Homes or Holmes Inspection I watch, Mike Holmes never runs across a crawlspace filled with buried corpses or a bricked-over room with a stained altar to a forgotten god, covered with awful eldritch writing. A man can dream, though. A man can dream.
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