Oct 1, 2010
Just like a thorough horror fan will return to the gory stuff after enjoying a quiet psycho-thriller or a suspenseful tale of simple survival, our pal Adam Green has returned to the sub-genre he loves so much: the slasher flick. The versatile genre freak started out with Hatchet before getting a little more sedate with Spiral and Frozen … and now(…)
Sep 23, 2010
Let’s just point to the elephant in the room right now and get it over with. Yes, the 2008 Swedish horror film Let the Right One In is sort of what you’d call an “instant classic.” I (and dozens of my festival colleagues) adored the film during its film festival run, the rest of the critics were(…)
Sep 22, 2010
Back when most of my friends were geeking out over their Mike Schmidt baseball cards or Spider-Man comic books, I was cataloging my own list of favorites. Sure, me and all my neighborhood friends loved baseball, comic books, and video games, but I’m pretty sure I was the only one who knew that Cujo and Cat’s Eye were directed(…)
Aug 20, 2010
Here’s a list of things you’ll definitely experience if you buy a ticket to Alexandre Aja’s remake of Joe Dante’s Piranha, Piranha 3D. 1. Some intermittently effective 3D trickery that I certainly won’t miss when the DVD hits the shelves. 2. Tons of gory scenes in which prehistoric, ravenous fish chew on shrieking people, most of whom(…)
Apr 28, 2010
It begins in standard enough fashion: Two young, pretty, obnoxious women get lost on their way to a party, only to stumble upon an isolated house belonging to a certifiable lunatic. That sums up the first 20-some minutes of Tom Six’s The Human Centipede, but once we get that familiar fare out of the way …(…)
Apr 27, 2010
Despite what the cynics say, there are many different reasons why someone(s) would want to remake a horror film like Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street: 1. Easy money, because the script is already done — and there’s always a few nickels to wring out of nostalgia and “name recognition.” 2. You love a classic(…)
Jan 24, 2010
I’m a big fan of the “what would YOU do?” thriller; the kind that asks how you’d react to A) being left in the ocean with hungry sharks, B) being trapped in a phone booth by a mad sniper, or C) being accidentally abandoned while riding a ski-lift high above a frigid mountain. Oh, you(…)
Jan 6, 2010
It’s a lazy technique … but it also works. I’m talking about the “movie X meets movie Y” style of cinematic analysis, and it’s how I plan to open my review of Michael and Peter Spierig’s Daybreakers: “It’s Gattaca meets Near Dark … sorta.” If I were one of those genre-lovin’ Australian Spierig boys, I’d choose to take that as(…)
Dec 11, 2009
Pity the poor apocalyptic horror film Carriers. Here we have a well-shot, psychologically demanding, and impressively unflinching tale of global decay, but since the screenplay caught the eye of a now-defunct “boutique” label (namely, Paramount Vantage), the film is beholden to all sorts of lofty expectations. A “studio product” must A) yield a jazzy trailer, B)(…)
Dec 4, 2009
Wikipedia tells me that the great Richard Matheson was none too pleased with the 1986 Twilight Zone episode that was based on his 1970 short story Button, Button. And having just witnessed the certifiably bizarre Richard Kelly adaptation, I think it’s safe to say that Mr. Matheson would have absolutely loathed this version. Let’s just say the TV(…)
Nov 25, 2009
Apparently all it takes to make an effective horror flick are the following components: a guy, a girl, a camera, and a whole bunch of seriously creepy atmosphere. Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity is one of the best haunted house flicks I’ve seen in quite some time — and what makes it even cooler is that(…)
Nov 4, 2009
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, in about 0.6 seconds: The horror / comedy mixture is a mean and difficult beast to tame. I do not envy the screenwriter, director, and actors who must, for at least 100 minutes, waver back and forth between A) shocks, scares, and splatter, and B) jokes,(…)
Oct 1, 2009
A college girl who desperately needs some income agrees to babysit in a giant creepy house, only to discover that she’s been enticed there for nefarious means. Your reaction is this: Yawn. Seen it. My response? That’s what’s so cool about Ti West’s The House of the Devil. It knows that YOU know all the “haunted house”(…)
Aug 30, 2009
