Dracula Presents: The Eighth Annual Golden Stake Awards

Meh, I liked Guardians of the Galaxy the most.

Is there seriously a scene in Gravity that comes anywhere close to the docking scene in Interstellar?

Say it ain't so.

Like, all of them?

I like Winter Soldier quite a bit, but I think Days of Future Past is superior in every way.

It's not excessive. It's defensive. Captain America and Guardians of the Galaxy have gotten so much hype that the vastly superior X-Men is getting screwed over.

Best Horror Movie

Giving out a horror award year in and year out can often be an iffy prospect. Last year for example, I ended up having to nominate four movies I didn’t even like. I wouldn’t say 2014 has been a banner year for horror, but it’s a definite improvement, at least in the upper tier. There wasn’t a huge quantity of options to choose from mind you, in fact I only really say five or six horror movies all year, but the five I was left with were five movies I was more or less happy to nominate.

The Babadook: This movie was hampered by a horrible title, but it really is a pretty damn cool horror movie. Director Jennifer Kent does a very good job of finding scary things to do in the movie while still avoiding cheap jump scares. She creates a remarkably creepy atmosphere simply by filming an ominous popup book and also manages to inject the film with a very strong psychological level that actually seems to have been added for a reason and not simply tacked on to give her film the veneer of respectability.

Oculus: This movie looked pretty terrible from the trailer (a movie about an evil mirror, really?) but it’s actually grown a decent fanbase and not unfairly. The film crafts an interesting set of rules for how this evil mirror functions in the world and also sets up an interesting structure in which it simultaneously shows events happening in two different timelines. The actual scare tactics are less innovative and more or less follow the usual haunting movie formula, but the characters are better than usual and the movie as a whole is good fun.

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones: When it was announced that the next Paranormal Activity movie would be a spinoff of sorts intended to appeal to Latino audiences it sounded like it would be a highly inessential side project and while it’s not a great movie exactly I don’t think it’s really the step down that most expected it would be. In fact I’d argue that it’s actually a clear step up from both Paranormal Activity 2 and Paranormal Activity 4. Still probably a movie that’s only for series completists, but it’s no embarrassment.

The Sacrament: The latest film from indie horror auteur Ti West is probably his weakest, but it still has more good ideas in it than half of the horror movies coming out of the major studios. The film falls back on the clichéd format of the found footage horror movie, but uses it fairly effectively as it depicts the downfall of a Jonestown-like cult. In usual Ti West fashion, the movie has a lot of build-up but that climax where shit goes down is pretty well rendered and there are some moments of genuine suspense in it.

Under the Skin: It might be a little bit of a stretch to call this a horror movie, but if you think about it the common characteristics are all there. You have promiscuous people getting stalked, at least one moment of horrific gore, a deffinate degree of suspense even if it isn’t the protagonist who’s in real danger. The milieu might be science fiction but it’s a very dark form of science fiction and those horror elements do exist. Besides, the alternative was Only Lovers Left Alive and there isn’t a single moment of that movie which is meant to be scary.

And the Golden Stake Goes To…

Best Comedy

All told, I think this has been a pretty good year for comedy. More often than not I need to stretch my definition of “comedy” in order to find four nominees in this category, but that wasn’t really the case this year, in fact I had to make some tough choices to bring this down to five nominees. On top of that I feel like these five movies are a pretty good cross-section of what modern comedy looks like with both the sophisticated and silly brands of comedy represented.

Birdman: Alejandro González Iñárritu began his career by making some of the most aggressively humorless movies you could imagine, so it was pretty surprising when he came out and made a comedy. More specifically what he’s made here is a satire, a movie that uses humor and a generally anarchistic spirit in order to make a statement about the modern world. It’s not necessarily a laugh-a-minute type thing, but it has a consistently funny tone and some really biting jokes.

The Grand Budapest Hotel: Wes Anderson has always been a director of comedies, but his humor is particularly pronounced in his latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel. With Ralph Fiennes providing the tempo as the cultured but vulgar concierge, the film is a wild romp through a fantastical alternate Europe filled with surprising cameos and colorful characters. The film is loaded with physical comedy and is in many ways the most versatile of these nominees in the ways it elicits laughter.

