This may be lost to time now, but back in the aughts when SAW was a new thing it was seen as a huge underdog story. These clever young Australians, director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell, had taken first Sundance and then the world by storm with their gritty, against-the-grain little high concept horror movie that cost a million dollars and grossed more than 100 times that much just in theaters. Soon it would be tarred as “torture porn” and looked down on for having an endless series of sequels, and then it would sort of outlive that criticism and become a beloved institution. It hasn’t been Wan’s baby for most of that time, but unlike the makers of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT or PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, he was able to grow a bigger directing career from that success. He didn’t want to repeat himself, and stepped back to executive produce the first sequels while he and Whannell hooked up with Universal to make a $20 million ghost story called DEAD SILENCE.
But it was seen as a huge dud. It made less than its budget in theaters and received “generally unfavorable reviews” according to Metacritic. Man, I should’ve known to see it anyway. I mean I did, I always meant to catch up with it, but it took me this long. It’s funny because you can see how people back then who pegged Wan as this extreme horror guy and wanted something really seedy were like, what the fuck is this? Haunted dolls? Flying cameras? I want to see something fucked up! I don’t think I would’ve agreed with them at the time, but today this is definitely the kind of enthusiastic absurdity I want from the director of MALIGNANT. (read the rest of this shit…)
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 
REBEL RIDGE is the latest from writer/director Jeremy Saulnier, who’s now five for five in my book. He did the gory art world satire 
