About Soft & Quiet

The movie was truly disturbing so credit where credit is due; You know you are watching a solid movie when you have to tell yourself it’s only that, a movie. Despite the cringe factor at 100%, the story seems very realistic and the sheer disgust you’re feeling through the movie is genuine. I won’t be watching it anytime soon though, one time is more than enough

I watched A Wounded Fawn yesterday. It wasn't particularly good, but one scene caught my eye. The protagonist is getting ready for her weekend cabin retreat (always a great decision) with a guy she recently met, combing through some stuff and picking out an LP, but not Hallows Eve's Monument. I don't think I ever listened to this Aussie thrash band, and this little detail that came out the blue, with no seeming connection to the plot and themes, got me thinking a bit. It's pretty cool even if there's no real reason behind it.

I thought A Wounded Fawn started out OK then lost me in the second half. Been happening a lot lately.

Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes - I keep hyping Barbarian as my favorite horror movie of the year for several reasons, but a major one is how it managed to make a drastic shift after the first act without losing my interest. This tried to do the same thing but failed IMO. After a gruesome display of violence around the midway point, we're treated to a development that killed my enthusiasm. And the movie never recovered. Great title though! 4 / 10

The Invitation (2022) - Missandei from Game of Thrones learns she has connections to a rich family in Europe and agrees to travel there for a wedding. Despite a couple missteps (including a superglued-on final scene whose tone didn't match what came before) this was never boring and had some nice visuals. 6 / 10

A Wounded Fawn was one of the best horror flicks last year. Mostly because of the climax and last parts - true gonzo, surreal shit. Amazing.

Watched THE OLD WAY with Nicolas Cage - a very solid Western. Adheres to its genre, lots of gritty stuff, a decent revenge plot and some good characters and all. Cage elevates it with a really stunning performance, and Ryan Kiera Armstrong does well too, an actor to watch in the future for sure.

Sick - It's early 2020 and two young friends realize covid is the perfect excuse to spend some time at an isolated vacation cabin. But this is a Blumhouse production co-written by Kevin Williamson so they also have to deal with a knife-wielding maniac!

This started kind of slow and made me wonder if the quarantine gimmick was just an excuse to set the bulk of the story in one location. But it picked up in the second half and did some stuff with the 2020 setting that it could not have done with a 2019 setting. Pretty good modern slasher. 6 / 10

Finally saw Everything, Everywhere. I had sky-high expectations and it was still better than that. I cried a few times, laughed a bunch. Adored it.

I watched the Banshees of Inisherin. That was a great movie. I didn't expect to like it so much. The performances were awesome, the cinematography was gorgeous, the story started light but went dark as fuck.

I also liked that one. Wasn't expecting it to be that good.

Il Buco

Couldn't finish watching that pile of shit called M3GAN. How on earth did this ridiculous waste of time get 6.5 on IMDB is beyond me. Avoid!

Thnx for the heads up

Mind expanding on that a bit?

Don't agree with this at all and looking at the Rotten Tomatoes 94% rating your're very much in the minority here. If you'd seen the trailer and taken note of the M rating, then you'd have a pretty good idea of what it was about and what you're in for. While it's not at least for this veteran, exactly original, scary or violent, it is very well made and makes great use of it's 102 minute runtime. It's a good, humorous, fun little piece of pulpy horror storytelling.
M3GAN's a blast, go see it.

Jesus, seriously? I bet you also enjoy the Chucky killer doll series...

Tried watching Everything, everywhere, all at once or whatever that movie is called: tedious, unrewarding chore to watch. Maybe that movie is too intelligent for my kind to enjoy.

Hey there, a quick question:
Has anyone already watched Darren Aronofsky's new movie 'The Whale'? If so, what are your thoughts about that one. I think it is the most anticipated movie of the year as far as I'm concerned; Aronofsky is so uneven and polarizing in his art, it's either he does those beautiful and dark movies such as Pi and Requiem For A Dream, and on the other hand, turds such as Black Swan...

C'mon, Chucky was a bit of fun too.

As for Everything Everywhere All At Once, it's fuckin great, one of the best films of the year, if not the best.

Man, life is too short to waste it on the likes of Chucky and M3GAN.

By the way, is the protagonist's husband on Everywhere, Everything...the same guy who played in The Goonies as that Chinese kid with all those props a-la inspector Gadget? Seems familiar as fuck.

^Yeah he was Data in the Goonies and Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

I thought he was familiar. He was so cute in a goofy kind of way on The Goonies. He still possesses that kind of infantile voice timbre from his youth though. That is how I recognised him.

Yeah, it is what it is, a very well made horror comedy for the masses. Almost tailor made to be a huge hit. I had fun with it. Certainly the best recent "mainstream" horror flick (comparable to Smile, Black Phone, the Ti West flicks, etc).



Looks unbelievably awful to me, and I hated his last movie too. Requiem for a Dream was so fucking awful as well - miserable shit man. I'll wait til it hits streaming...

