The Hunger (1983) - Mastodon watch party this Sunday evening!
The Hunger (1983) - Mastodon watch party this Sunday evening!
Yes, the one with Bauhaus playing "Bela Lugosi's Dead" in the opening scene!
This is a weekly event, I usually post these announcements on !bmoviebonanza@lemmy.world and sometimes cross-post to a relevant community. Apparently this movie "is popular with some segments of the goth subculture" so finally I can cross-post here!
Anyway details are below, but if you don't know what a watch party is, on Oct 12 9pm Eastern US time, open two web browser windows:
and watch a bunch of fediverse wits and weirdos chat about a movie that we're all watching at the same time.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/37158022
The Hunger (1983) is the movie for this Sunday's "monsterdon" watch party over on Mastodon, our fediverse sibling!
- Just start watching that movie this Sunday, Oct 12 at 9pm ET / 8pm CT / 6pm PT which is 1am Monday UTC
- and follow #monsterdon over on mastodon for live text commentary. For example, you can follow that hashtag here: https://mastodon.social/tags/monsterdon
- I usually open two web browser windows side-by-side on a computer. But you could follow the mastodon commentary on a phone app while watching the movie on TV or something.
How to watch the movie:
- tubi (availability varies by country): https://tubitv.com/movies/100045171/the-hunger
- uBlock Origin adblocker on Firefox should work for that tubi link
- archive (low video quality?): https://archive.org/details/the-hunger-1983-catherine-deneuve-david-bowie-susan-sarandon
- someone usually streams it on https://miru.miyaku.media/ at that time.
- if you want to pay and/or watch ads, look here: https://nobraincellsleft.github.io/JustWatch-Search/title/tm60122 or here: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/the-hunger-1983
The Hunger is a 1983 erotic horror film ... Its plot concerns a love triangle between a doctor who specialises in sleep and ageing research ([Susan] Sarandon) and a vampire couple ([Catherine] Deneuve and [David] Bowie).
...
The Hunger was nominated for two Saturn Awards for Best Costume and Best Make-up, while receiving mixed reviews upon its release: its pacing and plot were felt to be unsatisfactory, with more emphasis seemingly being placed on cinematography and atmosphere. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times described the film as "an agonizingly bad vampire movie," remarking that the sex scene between Deneuve and Sarandon is effective, but that the film is so heavy on set design and scene cuts that any sense of a story is lost.[10] In a brief review in Rolling Stone, Michael Sragow similarly called it "A minor horror movie with a major modern-movie problem: director Tony Scott develops so many ingenious ways to illustrate his premise that there's no time left to tell a story."[11]
Christopher John reviewed The Hunger in Ares Magazine #15 and commented that "Beautifully filmed, but boringly void of substance, The Hunger is (was) a film to be avoided like the plague."[12]
Camille Paglia wrote in Sexual Personae (1990) that while The Hunger comes close to being a masterpiece of a "classy genre of vampire film", it is "ruined by horrendous errors, as when the regal Catherine Deneuve is made to crawl around on all fours, slavering over cut throats", which Paglia considered an inappropriate focus on violence rather than sex.[13] Critic Elaine Showalter called The Hunger a "post-modernist vampire film" that "casts vampirism in bisexual terms, drawing on the tradition of the lesbian vampire...Contemporary and stylish, [it] is also disquieting in its suggestion that men and women in the 1980s have the same desires, the same appetites, and the same needs for power, money, and sex."[14] David Bowie later commented about the film that "the first twenty minutes rattle along like hell – it really is a great opening."[a]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, The Hunger holds a 59% approval rating based on 39 reviews, with an average rating of 5.8/10. The consensus reads: "Stylish yet hollow, The Hunger is a well-cast vampire thriller that mistakes erotic moments for a satisfying story." ...The Hunger has been listed as a cult film.[18][19] A retrospective review of the film by Film at Lincoln Center concluded: "With its famously bold visual aesthetic—featuring high-intensity lighting, expressionistic production design, and thrillingly intimate perspectives—and the melodramatic intensity of the three lead performances, the film is an ultra-stylish time capsule, an archetype of the high-gloss, high-concept storytelling mode that prevailed in early 1980s Hollywood."[20] The film is popular with some segments of the goth subculture and inspired a short-lived TV series of the same name, although the series has no direct plot or character connection to it.[21]
The film has been cited by publisher Fred Berger as an influence on the creation and direction of his gothic subculture zine Propaganda, and by showrunner Bryan Fuller on his television series Hannibal.