What Ingrid Watches

Today I present you another trailer of an upcoming movie that is linked to the Oscars: Weathering with You, Japan's submission for the International Feature Film Oscar. As you can see, Japan has chosen an animated movie this year, which is not a coincidence because Weathering with You is one of the most successful movies in that country this year. The movie also appears in the Academy's long list of Animated Feature Film, where 32 movies have been submitted (which is a record by the way). The plot centres around 2 main characters. Hodaka Morishima is a 16-year old schoolboy who runs away from home and ends up in a very rainy Tokyo, where he wants to become a writer. Soon he meets an orphan girl, Hina Amano, who has a really special gift: she can change the weather with her mind. A friendship emerges quite quickly, but will they become more than friends? I found the trailer to be really beautiful, moving and magical. The most magnificent scenes feature an almost submerge...

Where does our fascination with serial killers come from? Let's face it, these people have committed heinous crimes, yet we devour documentaries about their lives and deeds. We look at news reports and movies about them and their victims. We might even look at Wikipedia to read all the gory details of their crimes (or am I the only one who does that?). So, when the crew of Ghost Adventures announced earlier this year that they were going to investigate locations linked to 4 notorious (American) serial killers, I was excited, to say the least. So, this whole month of October I have spent a lot of time on YouTube. I cannot watch Travel Channel - where the episodes of Ghost Adventures are aired in America - here in Spain, so I had to wait until a kind soul on YouTube uploaded the latest episode of Ghost Adventures: Serial Killer Spirits. As you can imagine, YouTube deletes these episodes quite quickly - although they don't seem to be bothered about older ones - so I had to h...

The trailer that I present to you today is also linked to the Oscars; Our Mothers is actually the Belgian submission for the International Feature Film Oscar. To be honest, the choice of this movie came as a total surprise, not only for Belgian movie viewers but also for critics everywhere in general. Many had expected that my country would have chosen Young Ahmed by the Dardenne brothers (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne), which won the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival of this year. The movies by this duo - usually social dramas - are quite successful, especially with the critics and at film festivals. But critical success does not automatically guarantee an Oscar nomination. In the past, Belgium did submit movies by the two brothers (for the International Feature Film Oscar) and none of them actually got nominated, let alone shortlisted. Is this the reason why this year we chose another movie by another director? Mind you, Our Mothers by Guatemalan director Cesar D...

If you are into short horror movies, then YouTube is a paradise! Don't know where to start or feeling overwhelmed? Then let me recommend these three channels: Omeleto Alter Screamfast (by far the best one) These are some of the gems that I found during my explorations of the last month. We Summoned A Demon \ By far my big favourite of the moment! Two young men try to summon a demon in order to look cool for the girls. But when something goes wrong during the ritual, the two men get a lot more than they had bargained for... This is not a typical horror movie; the movie relies less on jump scares, but more on a creepy atmosphere and a healthy dose of humour. It's all in the details: the small record player that is part of the ritual, the way they try to exert their power over the demon by guessing its name and so on. Chris McInroy is the award-winning director of this gem. I am still exploring his channel and when I find anything else interestin...

About 2 weeks ago, I had never heard about these 2 movies. But when I did research about Shark Night , one of the movies that Google recommended was 3 Headed Shark Attack. Since I had never heard about this movie, I did some research. According to Wikipedia, this is the sequel - as you might have guessed - of 2 Headed Shar Attack. And there are by the way more movies in this series: 5 Headed Shark Attack and 6 Headed Shark Attack. In case you wonder what happened to the one with 4 heads, there is already a movie called Four - Headed Shark - apparently, this one doesn't attack! Anyway, probably to avoid confusion, there is no movie called 4 Headed Shark Attack... The production company behind all these movies is called The Asylum. Maybe the name rings a bell, especially if you are into B - movies or have spent some time on Netflix lately. They are actually the ones responsible for the Sharknado movies, which by now have reached cult status amongst horror fans. The Asylum produ...