Aftersun - brilliant and artful. Just a portrait of life. This was so exquisitely made and so well done in every aspect, really. A thing of utter purpose. Every shot just bleeds off the screen and even the quietest, most normal seeming moments have a lot of meaning. I was fascinated.

To Leslie - Andrea Riseborough got an Oscar nom for this little-seen indie flick, apparently a victim of how skewed the theater releases can be... it's not a new story, you've seen this kind of down-home, family drama stuff before. Americana small town stuff. But it resonates and has some good themes. Riseborough really does do that well.

Chucky is a great series. It goes from straight horror with a bit of humor to horror-comedy and goes back and forth, it's weird, it's crazy, it's ridiculous. Even the more straight horror entries aren't to be taken seriously, I mean it's a doll animated by voodoo magic and is inhabited by the spirit of a serial killer and spouts one-liners and laughs like Skeletor.

And I agree, EEAAO is an amazing movie. It's funny, you don't see it coming, it's weird, it's well constructed, well acted, well shot, and it even has some zany action scenes. I think it's even more fun on a rewatch, cause you see things early on that references alter elements. There's a reason why it leads the Oscars (and yes, it's not the best metric, but it's also far from the worse).

I mean there's plenty of stuff that gets nominated at the Oscars that people can easily hate, but yeah it's always interesting to see what gets up there. EEAAO I thought was very good... some people are way crazier about that movie than I was, but it was a well done, creative piece of work. Certainly would be a better pick for best picture than last year's CODA.

The first thought I had when I see the trailer was the movie Orphan, but I reckon that one was far more sinister and dusturbing. The M3GAN trailer itself said "pile of shit".

Sick - Pandemic fiction is pretty hard to do since we're so close. This isn't bad at first, with some decent enough scenes and a sense that you just don't know what's going to go on. The kills aren't too bad, though they are not really that great either. The problem is the writing just ends up being the most shallow surface-level reiteration of the pandemic - nothing but characters shouting about masks and getting infected. Where is the deeper dread, the confusion? Didn't we all live through this? It was a tremendously weird time, which this film just can't capture and doesn't try. It's just such skimpy, weak shit. Not to mention the film ends up even kind of mocking these ideas in some pretty questionable scenes. You wonder what the intent is. The direction it all ends up going is like a parody but they're serious - there's no jokes. Even if you take politics and social commentary out, it's just a sad shamble of a movie.

Old Man - Another Lucky McKee movie, another piece of evidence supporting my longtime suspicion he peaked with May back in 2002.

Stephen Lang opens the door to his isolated cabin and finds the mean casting agent from Starry Eyes. They talk. And talk and talk and talk. Then talk some more. Would it surprise you to learn they never leave the cabin? By the end it gets a bit more interesting when all is revealed but it's too little too late. 4 / 10

Violent Night - Can't remember if it was related to this movie's release, I rewatched Krampus recently and it was worse than I remembered. Violent Night was way more fun. It had exactly the tone I wanted and even the child acting was good. 7 / 10

I saw All Quiet on the Western Front. It's a good movie in that it is miserable. Trench warfare was truly one of the worst of mankind's invention. The violence is raw, the deaths are unglorious, but the movie doesn't just focus on the horror of warfare, it shows how terrible life in the trenches was, or even out of the trenches - soldiers needing to steal food, for instance, while the generals enjoy copious meals. It was well done in general. Not super entertaining, unless you like dreary movies about one of the worst period in human history.

Though I might watch it again, do a double feature with 1917.

I watched Le Vieux Fusil with Phillipe Noiret and Romy Schneider. This is one of my favorite movies of all time and I can’t recommend it enough, even if you don’t like French cinema. Noiret is superb and the soundtrack is so delightful!

I'm asking again: Has anyone watched Darren Aronofsky's 'The Whale' ?
And what would your thoughts be on 'Babylon' other than being hilariously funny? Does the movie actually depict real events / real decadent high life of Hollywood's who's who circa 1920's?

Skinamarink - I tend to roll my eyes at reviews that say "this is literally the worst movie I've ever seen," so I'll try not to go there. However this might be among the 5 or so that I'd be most strongly opposed to sitting through again.

It's so low budget it makes Paranormal Activity 1 look like Avengers Endgame. It's almost an "anti-movie," where any aspect I've ever enjoyed about any movie is intentionally omitted. Likeable characters? No. The movie has human characters, but I never felt like I got to know them. Clever dialogue? Nah. The kids are barely old enough to form sentences and a lot of the dialogue is subtitled (you don't need to manually turn them on) because it's inaudible. Engaging story? I didn't get any more out of it than "creepy stuff happens, or is implied to have happened." Striking visuals? Only if you appreciate shots of walls over and over and over.

I expected to dislike this based on other reviews. I really did give it a chance though, watching it in what I heard were ideal conditions: alone in a dark room with zero distractions. Can't even say "I almost fell asleep" because my eyes were wide open the whole time, they just didn't like the ugly grainy repetitive nonsense they were being fed. Skinamarink is a complete failure in every possible way, and one of my most hated movies in recent years, rivaling Climax and Human Centipede 2.

