IN A VIOLENT NATURE was one of this year’s most hyped and intriguing indie horror movies. It’s a slasher hailing from the land of Canada (see also: BLACK CHRISTMAS, PROM NIGHT, MY BLOODY VALENTINE), but it it takes an unusual approach that made some describe it as an “ambient slasher” or “slow cinema” after its midnight Sundance premiere. Writer/director Chris Nash cited Gus Van Sant’s camera-following-people-walking-around trilogy and Terrence Malick as inspirations, while many reviews compare the style to the Dardenne Brothers and Bela Tarr. So when I finally saw it on Shudder I was surprised that it’s much closer to a normal slasher movie than the arty deconstruction or reinvention I’d pictured from all that.
Yes, the approach is inspired by the above-named filmmakers, but this is not some self-serious, nihilistic chiller. It winkingly repurposes arthouse techniques for pulpy purposes. Alex Nino Gheciu of the Globe and Mail wrote that the film “has no protagonists. Everything is shown from [the killer’s] perspective,” which puts in mind the opening of THE TOOLBOX MURDERS, but it’s not that either. You have your usual characters, they’re just not at center frame the whole time. (read the rest of this shit…)
This may be lost to time now, but back in the aughts when 
A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE is something rare and kind of lovely: a big franchise genre movie that uses those expensive trappings for something modest, simple and beautiful. As the title implies, it takes place right before and during the initial onslaught of super-hearing monsters from space that eat anybody who makes a sound, quickly causing the fall of society and leaving a smattering of by-necessity-non-verbal post-apocalyptic survivors. We get those monsters, some tense set pieces, some clever ways to deal with them, some (I believe) new information about how they work and how mankind first reacted. But really it could be almost any disaster scenario, because what’s great about it is that it spends this day of almost certain doom with a protagonist who was already about to die anyway.
At some point in the last decade or so the movie-discussers really latched onto the term “body horror.” They kinda act like if you can identify a movie as body horror that means it’s legit. But also when they say it they almost always mean one thing: it has some David Cronenberg-inspired New Flesh type stuff at some point. I kinda wonder how many of the people comparing any vaguely misshapen flesh to Cronenberg bothered to see his last movie, but I suppose that’s irrelevant.
INFESTED (Vermines) is a very good French giant spider movie I watched on Shudder a while back and I’m happy to recommend it for your October viewing (or otherwise). It’s a movie with tons of style, energy and personality as well as, you know, spiders. The opening has almost an INDIANA JONES, adventure movie kind of feel, as we follow a pick up truck of Arab smugglers into the desert where they smoke a swarm of rare spiders out of a hole to capture in plastic containers. These things are so deadly that when one of their crew gets bit they have to put him out of his misery with a machete, but they still pack some of them up. And one of them will end up in Paris.
As I write this there’s a terrible sickness going around. All the world’s authoritarian assholes have agreed it’s time to whip out the ol’ “immigrants are scary” cliche to rile up the dumbest motherfuckers on earth. In my country there’s a specifically idiotic one where the two sweaty goblins running on the Keep Trump Unaccountable For His Crimes ticket purposely spread a racist myth about Haitian immigrants in a specific town in Ohio, leading to weeks of chaos, harassment and bomb threats. And of course they’ve refused to apologize, doubled down on the lies, and promised to deport these (legal!) immigrants if they manage to take power again.
KNOX GOES AWAY is, somehow, the second movie I watched in a week where a professional killer is diagnosed with the fatal neurocognitive disorder Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. In 
A sequel to BEETLEJUICE was first announced when part 1 was still in theaters. Director Tim Burton started developing it in earnest, went through a couple different ideas, it seemed like it was really gonna happen in the early ‘90s until he and Michael Keaton shifted their focus to 
A while ago I reviewed 
You bet your ass I’m gonna go see a theatrically released Dave Bautista vehicle directed by action legend J.J. Perry. THE KILLER’S GAME came out during the week I was traveling and it’s already down to limited showings but I got in there in time. I’m glad I did, but I gotta admit I can already feel it dissolving from my memory as I type this. I didn’t know it was based on a book and that it’s been in development since the ’90s (more on that later), but coming now it’s very well-worn material within the familiar Wacky Assassins mode of action filmmaking (think 
