Archive for the ‘Horror’ Category
Monday, October 24th, 2022
MEN is this year’s film from Alex Garland (writer of 28 DAYS LATER, SUNSHINE, 28 WEEKS LATER, NEVER LET ME GO, and DREDD, writer/director of EX_MACHINA and ANNIHILATION). It got mixed/semi-positive-ish reviews but its greatest achievement was a D+ Cinemascore, which sometimes can be a badge of honor.* Much more than the other A24 horror releases this year (X, BODIES BODIES BODIES, and PEARL) this is an A24 horror movie in all the senses of the term, so I advise many of you, you know who you are, to move along to the other movies that they have out there available to watch. I kinda liked it though.
Jessie Buckley (JUDY) plays Harper Marlowe, a recently widowed woman trying to treat herself by renting a huge cottage out in the country. She does a little remote work and keeps in regular touch with supportive friend Riley (Gayle Rankin – Sheila the Wolf Girl from GLOW), but mostly I think she’s trying to get away from it all, relax, take long walks and baths, just try to enjoy being by herself.
Of course it’s hard to do that, even out in the country, even out in the woods. You end up running into people. Awkward conversations are had. People know a little about you and think they should give you their opinion on things. You want to tell them why their advice is bad, but you don’t even owe them that, so it’s not worth getting into it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: A24, Alex Garland, Gayle Rankin, Jessie Buckley, Rory Kinnear
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 15 Comments »
Friday, October 21st, 2022
WATCHER – not to be confused with the Netflix show The Watcher or the Keanu Reeves movie THE WATCHER or the early UPN anthology series hosted by Sir Mix-a-Lot The Watcher – is an excellent psychological horror/suspense thriller that’s a Shudder exclusive and also came out on blu-ray and DVD a few weeks ago. Maika Monroe (INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE) stars as Julia, a young woman who moves to an apartment in Bucharest with her husband Francis (Karl Glusman, THE NEON DEMON).
Francis is American, but his mother is Romanian, and he speaks the language, but Julia doesn’t. So she’s immediately out of sorts from having to have her husband translate what people say to her as well as to speak for her. Then the very first thing she sees when they pull up to their building is a creepy guy (Burn Gorman, PACIFIC RIM) looking out a window across the street. Of course their apartment has a huge window facing right at this dude, but at first she doesn’t worry too much about it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Burn Gorman, Chloe Okuno, Karl Glusman, Madalina Anea, Maika Monroe
Posted in Horror, Reviews, Thriller | 7 Comments »
Thursday, October 20th, 2022
Though BODIES BODIES BODIES is one of this year’s crop of A24 horror releases, its slick filmatistic style, hedonistic twenty-something characters and aggressive electronical dance music soundtrack remind me more of non-horror A24 movies like SPRING BREAKERS and ZOLA than HEREDITARY or THE WITCH. And for good or bad it’s really not in that slow-burn/moody/atmospheric/symbolic vein – it’s pretty much an Agatha Christie inspired whodunit with some blood and some dark humor.
Sophie (Amandla Stenberg, COLOMBIANA, THE HUNGER GAMES) and Bee (holy shit why did I not recognize Maria Bakalova, Academy Award nominee for BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM?) are a new couple, together for about a month and a half. So it’s a big step that Sophie is bringing Bee to meet her oldest friends. There’s a hurricane coming, and they’re all rich kids, and apparently what rich kids do during a hurricane is hole up at somebody’s parents’ remote mansion and have a party. Honestly it seems like a great idea if you have the resources (events depicted in this movie aside). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: A24, Amandla Stenberg, Chase Sui Wonders, Disasterpeace, Halina Reijn, Kristen Roupenian, Lee Pace, Maria Bakalova, Myha'la Herrold, Pete Davidson, Rachel Sennott, whodunit slashers
Posted in Horror, Mystery, Reviews, Thriller | 12 Comments »
Wednesday, October 19th, 2022
“Motherfucker, there are coffins in the basement!”
SAVAGE LUST (1989) is a terrible title, and I’m not gonna claim the movie is much better. But as far as a first Slasher Search title of ’22 – and maybe the last if I can’t find anything else that seems to fit the bill – it’s surprisingly watchable. I got through it in one sitting!
This is not an official announcement of an ending to Slasher Search – just a realistic assessment that there aren’t many more of what I’m searching for out there. So I’ll share them with you when I find them, but I hope you won’t be disappointed if they end up being few and far between.
