[REC]2 (2009)

I don't know how they managed to wreck such a simple concept but they did. Just stick to the formula. That's all that had to happen to make this just as good as the first [REC] film. But no, multiple cameras, multiple protagonists, weapons, very little sense of dread, very little fear of the unknown, surprise cameo, all of this added together to create a very unfulfilling experience.
It was trying very hard to be the Aliens to [REC]'s Alien. In [REC], you had Ellen Ripley (Angela and Pablo) get caught in a rescue mission (the planet and the building respectively) that sees her as the last survivor, strongly soldiering on. Except Balaguero and Plaza killed their Ripley. So now you have a team of soldiers that get sent to investigate a downed receiver at a distant colony (dead policeman in a quarantined building), get told that there are monsters in there, get destroyed by the monsters after a pitched battle, the plucky survivor who Knows Better faces down with the Queen at the end and blows her out the airlock. Except Ripley is still dead. The plucky survivor is a side-character that everyone hates. The plucky survivor in [REC]2 is literally the Paul Reiser in Aliens. The character who is actually the villain in Aliens is the hero in [REC]2. Paul Reiser faces down with Queen and gets himself blown out the airlock, with no mechanical loader, no equalizer, nothing. There are some serious storytelling issues with this film, issues that make it boring.
Now there are some serious spoilers in this paragraph and this movie is pretty much dependent on its big reveal so beware or whatever.
How do you fix this? How do you make [REC]2 watchable while still keeping the ending from [REC]? You don't set it in the same building. You don't make the priest the protagonist while he is constantly and obviously  lying to the viewer insert character and putting his life in danger. I'm okay with Angela being the host for some weird Jason Goes to Hell-esque demon parasite, I'm okay with the soldiers being on the hunt rather than the other way around, I'm even okay with all the religious biology or whatever they keep trying to tack on to rationalize the monsters. Just give me this movie set in a monastery or something, with a single camera, and with a strong, likable protagonist. Please give me that.
I'll still be checking in for the sequels. Please don't disappoint again.

High Tension (2003)

This movie is so bad. This movie is absolute garbage. I regret almost every second of the 90 minutes I spent watching this horrible movie.
Let me save you the effort of ever seeing it:
The first rule of High Tension is you don't talk about High Tension. The second rule of High Tension is you don't talk about High Tension.

Burnt Offerings (1976)

Okay, so the only reason I watched this was because John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats wrote on his website that his new record conveyed the same feeling as the scene on the train at sunrise at the end of The Warriors and this movie. That scene at the end of The Warriors is one of my favorite scenes in film and that album is the best Mountain Goats album in years so I figured this would be worth a shot.
I sincerely regret watching House of the Devil before this.
This was the movie House of the Devil was trying to be and for every ounce of love i felt towards House of the Devil, it was a full ton of love towards Burnt Offerings.
A family (Oliver Reed, Karen Black, Bette Davis, and the kid from Ben) move into an old, beat-up house for very little rent in exchange for taking care of an old reclusive woman in the attic. As their stay in the house goes on, a lot of accidents start happening, endangering the life of the entire family with the exception of Karen Black's character, who is developing a connection with the old attic woman. In the end, the house itself is using the family's life force in order to regenerate and return to an earlier state.
There is a level of just absolutely crushing fear that exists through out the movie. The idea that "Something is wrong here and we all need to get the hell out" is conveyed so well, I wanted to run away. But at the same time there's the idea of, "Well, maybe one more night," that seeps in when the going is maybe at its worst.
Definitely needing highlighting are the acting chops of Oliver Reed and Karen Black. Reed plays his character so perfectly:  A man with no control over himself or his surroundings, trying to hold on to something, anything, that would make the way he feels make sense. A way to reject the violence and fear he's felt since moving in. For him, those things happen to manifest as the chauffeur from his mother's funeral, smiling crazily at him when he feels the influence of the house, the insanity of his situation, the most. The influence on Nicholson's Jack Torrance is unmistakable.
Karen Black, on the other hand, is absolutely terrifying. As tense as Oliver Reed's character is, and as unsettling as The Chauffeur is, Black's acceptance of the house's evil influence manages to be scary on an extremely personal level. She shifts from the caring mother to the deranged murderer so subtly, the last scene in the film is actually shocking. Even with me telling you exactly what is happening, its still shocking.
This movie manages to so completely inundate the atmosphere with dread, so completely fill you with an almost existential fear, you become accustomed to it. You begin to welcome it. And when you finally embrace it and try to make the best of the horror you've lived for the last two hours, the film pulls out all the stops and leaves you face first in an unforgettable climax. This is a horror film for the ages.

