fine whine

On a lark and a sort-of recommendation from Scott I borrowed the already forgotten 2002 WWII submarine horror/thriller Below, not too long ago. I’m not sure what brought it to mind today, but what popped up first was a single scene, a pretty cool one in retrospect. In it, one of the seamen is wandering through a dark corridor and sees his reflection in a particularly shiny of bulkhead or door or something. It matters not that which what he sees his reflection, but that his reflection is time lagged by about half a second. My description cannot do it justice, but suffice to say it was very memorable.

Thinking about it made me wonder about other single scenes from otherwise unremarkable movies that I’ve stocked away in my memory. One in particular stands out, from fairly early in the rather dismal House on haunted hill (the remake with Geoff Rush, Famke Janssen and Peter Graves, that is). There’s a part of the film, early on, when gaiety and fun still reign (and terror is but a shadow of, er, foreshadowing) and Chris Kattan is still alive, wherein characters are traipsing through the rooms of the former asylum with a camcorder. They find one room, ostensibly once an operating room of some sort that appears empty to the eye but the ol’ Handycam picks up a whole different environs, replete with a doctor and nurses, a patient and other various medical paraphernalia. Adding to the creepy-ness is a sideways glance by the doctor, whereby the idea that he’s somehow aware of its presence (and thus its implications) and he does a freaky head-shaking that looks, well, freaky. It’s a great moment. As for the rest of the film, particularly the inkblot monster chase at the end? Skip it except for the bit in the torture chamber–which is too bizarre for me to even try to describe, let alone explain.

So what is it that makes these moments so memorable and the rest so not? That which brought all of this to mind today was a little ditty by (Mr. Show’s) Bob Odenkirk over on Chunklet. At one point he said:

… it occurred to me that there’s a lot of comedies that come out where people like only four or five scenes. I remember the last Austin Powers. You know, you’d talk to people about it and they’d go, “Oh, it’s great! I didn’t like Goldmember, but I liked this, and that, and this!” And they name, like—everybody names, like, three things. And it’s like, “So you liked three things and that makes it a great movie?”

I can’t help but agree (how better to prop up my hastily-formed opinions than to yoke myself with an established yet still cool comedy guy?) but I have widened my scope on this beyond comedy to thrillers. It could likely go even further, but I am just one man, after all.

So anyway, as for these moments, is it possible to have a film comprised entirely of them? The example that came to mind was Princess bride, but not every single scene is utterly memorable, just almost all of them. That, though, is a comedy, and we’re discussing scary movies, but my expertise in scary movies is sorely lacking. Without stooping to comedy-horror (i.e. the Raimi/Evil dead canon), are there any examples of scary movies just rife with these sort of moments? I suspect somebody would throw in the first Exorcist, but I didn’t find it scary and too much of it is nondescript and merely ordinary to me. So… discuss.