Archive for the ‘Thriller’ Category
Monday, May 1st, 2017
RED ROCK WEST is one of my favorite neo-noirs, an ingeniously concocted tale with a simple, appealing hero who makes one wrong choice that snags him and he has to spend the rest of the movie trying to crawl his way out of an ever-tightening trap. He’s driving through the town of Red Rock, Wyoming when it goes down, so every time he gets out and then something else goes wrong we share his dismay at passing that god damn “Welcome to Red Rock” sign once more.
Well before all the thrilling twists and tense (but down to earth) set pieces, director John Dahl (THE LAST SEDUCTION, ROUNDERS, JOY RIDE) wins me over with an A+ overture of visual storytelling that establishes Michael (Nic Cage)’s hard times and integrity. We meet him waking up in his car on the side of a farm road, shaving, smelling the shirt he takes out of the trunk to make sure it’s not too bad, looking in the window reflection as he tucks it in, preparing to try to make a good impression. We also see his USMC tattoo, even before he starts doing shirtless one-arm push-ups. This will be relevant.
He’s broke and having trouble finding a job and has a bum knee brought back as a souvenir from Lebanon but he’s an honest man, not looking for any shortcuts. Not until he stops at a bar and his timing and Texas plates cause the owner, Wayne (the great J.T. Walsh, BREAKDOWN, EXECUTIVE DECISION) to mistake him for “Lyle from Dallas” who was supposed to be here last week for a job. Michael plays along, which seems like a promising trick for the few minutes before he realizes the job is to murder Wayne’s wife Suzanne (Lara Flynn Boyle, POLTERGEIST III). So it’s neither a line of work he’s interested in or the type where you can just put in your two weeks notice and be on your way. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Dan Shor, Dennis Hopper, Dwight Yoakam, J.T. Walsh, John Dahl, Lara Flynn Boyle, neo-noir, Nicolas Cage, Timothy Carhart
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 21 Comments »
Wednesday, April 19th, 2017
I’m real late to the dinner party (get it, because this is a movie about a dinner party), but THE INVITATION is a potent suspense thriller well-deserving of its reputation from film festivals and indie circuit release from Drafthouse Films. It’s tense and uncomfortable and it’s best not to know what sort of bad thing it’s leading up to, but don’t worry. You can sense its presence from early on.
Will (Logan Marshall-Green, who I did not recognize as the whiny boyfriend I hated so much in PROMETHEUS) and Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi, MILES AHEAD) are a couple invited to this other couple’s house out in the Hollywood Hills. It’s an awkward reunion for a close circle of friends who haven’t seen or heard from these party-givers in two years. There’s love and laughing and joking, but also weirdness with Eden (Tammy Blanchard, BLUE JASMINE)’s extra long hug of Will. And it starts to come out that not only are they exes, but their marriage ended because of a tragedy. They had a son who died in an accident right here at this house. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: cults, Drafthouse Films, Emayatzy Corinealdi, John Carroll Lynch, Karyn Kusama, Logan Marshall-Green, Matt Manfredi, Michiel Huisman, Phil Hay, Tammy Blanchard
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 8 Comments »
Wednesday, April 12th, 2017
THE CHASER opens with an escort getting in a car with a john. We don’t see what happens after that, just that she doesn’t come back. Many days pass – we know this from the amount of parking tickets attached to the car when Joong-ho (Kim Yoon-seok, THE YELLOW SEA) finds it abandoned on a winding road in the Mongkol District.
“You bitch,” he says. “If I find you, you’re dead.” And it cuts to the title. THE CHASER.
So this guy is The Chaser. Cool, I thought. This tough-as-nails detective is on the trail of a serial killer, and he’s not messing around!
Ha ha. Not quite. Come to find out he’s a pimp. It’s her he’s threatening to kill. A bunch of his employees have gone missing, and he thinks they’re running out on him. He sees it as a personnel problem. Not to be preachy but in my opinion pimping is not a respectable line of work, and he performs this immoral vocation in the style of a heartless corporate boss, or an Ebenezer Scrooge.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ha Jung-woo, Hong-jin Na, Kim Yoon-seok, Korean cinema, pimp, Seo Young-hee, serial killer
Posted in Crime, Horror, Reviews, Thriller | 11 Comments »
Monday, March 20th, 2017
Michael Mann feature #4 is MANHUNTER. Instead of a moody portrait of a thief like in THIEF he does one of a profiler trying to identify a serial killer. This is of course Mann’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, the pre-SILENCE OF THE LAMBS story of a guy chasing a killer called “The Tooth Fairy” after having caught Hannibal Lecktor (that’s how they spell it when he’s played by Brian Cox). William Petersen (THE SKULLS) plays Will Graham, who FBI agent Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina, CODE OF SILENCE) nudges into the investigation by showing him some crime scene photos and making him feel bad. That was a pretty shitty thing to do because Will is just starting to get his life back together after getting inside the mind of Lecktor also got him inside the rooms of a mental hospital.