Guardians of the Galaxy: Last year, partly out of desperation for a fifth nominee, I reluctantly nominated Iron Man 3 as a comedy even though it was primarily an action movie. This year I’m nominating another Marvel film, but I’m not reluctant at all and wasn’t desperate for a fifth comedy either. In fact I think I view Guardians of the Galaxy as a comedy first and a comic book movie second. It’s a breakout role for Chris Pratt as a big screen comedian and each one of the alien characters is primarily comedic in nature aside from the one straightman, or shall I say straightwoman.

The Interview: Once all the hubbub finally died down and it became clear that it wasn’t going to start a nuclear war, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s The Interview could finally be seen for what it was always supposed to be: a funny little comedy with a rather outlandish concept. This was actually a pretty brave movie to make, in part because it manages to deftly find the right way to elicit laughs out of a fairly tragic real world situation. Rogen mostly pulls it off though, and provided us with some of 2014’s more memorable comedic moments.

Top Five: Chis Rock has a long history of being bad in movies, but with his latest film he was finally able to come close to channeling his virtuoso stand-up routines into a story. The film is basically a comment on a very specific moment in American culture that is unsparing in its ridicule of reality television, the downsides of fame, tabloid media, egotistical actors, the battle of the sexes, and race relations. As a director, Rock gives the film a real energy and knows just how lowbrow the film can go without being crass.

And the Golden Stake Goes To…

Don't forget Neighbors. He loves that too.

Yeah, but I actually don't like that one either

Most Under-rated

Calling a film “under-rated” this year is kind of odd because, frankly, I thought a lot of this year’s movies were actually vastly over rated. I’ve been kind of hard to impress this year and even among the movies I liked a lot and gave awards to this year I usually wasn’t quite as over the top in my praise as a lot of people and even the good films that didn’t get a lot of money and attention still seemed to have a pretty big fanbases of people who liked them more than I did. Still I was able to find five movies that didn’t seem to quite get their due, some of them got good reviews, some of them made a little money, but they all seemed to kind of get ignored or under-appreciated when it mattered.

The Immigrant: James Gray has made something of a career out of making films that feel like they’re meant for great things and which are then kind of ignored once they get released into the wild. His latest film, The Immigrant, seems to be particularly mismanaged by the Weinstein Company. They barely advertised it and they gave it a very half-assed release in general which didn’t even seem to try turning it into the art-house hit that it could have been. Some critics have tried to save it, but even they aren’t really wild about it. I don’t necessarily think this is some kind of lost masterpiece but I do feel like it deserved more.

Kill the Messenger: I’ve long been kind of fascinated by Gary Webb and the “Dark Alliance” scandal that he uncovered and making a movie about the whole affair made a lot of sense. The film seemed to have everything necessary to become something of a prestige hit, it has a really good cast and a worthy topic, but when it was released it was met with great indifference. To be fair, the film itself is more good than great, but I feel like it wasn’t even really given a chance by the public of even the film critics of the world. That’s a tough break for Jeremy Renner, who does some of his best work in it.

Oculus: How the hell did something as unimaginative as The Conjuring make $137 million while something like Oculus (which really does have a spark at its center) only make less than a fifth of that? Well, I sort of understand it, the “evil mirror” concept does sound kind of lame (not as lame as evil Ouija, but still) and the trailers did nothing to distinguish it from the other haunted house movies we’ve been dealing with. Also, the movie isn’t “great” per se and I see why it hasn’t had too many champions, but compared to the competition it did deserve better.

The Sacrament: Speaking of horror movies that should have left a larger footprint, I’d say that The Sacrament fits that bill as well. This one was primarily dismissed for being a found footage movie, and I can’t entirely blame people for feeling that way. Found footage is completely overused in this genre, but I do think this one had some good reasons for using it and the film’s cult ritual was a nice change in pace for this genre which has become increasingly obsessed with ghosts and demons.

Wild: On paper this movie probably shouldn’t be considered under-rated. It’s at 90% on Rotten Tomatoes and it’s made $35 million at the box office, which is actually more money than such success stories as Birdman, Boyhood, and Whiplash. However, for whatever reason the movie seemed to all but disappear in the month between its release and the awards season. No one seems to be considering it for their year-end lists and outside of a couple performances the awards body seems largely uninterested. I’m kind of at a loss for why that is because it’s a pretty strong movie.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

I feel like The Immigrant has a lot of defenders trying to get the word out, but Wild just seemed to get completely ignored by the week after it came out.

Let me also tag thebtskink . I know he has seen the other Twilight. Dude name dropped The Other Sister and ya'll didn't even blink.