Night Watch (2004)

The best thing about this movie was the subtitles. They are honestly amazing in literally every way. I've never seen a subbed film that managed to convey so much emotion and acting through the way the words were presented before. It made the experience of watching it so much better.
Basically, there are two armies of monsters hidden to humans. Half of the monsters control the day (the titular Night Watch) and half of the monsters control the night (Day Watch). One of the Night Watch guys is tasked with protecting a boy from a vampire and breaking a woman's curse that threatens to end the world while managing his relationship with his vampire landlord and his new partner who used to be a bird. Its a bleak, eastern bloc movie crossed with a sleek hollywood action-horror in the vein of Underworld which gives me very mixed emotions re: it. On the one hand i like the Russian styling of it and really all of the style that it manages to wrangle is cool as heck (see the subtitles), but on the other its still a shallow, kind of boring, movie about vampires. There's things in it that remind me of Ghostbusters 2 and not in a good way. But, man, its worth seeing for the subtitles alone.

House (1977)

So awesome. A bunch of school girls go to an aunt's house in the Japanese countryside where they are tortured and murdered by the house itself, controlled by the crazed aunt. The movie at no point makes sense or is un-bizarre but embodies this kind of 'child logic' I guess where everything that happens could work if it was a story being told by a literal child. Its a film that isnt tied down by notions of quality filmmaking or acting or storytelling conventions. and as much as that sounds like me being sarcastic and actually calling it stupid, its not. I think Mac, the fat girl, is my favorite character.

Frontier(s) (2007)

This is a movie about Nazis. 

Judging from the Netflix blurb and the cover art and stuff, I assumed this was going to be a movie about trying to keep your unborn child alive during a revolution against a brutal authoritarian regime a la Children of Men. It's not;  It's about Nazis. 

The premise of the film is so promising. An ultra-conservative and white supremacist regime is elected in France. This sparks hugely violent riots across Paris. A bunch of kids steal a ton of money and try to make it to Luxembourg. One of these kids is three-months pregnant. So far, this film conceptually rules. 

But then, they leave Paris. They just make it out of Paris fine and escape to a motel run by literal cannibal Nazis who decide that the pregnant woman is carrying the savior of the Aryan race which leads to a the Hills Have Eyes-esque escape. 

Now the resulting film isn't bad, in fact it's great. Frontier(s) manages to be the perfect blend of The Hills Have Eyes and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It's got character development rarely seen in a film like this and literally every character is at least interesting and not just "cannon fodder" like so many supporting roles in horror films. It is a superb film in every right and I want to make that clear.

However, come on, you're seriously going to take the revolution premise and use it as an establishing shot and a little bit of allegory during the plot of the film? The only points where the fact that an insane authoritarian regime was just elected into power are brought up after they leave Paris are when two of our leading men are watching TV and make a George Bush joke, when the Nazi patriarch implies that the extreme conservative party is made of literal cannibal Nazis, and at the extreme end when the protagonist is forced to surrender to them.

I want a political horror movie that isn't Red State.

The Human Centipede: First Sequence (2009)

This movie sure exists. I don't really know how address The Human Centipede. I guess it superficially fits the mold of the best horror films, and falls in line with body horror classics but it doesn't really do anything with it. It sets itself up almost like a post-9/11 Videodrome in a way and if you wanted to stretch the film to the point of breaking it could sort of make a salient point about media consumption but I don't want to stretch the film. I don't want to force irony into where it clearly does not belong. To be honest, I'm not sure Tom Six is physically capable of making a salient point about media consumption. I'm not sure Tom Six understands why Croenenberg is a genius or why body horror is an effective genre. I'm not sure Tom Six is actually a director, let alone a human being, and not some kind of physical manifestation of misogyny and xenophobia. In fact, I'm sure that Tom Six, if he does truly exist, just got kinda high and said "Wouldn't it be hilarious if you like shat into a chicks mouth? Oh, and she is sewn to your butt so she can't complain. We could make it a horror movie. I watched Scream, I can do that."