“You’re supposed to be his friend. Why didn’t you leave him alone?” Will’s wife Molly (Kim Greist, C.H.U.D.) asks resignedly. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brian Cox, Dennis Farina, Joan Allen, Kim Greist, Michael Mann, profiler, serial killer, Stephen Lang, Thomas Harris, Tom Noonan, William Petersen
Posted in Crime, Reviews, Thriller | 154 Comments »
Tuesday, February 28th, 2017
GET OUT is a crazy, racially themed horror-thriller written and directed by Jordan Peele of the comedy duo Key & Peele. And you know how sensitive I am about this, so I’ll just say right here that I consider this a horror movie that’s funny, not a horror-comedy. That’s how I prefer it. There are some big laughs, but they come out of the characters and situations, not at the expense of taking them seriously.
Chris (Daniel Kaluuya, SICARIO) is a young photographer who’s going on a trip with Rose (Allison Williams from Girls), his girlfriend of five months, to meet her parents. One thing he’s nervous about: she hasn’t told them he’s black. She swears it won’t be a big deal. Swears it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Allison Williams, Betty Gabriel, Bradley Whitford, Caleb Landry Jones, Catherine Keener, Daniel Kaluuya, Jordan Peele, LaKeith Stanfield, Lil Rel Howery, Marcus Henderson
Posted in Horror, Reviews, Thriller | 44 Comments »
Monday, February 6th, 2017
Request: please be extra careful in the comments not to give away that one surprise thing
where people might see it by accident.
SPLIT is M. Night Shyamalan’s odd little thriller about three teenage girls abducted from a parking lot and kept locked in a room by a man calling himself Dennis (James McAvoy). Terror turns to confusion when he starts coming to the room talking different, acting different, claiming to be different people. It turns out Dennis is just one of 23 personalities in this guy, and they don’t all necessarily support what he’s doing.
Logically you assume this kidnapper is gonna be a rapist or killer, and these may be true, but for now he’s being told to cool it by “Patricia,” a female personality who shows up occasionally to make the girls mayo sandwiches and assure them “he’s not supposed to touch you.” Oh, okay, that’s comforting. He also shows up as “Hedwig,” an 11 year old boy who likes to dance and listen to Kanye West and giggles a little when he warns them that “The Beast” is coming.
I haven’t always been on board for McAvoy (WANTED, VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN, X-MEN FIRST CLASS), who’s obviously a good actor but seems weirdly prone to playing heroes who are a little too douchey to completely root for. But here he’s truly great. Each character has a different voice, accent and body language – you can recognize them even before he speaks, even if he doesn’t change his clothes. (Though he usually does. He seems to be very fast at it.) McAvoy is clearly having alot of fun with this, taking his acting skills and doing a bunch of donuts and wheelies and shit. Going off jumps.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anya-Taylor Joy, Betty Buckley, Haley Lu Richardson, James McAvoy, Jessica Sula, M. Night Shyamalan
Posted in Horror, Reviews, Thriller | 24 Comments »
Thursday, January 19th, 2017
With the inauguration about to happen I think alot of us kinda feel like we’re all alone, torn open, bleeding and floating on a dead whale, unable to get to shore because a shark the size of a fuckin bus wants to eat us and will not leave us be. So I thought you know what, what if there was a movie about somebody else in that situation, maybe if it had a positive outcome it would be a good inspirational tool for all of us as citizens of the United States and the world who hope to somehow survive the coming shit show of dangerous ignorance and blatant, barely-even-trying-to-fuckin-hide-it-at-all corruption.
The title THE SHALLOWS is not about the new management, it’s just referring to an area of not-that-deep water that is the setting for a pleasingly simple 80-minute romp from Jaume Collet-Serra, director of HOUSE OF WAX, GOAL II, ORPHAN and three Liam Neeson vehicles (UNKNOWN, NON-STOP and RUN ALL NIGHT). Liam must’ve been busy doing SILENCE or something, so Collet-Serra went off and made this adaptation of Blake Lively’s one woman off Broadway show about a surfer trapped on a rock after a shark attack.