I’ll always be open to recommendations for good slashers and other horror I’ve missed from any era. But the idea of Slasher Search is to discover things too obscure to be recommended to me. But the window for finding vintage slasher movies that I haven’t already seen, and that haven’t already been dug up by somebody else, gets narrower by the week. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Clark Tufts, Greg Rhodes, Jennifer Delora, Jerry Kernion, Jose Ramon Larraz, Slasher Search, slashers, William Russell
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 21 Comments »
Monday, October 17th, 2022
HALLOWEEN ENDS, the conclusion to David Gordon Green’s HALLOWEEN trilogy, and part 4 in the HALLOWEEN series (timeline 3), is not what I expected. It’s not what anyone expected, or could’ve predicted. The trailers made it seem like they completely ran out of material. Oh yeah, Laurie fights Michael again. She already tried that in 2018 with 40 years of preparation, hidden weapons and a dungeon. She wanted to do it in HALLOWEEN KILLS but a riot started at the hospital, some asshole bumped into her and the staples on her knife wound tore open. But now it’s years later so she’s gonna do it spontaneously in her kitchen, looks like. Seems redundant.
Oh well. I had faith, because I’ve liked these movies, I like this director. And it paid off. That stuff is in the movie, but it works because it’s about so much more.
(You know I have to dig in deep with a new HALLOWEEN movie, so this is a HEAVY SPOILER REVIEW.)
The cold open takes place in Haddonfield on Halloween, 2019. A young man named Corey (Rohan Campbell, SANTA BABY 2: CHRISTMAS MAYBE) is called last minute to babysit for some rich couple. The kid (Jaxon Goldenberg) is a smartass. They watch John Carpenter’s THE THING together – an obvious but too-perfect-to-pass-up nod to watching THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD in Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN. Fears of Michael Myers are discussed. The kid points out that Michael kills babysitters, not kids. But Corey goes to the kitchen, hears a thump, comes back and can’t find the kid. The mansion is huge. A door is open. A knife is missing. The kid is screaming upstairs. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andi Matichak, Blumhouse, Danny McBride, David Gordon Green, Diva Tyler, James Jude Courtney, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jesse C. Boyd, Jibrail Nantambu, Joanne Baron, John Carpenter, Keraun Harris, Kyle Richards, Nick Castle, Omar Dorsey, Rick Moose, Rohan Campbell, slashers, Will Patton
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 60 Comments »
Wednesday, October 12th, 2022
There’s this slasher sequel TERRIFIER 2 that just had a limited 4-day theatrical release, with some positive reviews. I didn’t see it, but it made me pay more attention to the existence of the TERRIFIER intellectual property brand. I had previously not paid much attention because I had seen pictures of the ugly clown it stars. I respect and support Killer Klowns from outer space, and IT is pretty cool, and I liked THE LAST CIRCUS if that counts, but in general I think an evil clown is about the corniest, most obvious, off-brand Halloween mask bullshit there is. Especially this type where he has a demonic face and teeth trying hard to do the work that the clown makeup is supposed to do on its own by accident. Wasn’t the idea that clowns are scary in the first place? When you have to turn them into monsters isn’t that admitting you don’t really believe that?
Anyway, this writer/director Damien Leone has made a career out of his “Art the Clown” character, first in a series of shorts that he turned into the anthology ALL HALLOW’S EVE (2013), then the two TERRIFIERs. TERRIFIER (2016) is the shortest at 86 minutes, so I decided to start there. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Catherine Corcoran, clowns, Damien Leone, David Howard Thornton, Halloween, Jenna Kanell, Pooya Mohseni, Samantha Scaffidi, slashers
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 91 Comments »
Tuesday, October 11th, 2022
HELLRAISER (2022) is the new straight-to-Hulu HELLRAISER movie. It’s a genuine, bonafide reboot, by the original definition of the term – it doesn’t seem to work as a sequel, but it’s certainly not a remake, it’s just starting over, I guess. And it’s certainly a new start in that it’s getting more attention and being treated more like a real, existing movie than the DTV sequels that came out in 2018, 2011, 2005, 2002 and 2000. That’s partly because it’s a polished, well-directed movie with plenty of production value, and it was intentionally written to be the new HELLRAISER. Much of the series, as you may know, was just a perpetual rights retention machine – the Weinsteins ramming Pinhead into an unrelated horror script and dumping one out so they could retain the rights to dump another one out to retain the rights further down the road. Now, at last, the rights have escaped Miramax Hell and are sheltering at Spyglass Media Group (who also got SCREAM and SPY KIDS. There must’ve been a sale). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adam Faison, Aoife Hinds, Ben Collins, Brandon Flynn, Clive Barker, David Bruckner, David S. Goyer, Drew Starkey, Eli Born, Goran Visnjic, Hiam Abbass, Hulu, Jamie Clayton, Luke Piotrowski, Odessa A'zion, Selina Lo
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 22 Comments »
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 »
