Archive for the ‘Horror’ Category
Monday, October 10th, 2022
I don’t know why it took me this long, but I finally decided to catch up with the two Mike Flanagan joints I hadn’t seen yet (not counting the dramas he made during and immediately after college, or the TV series The Firefighter Combat Challenge). He made his entry into horror in 2006, with a shot-on-video-in-one-room short called Oculus: Chapter 3 – The Man with the Plan. Like George Lucas with STAR WARS, his story was bigger than his resources so he started with the most exciting chapter and filled in the rest later.
The short is about a guy who has obtained a haunted mirror that he plans to destroy. It’s a cool idea for a short with acting and visuals that require a certain level of forgiveness. But it apparently went over well at film festivals and inspired some interest in a feature version. The trouble was that producers all wanted to make it a found footage movie and/or give it to a director other than Flanagan. So instead he set the evil mirror aside and did a Kickstarter campaign to finance his $70,000 debut horror feature, ABSENTIA (2011). And once that was under his belt he got Intrepid Features (WAIST DEEP, THE STRANGERS) to let him direct a non-found-footage OCULUS, which filmed in 2012. And they must’ve been pretty happy with it, because now he’s a partner in the company. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Annabeth Gish, Blumhouse, Brenton Thwaites, Danny Elfman, Dash Mihok, Jacob Tremblay, James Lafferty, Karen Gillan, Kate Bosworth, Kate Siegel, Katee Sackhoff, Mike Flanagan, Newton Brothers, Rory Cochrane, Thomas Jane, WWE Films
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 18 Comments »
Wednesday, October 5th, 2022
Every once in a while the streaming service Shudder does a “secret screening” – a one time only showing on their live feed of a movie they’re not gonna have available until later. I think this is a really cool idea, and something they can do specifically because they’re one of the more lovingly put together services, run by actual programmers trying to curate horror movies they think their subscribers will be excited about.
I caught what I believe was the first time they did it, when it was a time loop thriller called LUCKY. I was into it but something about the ending that I don’t remember anymore fell flat with me and I never actually reviewed it. (Others thought more highly of it.) But I happened to be free last Saturday when I saw they were doing another one, so I gave it a shot again.
When the credits started in Italian I admit that my limited horror brain did immediately think “Is this an Dario Argento movie?” But I didn’t specifically remember he had a new one called DARK GLASSES (Occhiali neri) until his credit and the title came on after the ominous opening scene. If there’s a giveaway, it’s the swaggeringly aggressive use of electronic score by Arnaud Rebotini (a French musician from a band called Black Strobe). It sounds John Carpentery at first, then a little Gobliny, and by the end you’re at some evil rave. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrea Zhang, Arnaud Rebotini, Asia Argento, Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini, giallo, Ilenia Pastorelli, Shudder, Viktorie Ignoto
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 12 Comments »
Tuesday, October 4th, 2022
It seems like a fluke that PEARL even exists. It’s director Ti West’s prequel to his previous movie X, which was a hit for A24 earlier this year. It came so fast because he thought of the idea during a pandemic delay for the first movie, wrote it real fast and built it in as a back-to-back shoot.
X was of course a ‘70s set TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE homage about a very old couple taking out some of their issues on the young people who rented their barn to film a porn movie. One of its novelties was realizing somewhere in the middle that Mia Goth (SUSPIRIA remake), who plays the wannabe starlet protagonist Maxine, is also playing the lusty elderly villain Pearl. So in this one she return as a young Pearl in 1918, and as the central character. You don’t see that every day. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: A24, Alistair Sewell, Emma Jenkins-Purro, Matthew Sunderland, Mia Goth, prequels, Tandi Wright, Ti West
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 8 Comments »
Friday, September 30th, 2022
Just as the Weird Summer of 1992 was wrapping up, New Line Cinema gave us arguably the season’s weirdest wide release. Sure, it played half as many screens as its fellow August 28, 1992 releases HONEYMOON IN VEGAS, PET SEMATARY II and FREDDIE AS F.R.O.7., but I think it’s fair to call it mainstream. There was awareness, it was based on a recently popular TV show, and it at least opened bigger than FREDDIE. As far as per screen averages it came in 4th place for the weekend.
TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME is, of course, David Lynch’s big screen prequel to his pop-culture-phenomenon TV series Twin Peaks. I’ll get into my history with the show later, but for now I’ll just note that I’m unfamiliar enough that I watched this as pretty much an outsider, looking at it almost as a stand alone movie.
And at first it really does fit into the indie releases of ’92 – it makes sense as a contemporary of NIGHT ON EARTH, ONE FALSE MOVE, RUBIN & ED, and JOHNNY SUEDE. It tells the story of FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole (David Lynch, ZELLY AND ME) teaming up stoic veteran Special Agent Chester Desmond (Chris Isaak, MARRIED TO THE MOB) and nerdy bow tie wearing rookie Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland, RENEGADES) to investigate the murder of a teenager named Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley, CHERRY 2000, HIGHWAY TO HELL) in the small town of Deer Meadow, Washington. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Chris Isaak, continuation of a TV show, Dana Ashbrook, David Bowie, David Lynch, Eric DaRe, filmed in Washington, Gary Bullock, Harry Dean Stanton, James Marshall, Julee Cruise, Kiefer Sutherland, Kyle MacLachlan, Lenny Von Dohlen, Moira Kelly, Pamela Gidley, prequels, Ray Wise, Rick Aiello, Sheryl Lee
Posted in Horror, I don't know, Reviews, Thriller | 40 Comments »
Thursday, September 15th, 2022
July 31, 1992
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER is an unusual cult movie because it’s largely remembered for the same reason it’s dismissed: it’s overshadowed by its long running TV show followup. In that sense it’s Gen-X’s answer to M*A*S*H.
Had that not happened, maybe there would be more passion for this likable if not entirely successful execution of a cute horror-comedy idea. The director is Fran Rubel Kuzui (TOKYO POP), the screenwriter is then-25-year-old Roseanne staff writer Joss Whedon, and its gimmick is almost there in the title: what if the popular, mall-loving, air-headed Valley Girl cheerleader was not just fodder in a vampire movie, but the chosen one destined to protect humanity? I can’t actually think of many Valley Girl cheerleaders in horror – it seems more like a twist on fake horror movies within other movies than on the actual genre – but it works as a tongue-in-cheek way to cross a high school comedy with horror, and at least superficially point to the serious place where their themes can overlap. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alexis Arquette, Ben Affleck, Candy Clark, cheerleaders, David Arquette, Dolly Parton, Donald Sutherland, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Hilary Swank, James Lew, James Paradise, Joss Whedon, Kristy Swanson, Luke Perry, Michele Abrams, Natasha Gregson Wagner, Paris Vaughan, Pat E. Johnson, Paul Reubens, Randall Batinkoff, Ricki Lake, Rutger Hauer, Stephen Root, Terry J. Leonard, Thomas Jane, vampires
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Horror, Reviews | 30 Comments »
Monday, September 12th, 2022
The trailer for BARBARIAN suggests an intriguing and pretty straight forward horror-thriller idea. Tess (Georgina Campbell, KING ARTHUR: LEGEND OF THE SWORD) shows up at her Airbnb late on a rainy night and discovers that somehow someone is already staying in it. It’s a scary neighborhood on the outskirts of Detroit, so the other renter, Keith (Bill Skarsgard, ATOMIC BLONDE) lets her come in while they try to figure out what’s going on. They can’t get ahold of the owners, so she sneaks a photo of Keith’s driver’s license (just in case) and reluctantly accepts his offer to take the bedroom while he sleeps on the couch.
He seems very polite and cute, but of course that’s a reason not to trust somebody in a movie like this. Plus the motherfucker played Pennywise! So when weird shit starts happening and she finds a scary secret door in the basement you try to figure out if he’s up to something or if they’re both in trouble together or what. And you can sort of see where it would go from there.