After Nick Groff left Ghost Adventures , he launched Paranormal Lockdown and also served as an executive producer for another paranormal television series, Ghost Stalkers. This series only lasted for one season (end of 2914) and has six episodes, each devoted to one (supposedly) haunted location. Each episode lasts about 45 minutes. Ghost Stalkers features two hosts, actor Chad Lindberg and author John E. L. Tenney. Both have a lot in common: not only do they believe in the paranormal, but they both also experienced an NDE (Near Death Experience). Because of this, they believe that haunted locations contain a portal (to hell), where the dead can cross over from one world to another. And it's their mission to find this portal in the locations they investigate in each of the six episodes. For this, they use a device, called a wormhole detector, built to discover gateways that connect different realities with each other. The two men have different personalities though and thi...

We all have guilty pleasures like watching a movie that is so bad that it actually becomes hilarious. Showgirls is a perfect example: the screenplay is ludicrous and the acting is over the top, but we all enjoy the nudity (both female and male) and the dancing and the stripping. Shark Night is another example: the plot of this horror movie is silly and predictable, to say the least, and the acting is wooden, but we can't wait to see how most of the cast is killed off. A group of young people spends a long weekend in a gorgeous house located on a beautiful saltwater lake. They all represent a certain prototype: the innocent virgin, the jock, the nerd and so on. They quickly have a run-in with some bad guys, but very conveniently there is a sheriff nearby. It doesn't take long though for our group to figure out that there is something "fishy" in the water. And the viewer quickly knows who will survive the shark attacks and who won't. Of course, you might ask y...

Last week, I talked about one of my favourite paranormal shows on American television, Ghost Adventures . As I explained to you, in the 10th season, paranormal researcher Nick Groff was replaced by 2 other collaborators. Luckily for us, Groff returned with other shows, one of them being Paranormal Lockdown. In this series, Groff teams up with another paranormal researcher, Katrina Weidman - who was featured on yet another American paranormal program - and a cameraman called Rob. The show follows more or less the same format as Ghost Adventures: the first 20 minutes feature an introduction with some historic details and eyewitness accounts of the haunted location, followed by the investigation itself. But instead of exploring the building during one night, both the researchers and at some intervals also the cameraman, are locked down for 72 hours, thus allowing enough time to gather substantial evidence. Paranormal Lockdown takes you to haunted buildings all over America and the...

It's the end of August and slowly but surely, Oscar season is heating up. Right now, a lot of countries are selecting the movie that will represent them for the Oscar of foreign language film. 16 countries - and counting - have done this so far. Flashback to 1993, when Cuba chose its most successful movie ever... In an ice salon, somewhere in Cuba, two men meet. One is David, a student in political science, in favour of the Cuban revolution, who has just been dumped. The other is a flamboyant gay photographer, Diego, who opposes the revolution and is clearly smitten with the student. From the beginning, it is clear that these two men are each others' opposites and not just on a political level. The movie follows the budding of the unlikely close friendship between the two men through a series of conversations. Diego can not help but fall with the gorgeous student and David gradually comes to a better understanding of Diego's political choice. Enter Diego's lovel...

Somewhere in France, a Georgian immigrant called Sébastien works as a handyman for Godon, a criminal who is addicted to drugs. Quite unexpectedly the latter dies of an overdose without having paid the former for all his work. As an act of revenge, Sébastien steals an envelope containing a train ticket and a hotel voucher in the hope it will lead to him to a job. The young man follows a series of mysterious instructions which eventually lead him to a mansion in the middle of nowhere. There a terrible fate awaits him, but there is no way back... Director Géla Babluani takes his time for the introduction of his first long feature and that is a bit of a shame. The first 30 minutes are slow and quite frankly, a bit boring. But then suddenly, the pace changes. As soon as Sébastien finds himself in a brutal game where old men bet large sums of money on men playing a variety of Russian roulette, the viewer is quickly led from one horrific scene to another. And somehow this mix of thrill...