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Showing posts from June, 2010

In The Mouth Of Madness

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Top 3 John Carpenter Films 3. In The Mouth Of Madness 2. The Thing 1. Halloween It has been nearly a decade since Carpenter has given us a new feature film, though the glimmer of hope came with his entry in the Masters Of Horror series: Cigarette Burns then flickered the next season with Pro-Life.  Either way these two hour long films make up for his last foray in filmmaking: Ghosts Of Mars , a film so bad no one wants to include it in their Carpenter collection. There's a lot of talk of his comeback, with three films slated to be delivered over the next year we thought it would be good to start going through his filmography again.  The one film all of us agree on here at CineNiche is Halloween - the ultimate landmark in horror cinema.  Michael Meyers will always strike fear into our hearts and for good reason - his image is iconic and terrifying.  It is in the films simplicity that fear grows.  Over the course of Carpenter's career he has swayed between action and

Mr. Nobody Is Certainly Somebody To Us

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After a 13 year hiatus from filmmaking Jaco Van Dormael has created in Mr. Nobody the most perfect vision of string theory.  Creating a film about every possible outcome of every possible choice and each of their timelines takes either a brilliant mind or one completely mad, and the jury's still out on Dormael.  Either way this film is breathtaking.  The soundtrack, editing, and cinematography are all mixed so well that the film itself seems to spring from the fourth dimension itself. We are given fragments of the past, present, and future of Nemo Nobody (Jared Leto).  In the beginning these fates clash together in something astonishing yet unrecognizable, but by the middle of the film the viewer begins to understand how all of these pieces fit together.  Our future Nemo, an old man on the verge of his 118th birthday in a society where everyone is immortal recounts his full life but the memories are not of one distinct timeline but multiple ones, as though he is able to see a

Surviving Survival Of The Dead

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Dear George A. Romero, We here at CineNiche have been long time fans of your work, we eat up any information on your new projects and each of us buy any Fangoria that has an interview with you in it.  We love your films, from the genre changing Night Of The Living Dead onward, your films have always been an inspiration to our own indie spirit.  Your ability to provide a social commentary more blatant than other horror directors and your simple yet highly effective camera work has shown us a good story means everything.  And what better story than your forty plus year ongoing tale of humanity's inability to help each other.  Even in Dawn Of The Dead your characters help themselves and guard the fort against the living and the undead.  Your films are important to us and even when they are not at their best, they still offer something toward the genre.   Martin was a revolution to the vampire film.   Monkey Shines was a pitch perfect adaptation.   Creepshow 1 & 2 are both e

Is The Human Centipede The Most Disgusting Film?

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Tom Six's film The Human Centipede: The First Sequence is a well done first feature from a filmmaker, but is it the most disgusting film ever made?  Simply put, no.  The biggest problem with this film is the hype machine behind it.  "A friend of a friend saw it and nearly threw up,"  or "people walked out of the theater because it was too disturbing."  We've seen this happen before, more recently with Eli Roth's oeuvre from Cabin Fever to Hostel 2 or with the Saw  series.  Torture porn is made to feed the darkness within, the unconscious or conscious part of ourselves that wants to see the body opened up and put through ghastly horrors.  The thirst for this type of horror is not new only the special effects that make them possible are.  Torture porn is a direct reflection of our social climate since the Iraq war began and we started seeing leaked decapitation videos streaming online.  It is humanities ability to fictionalize what they don't unde

Best-Horror-Movies posts a section from CineNiche

Our editor just got a little more love over at Best-Horror-Movies  but the article is just a reposting of the beginning of: A Study On Fear And Pleasure In The Horror Film  which can be read here, but go on over to Best-Horror-Movies and check them out - the site is awesome.

Suspiria - The Greatest Horror Film

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This is an excerpt from CineNiche editor Shaun Huhn's unpublished book on the horror genre The Wonderfully Terrifying: An Insight Into Our Love Of Being Afraid. This is from the "Monster" section of the book where he writes about witches but we chose this to showcase our favorite film Suspiria.  Enjoy. The following has been taken from the limited edition DVD of Suspiria , writer Scott Michael Bosco has captured everything that identifies a Dario Argento film.  It is entitled “Introduction for Dario Argento Films.”  He describes Argento more poignantly than I ever could, so here is that page:   “When we enter the realm of a Dario Argento film, the laws of the possible and probable are challenged.  Like a master architect, a new framework of realities has been constructed concealing the audience in a house with many doors, even more rooms, and numerous windows. There is only one entrance, which we enter with free will and exist only when allowed.  We are