Movie Night

So The Girlfriend and I decided to sit down and watch a movie tonight. Having a free rental to use, we agreed that Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem looked like it could be fun (if not intelligent). We both enjoyed the first one, and this was the unrated version, which loudly proclaimed from the box, "More blood, more guts, more gore!" How could we pass it up, really?

Well, maybe there was more blood, guts, and gore. We couldn't tell. The lighting in the film was so freaking awful that we couldn't even see what people were eating at lunch in broad daylight by a picture window in a diner. We were both surprised when a shadow moved and spoke when some pizzas were delivered, because there was no way of knowing there was a black guy sitting on the couch. We couldn't tell if the other shadow was a man or a woman.

You see how dark the poster is? How you can barely tell what's what? Imagine 90 minutes or so of that. I'm not exaggerating. The amount of darkness compared to the amount of light on that poster is pretty much the same in 90 % of the film.

I can understand keeping the lighting low in order to make the scares more scary or to cover up poor costuming (we are dealing with Aliens and Predators, here), but we should be able to see people's faces when they're standing outside in the middle of the day chatting about whatever people chat about in the daylight.

There was really no point in watching it.

So, The Girlfriend turned to me and said, "How about watching The Mist?"

I've been meaning to watch it for a while, but keep forgetting about it (or have things to do, like grade papers or write reviews or whatever). So I grabbed it and stuck it in the DVD player.

It was freaking great. I haven't seen a horror film that really drew me in like this in ages. I blame the Stephen King factor, where he can take simple situations and characters and make them work on a gut level. And the ending was brutal. I'm not going to say anything else about it, because I don't want to spoil it, but this was well worth the time spent watching.

Seriously. If you haven't seen it, put it at the top of your Netflix queue now. You won't be sorry.

From what I understand, the two-disc version includes the entire film in black and white on the second disc, giving it a classic horror kind of feel. I'm very tempted to watch it again that way and see which I prefer. But honestly, it was so good in color, I can't really believe that it would be better in black and white.