So of course it has a respectable 72% Tomato-meter.

^ Easily the best horror movie I've seen in a while. Wonderful stuff I thought. This is why I really still keep watching horror personally - utter feeling and nightmareishness. I love it.

I don't look for likable characters or a cohesive story as some kind of barometer for if it's good or bad though. All depends.

Loved Climax too. I dunno.

If somebody gave me a camera and forced me to make a parody of everything I despise about low budget movies, I could not do a more effective job than Skinamarink. While writing that comment I felt like I was half-plagiarizing something I read in the main metal forum where somebody said I'd define post-rock and post-metal as rock and metal with all the interesting stuff stripped away. [Edit - Found it. Thy Shrine described post-metal as "metal that gets rid of all the exciting parts."] Maybe I should have called Skinamarink a post-movie instead of an anti-movie. Besides lacking anything that normally draws me into a movie, it often didn't even feel like it was composed of individual scenes trying to add up to something. Just repetitive interior image after repetitive interior image.

Totally random comparison, but Rubber is something I've described as feeling more like a pretentious film student project than a proper movie, even though I kind of like it for its disarming we're-just-having-fun attitude. Skinamarink is a pretentious film student project in an obnoxious I-dare-you-to-sit-through-this way.

Rubber was so bad. Just insulting really from what I remember. Felt like a stupid piss-take joke that was low effort on purpose. It's been ages since I saw it though.

Skinamarink won't be for everybody. But it did have a clear intent and purpose and wasn't trying to be normal - it's an art piece and will appeal to people looking for stuff that's more out-there.

Rewatching it myself tonight!

Skinimarink was really cool. It’s composed like a nightmare, so yeah, if you’re looking for the linear sense of a normal movie that’s driven by a coherent narrative, you’re shit out of luck. Some will see that as pretentious, but I just saw it as clearly made by someone who wanted to make the craziest movie they could with no budget and limited resources.

It could have been trimmed by 15 minutes, and I didn’t find it as scary as my fiance did, but it was a cool trip to see, especially in a theatre.

Thinking it's pretentious seems odd - it's just a little movie made by a dude who was trying to make something crazy and out-there, like Razakel said. Never got the sense it was trying to be smarter than the audience or anything like that.

I'm really curious about Skinamarink. People either loathe it or love it.

When I described it to my girlfriend, she said it sounded dull and stupid. When she watched the trailer, she said "oh non, I'm not watching that, I want to sleep again".

In any way, it's crazy that such a small movie gets people talking so much.

At this point there aren't many more ways to say "Not a single aspect of this film appealed to me" so I'm moving on to the phase where discussing other people's reactions is more interesting to me. A couple observations...

Currently on Shudder.com it's showing up with a mediocre 3 / 5 average rating. However scrolling through all the reviews shows nothing but 5 star (5 "skull") ratings. But! If you actually read some of the reviews they don't sound like 5 / 5. Here's one:


Don't know if Shudder routinely pulls these shenanigans, or only for higher profile acquisitions.

On Bloody-Disgusting.com (which is affiliated with ScreamBox, a Shudder competitor) you'll read (beware spoilers) Why Scary New Movie ‘Skinamarink’ Will Make You Afraid of the Dark Again. Many of the Disqus comments are extremely negative about the movie, with some accusing the article of reading like sponsored content.

So yeah, as a piece of entertainment Skinamarink didn't work for me. But the story of a microbudget movie getting this amount of "institutional" backing is kind of notable.

I will say though, even if there is a grand conspiracy to overhype the movie (and nothing I wrote above comes close to proving that), and people like me who hate it are really the majority, I wouldn't claim that necessarily makes my opinion correct. I heard test audiences hated Hereditary and The Empty Man and I really like both.

Lol, there's no conspiracy. It's a divisive art-house horror movie that experiments with the form. By nature lots of people will dislike it just like many will find it affecting.

I'd be inclined to agree with that, Empy, but Shudder has a vested interest in there being positive reviews (since it, and sister company IFC Midnight, have distribution rights).

As for the Disqus comments vs. the critical reviews? Yeah, that's just a case of the average audience not looking at movies the same way a critic would.

Yeah I thought about that too. If so, it's such a low-stakes "conspiracy" that it's hardly worth bringing up, I think...

Skinamarink isn't the first time I've noticed possibly sketchy attempts to manipulate ratings, of course. It reminded me of something much more blatant from a couple years ago.

Malevolence (2004), Bereavement (2010), and Malevolence 3: Killer (2018) form a trilogy that didn't really impress me. But check out the ratings breakdown for the third movie. Over 60% of users gave it a 9 or 10. That's obvious bullshit. Luckily IMDB's internal number cruncher is smart enough to see through that and produce a 4.7 average.

Skinamarink's IMDB score is currently 5.2 which is believable to me. 1 / 10 is the most common rating and there's no suspicious concentration of 8 and above.