ABCs at the Movies: The Doubles Round!

[oilgun]

aka: Daughters of Darkness
Excerpt From IMDB: Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Bathory didn't die in 1613 walled up in her castle . She is still alive over 350 years later and still preying on young girls for their blood. Elizabeth [Delphine Seyrig] and her secretary Ilona Harxzy [Andrea Rau] have arrived at a hotel in Ostend, Belgium[...]It is winter, and the only other hotel guests are a newlywed couple, Stefan [John Karlen] and Valerie [Danielle Ouimet] Chilton, who are en route from Switzerland to England, where Stefan's mother lives. Elizabeth comments to Ilona that Stefan and Valerie are perfect...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067690/synopsis

[Fran]

From IMDb:

Psychological horror about a lonely young woman traumatized by a difficult childhood and her increasingly desperate attempts to connect with the people around her.

=comment=
Anna Faris (with dark hair) appears in this one.  Here's the trailer:

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwytTsUy0kg[/youtube]
Time:  1:44

[MaineWriter]

The British restricted horror movies during WWII, figuring that people preferred wholesome, happy entertainment. This was one of the few movies that was allowed and was rated "H" (for Horror) meaning no one under 16 was allowed in the theater. By today's standards it is pretty tame but interesting as a historical tidbit.

[oilgun]

Synopsis
Independent filmmaker Chris Kentis directs the dramatic thriller Open Water, based on a true story. Susan (Blanchard Ryan) and Daniel (Daniel Travis) are a busy married couple on an island vacation. They board a vessel called the Reef Explorer with a group of other scuba divers, traveling 15 miles out to sea. Since they are certified to dive in open waters, the couple breaks off from the group to go exploring. The Reef Explorer accidentally leaves without a proper head count, leaving them stranded in shark-infested waters. Kentis and producer wife Laura Lau did all the filming themselves in the actual ocean without extraneous special effects, while the actors wore special steel-mesh under their wetsuits in the scenes where actual sharks were involved. Open Water was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004 as part of the American Spectrum competition. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide



==COMMENT==
A lot of people don't like this movie, but it worked for me.  I thought it was a tight and effective thriller. Of course, it's not very PC because it does make the sharks look pretty bad.

==ASIDE==
I forgot to mention that my previous movie, Daughters of Darkness, was filmed in Belgium and one scene, right in Bruges.

[Fran]

Thanks for posting this, Gil.  I was trying to remember the name of this movie for quite a while now.  Like you, I thought it was very good.  (But it compelled me to add scuba diving to my list of things I'm never going to do.) 

Here's a link that refers to the event it's based on: 
Open Water:  The True Story Behind the Disturbing Movie

The sun is bright and hot as you break surface. You squint to see the outline of a boat. After 40 minutes of scuba diving you feel disoriented. You paddle round to see whether the boat is behind you, but there is nothing: just calm, blue ocean, stretching to the horizon.

Such is the scenario of Open Water, the surprise hit of this year's Sundance film festival....

[Fran]

aka Pon



From IMDb:

Soon after Ji-won gets a new cell phone, her friend's young daughter, Yeong-ju, puts it to her ear and immediately begins screaming in terror. When other strange things start happening in connection with the phone, Ji-Won does some investigating and discovers that of the people before her who had the same number, almost all of them died suddenly under unusual circumstances. As Yeong-ju's behavior becomes increasingly alarming, Ji-won digs deeper into the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of the number's first owner, a high school girl named Jin-hie.

[memento]

IMDB: The protagonist, Ryn Baskin, is a bounty hunter. After a successful hunt, he is robbed, shot, and left for dead by a rival gang of hunters led by Blythe Remington, a man with a plan to weaponize the plague in order to create more zombies and line his pockets with the bounties. Ryn survives and follows Baskin with the aid of Hans Tubman, the cowardly foreigner who double crossed him, in order to retrieve the sack of pinkies he collected when the movie began. His quest leads him to a final confrontation not just with Blythe, but with a massive zombie armada.

[oilgun]

==COMMENT==
This is apparently more Drama than Horror but just the fact that a major church actually believes in demonic possession is pretty damn scary.



Synopsis
Director Hans-Christian Schmid helms this award winning account of a first-year university student whose bout with epilepsy leads to a tragic exorcism. Inspired by the same events that were previously dramatized in The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Requiem follows college freshman and devoted Catholic Michaela Klinger (Sandra Hueller) as she attempts to adjust to dormitory life while struggling to meet the growing pressures and academic expectations of school. Though a tentative friendship with temperamental classmate Hanna (Anna Blomeier) and a blossoming romance with easygoing chemistry student Stefan (Nicholas Reinke) at first find the shy student developing a pair of healthy bonds, an ill-advised abandonment of her medication regimen sets into motion a chilling series of events. Warned by a series of apparitions and disembodied voices that she should stay away from rosaries and crucifixes, Michaela seeks out the help of both her parents and amiable priest Father Landauer (Walter Schmidinger) to no avail. When Michaela becomes convinced that she is being made to suffer in the same manner of a well-known saint, well-intending pastor Borchert (Jens Harzer) hastily assembles an in-home exorcism that is doomed to end in tragedy. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

Interesting article on the real events the mvoies are based on: http://www.chasingthefrog.com/reelfaces/emilyrose.php  You can even listen to audio clips of the woman's voice and of one of the exorcism.

=ASIDE==

Thanks for posting this, Gil.  I was trying to remember the name of this movie for quite a while now.  Like you, I thought it was very good.  (But it compelled me to add scuba diving to my list of things I'm never going to do.) 

Here's a link that refers to the event it's based on: 
Open Water:  The True Story Behind the Disturbing Movie

The sun is bright and hot as you break surface. You squint to see the outline of a boat. After 40 minutes of scuba diving you feel disoriented. You paddle round to see whether the boat is behind you, but there is nothing: just calm, blue ocean, stretching to the horizon.

Such is the scenario of Open Water, the surprise hit of this year's Sundance film festival....

Thanks for the link, Fran, it's an interesting article.  I hadn't read anything detailed about the real events the film is based on.

[Fran]

aka  สวยลากไส้
       Suay Laak Sai



From IMDb:

Suay Laak Sai (Sick Nurses), a Thai horror film about a group of seven nurses and a doctor who are involved in a somewhat vague scam of selling dead bodies for money. When one of the nurses discovers that the doctor she intends to marry is having a fling with her sister (also a nurse), she threatens to oust the nurses' evil scheme. In return, the girl is brutally murdered to prevent their secret from being revealed. To make things short, the rest of the film takes on a horror plot. The murdered nurse comes back from the dead seven hours after her death to enact her revenge. And what a revenge it is! The ghost visits each girl and tortures them based on their individual vices -- bulimia, materialism, narcissism, the desire to obtain the perfect body. The film contains surprising plot twists that are too good to even allude to and a balanced mix of humor, satire, and gore to gain it "cult" status. Under the rubric of successful horror films, Suay Laak Sai has a terrifying ghost, a good amount of gore, and a satisfying plot as well as ending.

[Meryl]