Rate/rank the films of Jaume Balagueró & David Bruckner.

Jaume Balagueró

[REC] - 7/10
Darkness - 6.5/10

David Bruckner

The Ritual - 7.5/10
The Night House - 7/10
V/H/S - 6.5/10

I remember that I liked Rec, I think I gave it a 7 on IMDb, but I haven't seen it in forever. I kinda remember the American remake more, even though I didn't like it as much.

Darkness was terrible, but as is often the case, I would guess that it wasn't really his fault and just another case of a director of a foreign hit having to conform to studio notes.

For Bruckner, I really can't remember which VHS segments he did. I can never remember which is which from those movies, they all sorta blend together... and I can't remember much of Southbound, but I thought it was a slightly above average anthology. And I know I've seen his Creepshow episodes, but that show is (sadly) very forgettable too.

But, by the time he gets to features, his output is pretty strong. The Ritual is solid and has that great creature design, and The Night House is even better. It's visual style is really inventive and evocative, and all really supports the story and character.

That's why it's so surprising and disappointing how kinda underwhelming, ordinary, and unimaginative his Hellrasier movie was. It's certainly not the worst Hellraiser movie, but it's his worst feature by a long way.

Rec -5/10

Hellraiser -6/10
VHS -4/10

I think Rec was at one tine the most overrated horror movie I'd ever seen. It was nothing but jump scares, which is ironic because the sane people who complained about the over reliance on jump scares in American movies ate it up like catnip. The most effective one of the bunch, the attic bit, is ripped off straight out of The Grudge. If it has been an American movie I don't think it'd have gotten the same attention, which I feel I was proven right about with the long forgotten Quarantine.

There is a bit of a tiresome reliance on 'grief' in horror movies. It's been all the rage for a while now. So that can be tiresome.

But The Night House has a lot going for it beyond a grieving wife as the central character. The tone and the visual inventiveness are very wonderful. There are some really simple visual tricks and motifs, many that seem to be done entirely practically, which is quite impressive. I think it's worth watching for his directing alone, but it's also a perfectly good script and has a really good central performance from Rebecca Hall.

And yet all of that inventiveness was more or less missing from his Hellraiser movie, so that was all the more disappointing.

I've just generally seen cats rub their little junkie faces in it rather than eat it. Either way, 'eat it up like catnip' isn't really a phrase.

?

It's a Google search mostly showing me results for that movie where Kevin Spacey turns into a cat... which is something I completely forgot existed, so thanks for that... it's pretty amusing.