Or that’s what it seems like. One question: why BARBARIAN? Why not, like, OVERBOOKED or SCARE BnB or whatever? Well because it goes a little further off that set up than you might expect, and I’m glad I heard that because it inspired me to go see it opening day. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bill Skarsgard, Georgina Campbell, Justin Long, Richard Brake, Zach Cregger
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 64 Comments »
Thursday, September 8th, 2022
“She’s dead, sir. They took her to the morgue.”
“The morgue? She’ll be furious!”
On July 31, 1992 we come to another one of those odd happenings that caused me to label this as Weird Summer. This is the time when an A-list director became enamored of a cynical black comedy and turned it into a big summer movie starring Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn and Bruce Willis. Writers Martin Donovan (the Argentinian filmmaker who directed APARTMENT ZERO, not the guy from the Hal Hartley movies) and David Koepp (co-writer of APARTMENT ZERO – this was his movie after TOY SOLDIERS) saw it as a low budget indie, and then it got made with a budget bigger than ALIEN 3, and groundbreaking digital effects by Industrial Light and Magic. The effects ended up winning an Oscar and Koepp’s next gig was writing JURASSIC PARK.
Director Robert Zemeckis had put his name on the blockbuster map with ROMANCING THE STONE in 1984, and then triple circled, highlighted and put stars next to his name when BACK TO THE FUTURE was a surprise smash hit the following year. Since then he’d made my favorite of his movies, WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (1988), followed by the BACK TO THE FUTURE sequels (1989 and 1990). Those were all rated PG, and most of them were produced by Steven Spielberg, so Zemeckis was generally thought of as that kind of family friendly whiz bang popcorn movie guy. And now here he comes with this mean-spirited PG-13 movie aimed at adults, its wider appeal coming from the genuinely envelope-pushing ways it depicts gruesome bodily mutilations. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bruce Willis, David Koepp, Dean Cundey, Fabio, Goldie Hawn, Isabella Rosellini, Meryl Streep, Robert Zemeckis, Sydney Pollack
Posted in Bruce, Comedy/Laffs, Horror, Reviews | 22 Comments »
Friday, September 2nd, 2022
DAY SHIFT was a highly anticipated Netflix production that I watched right before leaving for my vacation-turned-sick-leave. I know plenty of other people enjoyed and discussed it upon release a couple weeks ago, now they’re mostly done with it and have moved on to other topics, but here I am to remind everyone that it still exists on a server somewhere and can be accessed at the click of a button if somebody remembers to. Which I recommend.
It’s a heartily enjoyable horror-action comedy that’s kind of like John Carpenter’s VAMPIRES but in L.A., and with more of a ZOMBIELAND sense of humor. I guess you could say it takes kind of a MEN IN BLACK approach to the profession of vampire hunting, but I can take it more seriously than that because it’s pretty raunchy and gory and especially delivers on outstanding action sequences.