I lied. It is not based on a one woman show. But it is almost entirely balanced on Lively’s shoulders. She plays Nancy, who is always on screen and usually alone. Supporting characters who she’d also play in the stage version are:
1. Little boy seen on beach in prologue
2. Guy who gives her ride to beach
3. Her friend who was supposed to be with her, portrayed through text messages (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anthony Jaswinski, Blake Lively, Jaume Collet-Serra, sharks, Steven Seagull
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 14 Comments »
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2016
For some reason it’s hard to make a movie series based on a book series about some dude who has different adventures. Except for James Bond, and Jack Ryan at one point. And it tends to be only screenwriters turned directors who know this sort of thing would be cool: Brian Helgeland did a Parker book (PAYBACK), Scott Frank did a Matthew Scudder (A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES), Christopher McQuarrie did a Jack Reacher (JACK REACHER). All of these are artful takes on pulpy material, slightly elevated genre fare that’s neither generic nor ashamed to take part in a one-liner or just-how-badass-is-he speech. The latter two are really more interesting for their characters and style than for the particular mysteries they get involved in, so naturally you’re left wanting them to have a whole series of movies.
So congratulations to Jack Reacher for eking out just enough box office to justify a sequel. It feels so natural, but I honestly didn’t think it would happen. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Cobie Smulders, Danika Yarosh, Edward Zwick, Lee Child, Patrick Heusinger, Robert Knepper, Tom Cruise
Posted in Action, Reviews, Thriller | 48 Comments »
Tuesday, November 1st, 2016
a.k.a. SNAPSHOT
a.k.a. ONE MORE MINUTE
I’m including this as one final Slasher Search ’16 because I came to it by looking up the Australian screenwriter Everett De Roche (LONG WEEKEND, ROAD GAMES, RAZORBACK, LINK, STORM WARNING) to see if he ever did anything slasher-ish. This one, which was listed as ONE MORE MINUTE on IMDb, seemed promising with its stalker storyline, and then I figured out I had heard of it before because it’s released on DVD under the title THE DAY AFTER HALLOWEEN. For some reason I got a thing for horror movies set on specific days, so that stuck in my head.
But actually that title is purely exploitation and doesn’t describe the movie at all. There is no Halloween content, it happens over more than one day, and in fact it’s mentioned that it’s winter. This is Australia, so that would make it June, July or August, and therefore not the day after Halloween. The title on the opening credits, SNAPSHOT, makes alot more sense.
This is also not a slasher movie, and barely a horror movie, but it does include stalking and building tension and is actually quite good. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Australian cinema, Chantal Contouri, Everett De Roche, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Sigrid Thornton, Simon Wincer, Vincent Gil
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 10 Comments »
Monday, August 15th, 2016
JASON BOURNE opens with clips from the original Doug Liman/Paul Greengrass/Matt Damon BOURNE trilogy of 2002-2007. Those movies came to reinvent the spy thriller for a new age, even influencing the subsequent 007 movies and unfortunately inspiring an age of impressionistic action sequences. But the last time Damon played the character was almost a decade ago.
THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM doesn’t seem like very long ago to me, but think about how much has changed in our world. When it came out Obama was still a senator, Heath Ledger and Paul Walker were still alive, Margot Robbie was 17 years old, only serious fantasy nerds had ever heard of Game of Thrones, movies were projected from 35 mm prints, there was growing excitement about a comeback for 3D, and Vin Diesel had not yet returned to starring in the FAST AND FURIOUS series. Along with FASTs 4-7, action movies we’ve had in the interim include the entire IP MAN series, the entire EXPENDABLES series, THE RAID 1 and 2, JACK REACHER, the John Hyams UNIVERSAL SOLDIER movies, JOHN WICK and MAD MAX: FURY ROAD. So one could argue that the genre has changed.
And when JASON BOURNE cuts from blue-tinted, baby-faced everyman flashback Damon to the 2016 model – chiseled features, convincing grimace, gray hairs, a wider color palette – it’s a thrilling leap. He just looks so much cooler now. Having done, you know, whatever the stuff was in the other movies, Bourne is now living the way of the dragon, bare knuckle brawling for cash in Greece. That tells us he’ll probly never stop killing, because he’s clearly some kind of genius who could change his name and get all kinds of high paying jobs, and still he chooses to be a human cockfighter. I wish he lived in a Buddhist temple to complete the RAMBO III homage. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alicia Vikander, domestic spying, Julia Stiles, Matt Damon, one-punch knockout, Paul Greengrass, spy, Tommy Lee Jones, Vincent Cassel
Posted in Action, Reviews, Thriller | 49 Comments »
