All these movies are essential to any horror fan's movie education. Here's a sample of Roger Ebert's appraisals of these originals, from 1972 to 1999.
August 12, 2006 (Press Release) --
Neil Marshall's acclaimed British horror-thriller "The Descent" draws on plenty of other genre classics for visual inspiration, from otherworldly mysteries ("Picnic at Hanging Rock") to oudoor adventure ("Deliverance," "Jaws") to science-fiction ("Alien") and straight-out horror ("The Blair Witch Project"). All these movies are essential to any horror fan's movie education. Here's a sample of Roger Ebert's appraisals of these originals, from 1972 to 1999:
"Deliverance" (1972)
Director John Boorman and his cameraman, Vilmos Zsigmond, get some tremendously good (and unfaked) footage of the foursome shooting some fairly hairy rapids. The scenes of violence and rape also work, it must be admitted, although in a disgusting way. The appeal to latent sadism is so crudely made that the audience is embarrassed....
The adventures that occur in the film belong in Freudian dreams, and many of the exploits (particularly Voight's scaling of a cliff) are so incredible that we are back in a James Bond universe.
"Don't Look Now" (1973)
The movie is billed as a "psychic thriller," and that's fair enough. Its supernatural content (or ESP content, depending on your prejudice) is taken at face value; this isn't a movie like "Rosemary's Baby," where you can never quite be sure there's not some rational explanation. Almost all of it was shot in Venice, that fantastical city that anticipated the Gothic style, and the locations are so much a part of the effect that it's impossible to imagine the movie being set anywhere else.
"Jaws" (1975)
It's a film that's as frightening as "The Exorcist," and yet it's a nicer kind of fright, somehow more fun because we're being scared by an outdoor-adventure saga instead of by a brimstone-and-vomit devil.
The story, as I guess everyone knows by now, involves a series of attacks on swimmers by a great white shark, the response of the threatened resort island to its loss of tourist business, and, finally, the epic attempt by three men to track the shark and kill it. There are no doubt supposed to be all sorts of levels of meanings in such an archetypal story, but Spielberg wisely decides not to underline any of them. This is an action film content to stay entirely within the perimeters of its story, and none of the characters has to wade through speeches expounding on the significance of it all.
"Picnic at Hanging Rock" (1975) Great Movies review
On a drowsy St. Valentine's Day in 1900, a party of girls from a strict boarding school in Australia goes on a day's outing to Hanging Rock, a geological outcropping not far from their school. Three of the girls and one of their teachers disappear into thin air. One of them is found a week or so later, but can remember almost nothing. The others are never found.
On this foundation, Peter Weir's "Picnic at Hanging Rock" (1975) constructs a film of haunting mystery and buried sexual hysteria. It also employs two of the hallmarks of modern Australian films: beautiful cinematography and stories about the chasm between settlers from Europe and the mysteries of their ancient new home.
Source: http://www.yahoo.com
Posted by Jim Emerson
"Deliverance" (1972)
Director John Boorman and his cameraman, Vilmos Zsigmond, get some tremendously good (and unfaked) footage of the foursome shooting some fairly hairy rapids. The scenes of violence and rape also work, it must be admitted, although in a disgusting way. The appeal to latent sadism is so crudely made that the audience is embarrassed....
The adventures that occur in the film belong in Freudian dreams, and many of the exploits (particularly Voight's scaling of a cliff) are so incredible that we are back in a James Bond universe.
"Don't Look Now" (1973)
The movie is billed as a "psychic thriller," and that's fair enough. Its supernatural content (or ESP content, depending on your prejudice) is taken at face value; this isn't a movie like "Rosemary's Baby," where you can never quite be sure there's not some rational explanation. Almost all of it was shot in Venice, that fantastical city that anticipated the Gothic style, and the locations are so much a part of the effect that it's impossible to imagine the movie being set anywhere else.
"Jaws" (1975)
It's a film that's as frightening as "The Exorcist," and yet it's a nicer kind of fright, somehow more fun because we're being scared by an outdoor-adventure saga instead of by a brimstone-and-vomit devil.
The story, as I guess everyone knows by now, involves a series of attacks on swimmers by a great white shark, the response of the threatened resort island to its loss of tourist business, and, finally, the epic attempt by three men to track the shark and kill it. There are no doubt supposed to be all sorts of levels of meanings in such an archetypal story, but Spielberg wisely decides not to underline any of them. This is an action film content to stay entirely within the perimeters of its story, and none of the characters has to wade through speeches expounding on the significance of it all.
"Picnic at Hanging Rock" (1975) Great Movies review
On a drowsy St. Valentine's Day in 1900, a party of girls from a strict boarding school in Australia goes on a day's outing to Hanging Rock, a geological outcropping not far from their school. Three of the girls and one of their teachers disappear into thin air. One of them is found a week or so later, but can remember almost nothing. The others are never found.
On this foundation, Peter Weir's "Picnic at Hanging Rock" (1975) constructs a film of haunting mystery and buried sexual hysteria. It also employs two of the hallmarks of modern Australian films: beautiful cinematography and stories about the chasm between settlers from Europe and the mysteries of their ancient new home.
Source: http://www.yahoo.com
Posted by Jim Emerson
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