Movies you like, but people seem to hate

[The Scythian]

Watchmen. All my peers hate for no reason, and think that Revenge of the Sith was better. Also, the Chronicles of Riddick.

 

[deadguynotyetburied]

Fargo. Can't figure why none of my friends find it funny.

 

[micky]

Starship troopers. Because most peope I talk to just see it as 'just a fictional war.' but there are so much layers in that movie.. wauw.

Have you read the novel yet? Good read if you enjoyed the movie.

Yes! This movie is in my top five favorites...

The 13th Warrior...

i loved the 13th warrior, it was so cool.

 

[RebelRising]

Rob Zombie's Halloween II. I didn't much care for the first, mainly because he tried to cram the entire original movie into the last act. But in his sequel, he did his own thing, which turned out to be uncompromisingly brutal and occasionally emotional. Plus, the end twist was very promising.

And I thank the reason people hate the movies is simply nostalgia and an unwillingness to respond to challenging visuals. People generally go to slashers because they get a kick out of seeing people die, but Zombie refused to glorify the killing and thus took away people's enjoyment of human suffering. That, and they dismiss him because he's a musician or something.

Funny. I got the exact opposite between the two movies. The first movie established Michael as an actual character and it made you feel bad for him and wish that he wouldn't kill. It turned him into a victim and a villain at the same time. Having McDowell's character act like a surrogate father was also very impacting because he seemed like he truly cared for Michael while at the same time needed to protect the world from his wrath. Several of the kills were much more emotional, namely Trejo's. Don't tell me you didn't get a little sad when he was shouting, "I was good to you, Michael!"

The second movie was pretty damn dumb. It was way more brutal in much more unimportant ways. The leading protagonist was extremely annoying the entire movie, making anything that might have happened to her irrelevant in my eyes. McDowell's character also became rather obnoxious because he went from caring psychiatrist to douchey pseudo-hero. He only switched back in the last scene, which broke continuity from the rest of the movie. The thing with the white horse in the white hallway with the mother dressed in white is the only thing that really resembled any sort of intelligence, but it was so incredibly hamfisted that I really couldn't care less about it. "Family is Forever" was the tagline, but a more suitable one might have been, "Whoa, check out this dude chopping up people because he's crazy and keeps seeing his dead mom and holy crap that girl is psycho too." Oh, that was another thing. Having Angel be crazy too was stupid because Michael's insanity was situational. He had an abusive "father" and is mother was known around town as a whore. That plus bullies is a logical path towards crazy little bastard. There was no good reason for the girl to go as insane as she did before she found out that Michael was her brother.

The first movie was going somewhere with Zombie's original plot, but it kinda went downhill after he escaped. It was interesting enough to warrant an film devoted to that material. Everything up until it cut to the suburbs was good, including Trejo's death, which only goes to show that Zombie certainly is not soft-hearted, and that serves him well. A whole film devoted to that would be pretty solid, but then we might never have gotten Halloween II.

And you thought the girl was more annoying in the second movie? I don't agree at all. In the first, she was just another obnoxious, horny teenage girl who just screamed pretty much all the time. In the second, she was a lot less in your face and she portrayed the trauma and damage very well. Her swinging from depression to fear to resentment was done very realistically and in a paced manner. She's a great actress, better than Jamie Curtis, in my honest opinion, and I hope that she gets more work, because she did a lot with what might otherwise have been another unlikable teenage protagonist. And while I wouldn't presume Zombie's movies to be psychologically deep, I maintain that her going insane at the end is not completely out-of-left-field and that it's an incredibly intriguing direction to take the series.

I will concede with you, however that Dr. Loomis's turn in the sequel was rather jarring. Zombie is not known for providing us with sympathetic, likable characters, so he was actually kind of generous with Brad Dourif's sheriff and his daughter in HII. Still, they should have stuck Loomis's original personality. That way, his sacrifice in the end would have been all that more bittersweet. He was a good guy, rare in Zombie's universe of male pigs and female whores, and he should have stayed that way through the end.

I still rank Halloween II as his best work, along with Devil's Rejects, mainly for the reason that, despite how brutal and unrefined Zombie's style and mindset are, he evokes some real emotion in this movie, as well as a substantive cinematic sensibility. The first one just felt like a rush job in order to start working in his own ideas for a sequel. If nothing else, HII leagues beyond any of Bay's abysmal remakes, and I hope Zombie keeps up with it.