One of the main (and corniest) reasons I love film festivals is this: We’re (pretty much) all there to acknowledge / admire / adore the art of cinema, and the love for the medium oozes out of every crack in the sidewalk found at Sundance, Toronto, SXSW, etc. But here’s the thing: 99.5% of the(…)
Aug 28, 2009
If you have a baby who loves to, say, take off his diaper and smear the walls with his own feces, it’s not really the kid’s fault. It’s the fault of the parents who allow a small child with a poop fetish to run around unchecked, free to do whatever he likes with his diaper(…)
Aug 28, 2009
It’s a phrase that a lot of film critics (and fans) love to throw around, but truth be told, even while digging through the lamest of the lame … I usually DO see some semblance of effort. Such is clearly not the case where the stupidly-titled The Final Destination is concerned. Considering I’ve seen unfinished work prints(…)
Aug 7, 2009
Sometimes a scary movie is a glass-half-full proposition, and sometimes it’s a half-empty one. This was the first thing to pop into my head upon sitting down to review the new “scary kid” flick Orphan, and I guess that’s my brain’s way of saying “It’s half-decent and half-goofy. Midway between surprisingly compelling and predictably familiar. For(…)
Aug 6, 2009
In watching A Perfect Getaway I can’t help but be taken back to 1988, a time in which we received a rather basic and unassuming action thriller from Touchstone (Disney) called Shoot to Kill. In that film, a brutal killer has taken a Pacific Northwest hiking guide hostage, and it’s up to a manly tracker (Tom Berenger) and(…)
Jul 24, 2009
“Chaos reigns!” is a now-famous line of dialog (spoken by a wolf) in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, and it certainly seems to sum up the director’s point: Chaos does indeed reign, and no amount of preparation, good intentions, or philanthropy can change that fact. We may try to control our own tiny little corners of the(…)
Jun 19, 2009
Nazi zombies. That’s all you really need to hear and you know if you want to see Dead Snow or not. I mean … zombies are pretty damn evil all by themselves, but zombies that are also undead minions of Adolf Hitler? You don’t get much more horrible than that. It’s not the plot or the acting or the(…)
Jun 12, 2009
Most zombie flicks are actually “about” something. George Romero always finds numerous ways to thread all sorts of sly social commentary throughout his tales of undead mega-carnage, and he’s not the only one: brainy filmmakers have been utilizing the “‘zombie” concept to tell all sorts of subtextual stories: Fido, 28 Days Later, and I Walked With a Zombie have(…)
May 27, 2009
For those who were worried that filmmaker Sam Raimi had become lost in the wilds of big-budget Hollywood, well, you can rest easy. To those who hold a very special fondness for Mr. Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy, his latest film represents a powerfully welcome return to the horror genre — and it’s evident after only 10 minutes(…)
Mar 27, 2009
There are of course at least a dozen different “sub-genres” beneath the glorious heading we all refer to as Horror. Some folks like the monster movies, others dig the slashers, this guy might be a fan of psychological horror, and this gal might be obsessed with all things devil-related. Crazy kids, angry animals, apocalyptic insanity(…)
Mar 13, 2009
When it comes to remakes, the “horror faithful” can be a prickly lot. Make one like Prom Night and we complain about a lack of faithfulness to the source material, a softening of the chills in the name of a PG-13 rating, and a distressing prevalence of downright suckiness. (Yeah, maybe Prom Night wasn’t a great example to begin(…)
Feb 13, 2009
Usually when I’m about to write a review, I think of an opening, present (at least) one interesting angle, and make sure my opinions are laid out in decipherable form. But when it comes to any movie with that employs the phrase “Friday the 13th,” my objectivity sort of flies out the window like so(…)
Jan 16, 2009
George Mihalka’s 1981 Canadian slasher movie My Bloody Valentine is sort of a rarity among similar flicks of the era for a few reasons: Instead of stupid teenagers, the movie is populated with (fairly stupid) grown-ups; it aims to add a small air of mystery-style “whodunnit?” to a generally standard “slasher” premise; and (weirdly enough),(…)
Dec 5, 2008
The annals of “killer kids” genre cinema is a long and colorful one indeed. Of course we have classics like The Bad Seed (1956), Village of the Damned (1960), and The Omen (1976), but the extra-caffeinated horror geeks will bring up solid little titles like It’s Alive (1974), Devil Times Five (1975), Who Can Kill a Child? (1976), The Children (1980). Children of the Corn (1984), Pet Sematary (1989). And there’s also The(…)
