here's two films that couldn't be more different.
Wrong Turn 2: Dead End (2007): Only watched this because my kid was watching it and laughing about it via phone/skype with a friend. Gawd. Like, I was amused by how excessively terrible it was but sorry, inbred hillbilly gorefest is not my idea of a fun time even if some of it was amusing. The person we thought might be Final Girl didn't make it through the film. Another of the female stars actually had been in a film I liked -- she played Kay (the murder victim) in Nolan's remake of "Insomnia." Honestly, even with laughing at the film, I had little interest and am not sure how I made it through. Just to imagine, French directors were making crazy but interesting ultra-violent films that were more intriguing conceptually and dramatically, meanwhile USA directors were making this stupid schlock which kind of made it all into one big silly boring joke. Put another way, I could see both countries making a film involving a victim being split in half from top to bottom, but somehow the French could make it feel artsy and transcendent (rofl) while Americans just make it cheesy and banal.
Kwaidan (1965): Three hours, four stories -- this reminded me of the ghost story books I read when younger, which are just compilations of various ghost folklore tales. Despite being 1965 and nowhere near today's special effects (a few of the stories were obviously on sound stage -- you could pick out the foreground from the backdrop paintings), the film really takes its time to develop the atmosphere for the stories, which are not overtly complicated. I think my least favorite was Hoichi the Earless, not because of the story but because of the length... there's a needless 10-20 minute opening about a historical battle that the tale doesn't need, and then the main story just drags on and on. It needed a bit more editing IMO. However, the core of the story (and the business about the ears) is beautiful -- and this is the image typically associated with the film, of Hoichi covered with writing of the Heart Sutra.
My favorite two included the first tale (a very simple story, but I was joking about it being where Nolan got the line, "... become an old man filled with regret, waiting to die alone?" It is very evocative in terms of a man regretting the decisions he has made and how some things, once lost, can never be recovered even with the wisdom brought by time and experience. Also, "The Woman of the Snow" -- about the yukionna -- is great, and it's interesting to me that these tales seem to be in many cultures, I know the equivalent of these cautionary tales in European mythos, like the ones involving swans and secret identities. Lesson: If you make a promise to a ghost, never ever break it.