And that was the main thing I was looking for, because this is the directorial debut of stunt legend J.J. Perry. I first became aware of him as the fight choreographer of UNDISPUTED II, followed by THE TOURNAMENT, WARRIOR, and HAYWIRE. But he’d been around since the ‘80s, a true blue veteran of the type of movies I love most. He played fighter J.J. Tucker in BLOODSPORT III and Cyrax, Scorpion and Noob Saibot in MORTAL KOMBAT: ANNIHILATION. He did stunts in all the BEST OF THE BEST sequels, DRIVE, BLADE, and a bunch of Seagal movies (THE GLIMMER MAN, TODAY YOU DIE, BLACK DAWN, URBAN JUSTICE, PISTOL WHIPPED). He was the stunt coordinator and second unit director on productions ranging from ROAD HOUSE 2 to BLOOD AND BONE to FATE OF THE FURIOUS and F9. And there’s more justice in the world than I previously thought because now he’s directing a $100 million production starring an Academy Award winner! And Snoop Dogg. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: 87Eleven, Dave Franco, Eric Lange, Felix Betancourt, J.J. Perry, Jamie Foxx, Karla Souza, Meagan Good, Natasha Liu Bordizzo, Netflix, Oliver Masucci, Peter Stormare, Scott Adkins, Shay Hatten, Snoop Dogg, Steve Howey, Toby Oliver, Tyler Tice, vampires, Zion Broadnax
Posted in Action, Comedy/Laffs, Horror, Reviews | 14 Comments »
Tuesday, August 30th, 2022
ORPHAN: FIRST KILL is a good version of a usually under-appreciated popular art form: the knowingly-trashy-but-not-too-winky-about-it horror-thriller. I’m surprised and happy to see it getting as much love as it is, and hopefully that’s not setting expectations too high. I think it could kinda be like a 21st century version of the STEPFATHER trilogy. Though both started with the loose inspiration of real life crimes, the ORPHAN premise has the advantage of seeming much more absurd from the beginning, and therefore more ripe for escalation. I haven’t seen anyone arguing that it’s exploitative (in a bad way) to continue the adventures of Esther nee Leena (Isabelle Furhman, THE HUNGER GAMES), the (spoiler for ORPHAN part 1) dangerous escaped mental patient who pretends to be an innocent little girl.
I probly didn’t need that spoiler warning. By now anybody who knows what ORPHAN is knows that wild plot twist: the adopted little girl who’s been terrorizing Vera Farmiga and making everybody think she’s crazy and abusive turns out to be a woman in her 30s with a rare hormonal disorder and a false identity. What makes this prequel so unlikely and so delightfully audacious is that Fuhrman originally played the character when she was around 12, and instead of recasting they brought her back at the age of 24, using Hobbitvision (forced perspective and body doubles) to make her look small. I honestly found it easy to forget, but just knowing they went through the trouble for this movie gives it an extra kick. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alex Mace, David Coggeshall, David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, Hiro Kanagawa, Isabelle Fuhrman, Julia Stiles, Matthew Finlan, Rossif Sutherland, Samantha Walkes, William Brent Bell
Posted in Horror, Reviews, Thriller | 6 Comments »
Friday, August 12th, 2022
For those of you who missed it when it was a Patreon exclusive in June, here’s my Vern’s Appeals Process revisit to the 2003 remake of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. And if you’re interested in something else to read I just put up a new Patreon exclusive (for now) where I do the same for Stephen Sommers’ DEEP RISING.
INSPIRED BY A TRUE STORY
When I positively reviewed this year’s sequel to THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974), coherently titled TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (2022), I wasn’t quite prepared for how controversial that would be. Not nearly as controversial as when I loved the 2013 EVIL DEAD remake directed by the producers/writers of this new CHAINSAW (I stand by that), but my appreciation for it really threw some people for a loop. What I came to understand was that people remembered how fiercely protective of Tobe Hooper’s creation I was when I went scorched earth on Marcus Nispel’s remake in my 2003 Ain’t It Cool News review, which I proudly titled “Vern massacres THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.” At least a few people wished I had come at this unpopular sequel with that same kind of righteous fury.
My perspective: of course I didn’t. That was a long time ago, I’ve changed, circumstances have changed, the franchise has changed, this one is more my style than that one was, and even if none of those things were the case, I’d still have different expectations for the — what, fifth? — sequel than the first redo. But I had been thinking about the remake, because I’d been seeing people on Twitter – possibly a generation younger than me, who saw it at a different stage in their life and horror fandom – saying that it was a classic in its own right, and they couldn’t believe there were people who disliked it. I ferociously disagreed with that assessment at the time, but like I said, I’ve changed, things have changed. And It’s been so long. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Daniel Pearl, Jessica Biel, Lauren German, Marcus Nispel, Michael Bay, Platinum Dunes, R. Lee Ermey, remakes, Scott Kosar, slashers, Vern's Appeals Process
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 7 Comments »
