Post a Comment On: Horrorthon

The Host (2006) *1/2
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I hated this fucking movie. I can forgive silly bad horror movies for many things, but stretching themselves out to 2 full hours of needless slo-mo and drawn out grief scenes is too fucking much. I grabbed this from the library yesterday based on a cool cover image and some hyperbolic quotes from well know critics. Hell, one idiot called it, "On par with Jaws!"

About halfway through, I was trying to decide whether to finish (I was having so little fun), and so I decided to pause and check if anyone had reviewed this suckfest for thon before. Ha! JSP and Octo both had similarly bad times (though inexplicably overrate it on the Gretchen meter, imo).

I get the feeling that the director had a clever idea--that he was trying to make some sort of genre bending slapstick-horror hybrid and also offer up an homage to the old Kaiju movies of the 50s. And then he decided to throw in a dose of political satire. But the whole thing ends up as a complicated mess. Characters show up briefly, seeming important, and then are gone. Subplots about biochemicals and viruses are vaguely explicated. It's just garbage. And worse, it's boring.

There's two things that earn it that bonus half star though. One, the monster is actually pretty cool. I really like how he swings by his tail underneath a huge bridge. It's a nifty effect. And also, the camerawork and overall cinematography is way too good for this material. In some ways, it's a pretty beautiful movie. The lighting and shadows and textures really popped for me.