Sep 12, 2008
Once again I find myself in a love-hate relationship with the brothers Weinstein. Love because someone at their company clearly has good taste in imported horror cinema, plus the brothers actually do give a lot of cool flicks a chance to find an audience … eventually. That’s where the “hate” part comes in. I’m fully(…)
Aug 15, 2008
The good news is that Alex Aja’s Mirrors is a perfectly watchable horror-thriller that’s well-shot, well-scored, and backed by an excellent lead performance by Kiefer Sutherland. The bad news is that, despite the relative quality of this movie, we’re dealing with a simple case of cinematic leftovers. Like most horror flicks these days, Mirrors is based on(…)
Jul 11, 2008
If Steven Spielberg were just a little bit edgier, a little bit darker, and a little more (ok, I’ll say it) colorful, his movies would look a lot like those of Guillermo Del Toro. That’s not to knock Steven Spielberg (at all), nor is it meant as a straight comparison. But there were times during(…)
Apr 28, 2008
In the beginning, there was Ringu, Ju-On, and Gin Gwai. And Kairo, Chakushin Ari, and Honogurai Mizu No Soko Kara. And they were good. Well, good enough, anyway, although I’m probably committing horror-geek heresy by admitting that I wasn’t all that dazzled by the non-stop Asian genre flicks that I kept seeing at every freakin’(…)
Feb 15, 2008
Way back in September of 2006 I reviewed the rather impressive horror film called All the Boys Love Mandy Lane. It has never opened in America. Until this month, that is! Radius/TWC has finally rescued this darkly amusing little indie from financial nightmare limbo (it’s a long and boring story, believe me) and you can(…)
Jan 4, 2008
We could start with the fact that January and February are generally considered “the dumping grounds,” where studios manage to unload their lamest flicks with very little in the way of fanfare. Or we could note that One Missed Call is YET ANOTHER American remake of a (very recent) Asian horror flick, and just start(…)
Nov 11, 2007
When your $8 million movie grosses more than ten times that amount across the globe, the topic of “sequels” is going to come up. Such was the case surrounding Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, a freakishly fun (and admirably harsh) piece of sci-fi horror from one of the planet’s most consistently eclectic filmmakers. But while(…)
Nov 9, 2007
After years of seeing Ashley Judd as little more than a doe-eyed cutie-pie with limited acting skills, I (skeptically) sat down to watch her in William Friedkin’s “Bug.” Regarding the director, well, it’s tough to knock the man who gave us “The Exorcist,” “Sorcerer,” and “The French Connection,” but over the last several years his(…)
Oct 12, 2007
If there were a whole list of movies about killer mutated sheep and the horrific things they do to people, Jonathan King’s “Black Sheep” would be the very best. But since it’s the only movie with this particular premise, let’s just call it a really funny, not very scary, enthusiastically gory, and surprisingly “lovely to(…)
Sep 7, 2007
I was happy to sit down with Adam Green’s Hatchet in a quiet room with the volume cranked up, and here’s why: The last two times I saw Hatchet, I was sitting with some very enthusiastic film festival audiences — and I will admit that seeing a movie in that sort of situation can mask(…)
Aug 31, 2007
It’s just amazing how many things Rob Zombie gets wrong in his resoundingly pointless remake of John Carpenter’s Halloween. The original film could be used as a freakin’ textbook on how to craft a dark thriller that will toss an audience into a frenzy — but Zombie just sort of staggers drunkenly through the source(…)
Aug 31, 2007
A movie based on a Stephen King novel about a haunted hotel? And the main character is a frustrated writer? And it’s all about latent horrors, undead specters, and the gradual unraveling of a man’s psyche? Heck, I’ve seen this movie before. It was called “The Shining,” and even though it deviates quite a lot(…)
Aug 26, 2007
Monsters, demons, and knife-wielding psychos might make for a suitably creepy movie, but if you really want to be chilled to the bone, just turn on the evening news and witness something really horrifying: The evil that men do to one another for no good reason. One of the most infamous crimes in American history(…)
Jul 6, 2007
I suspect that a lot of horror fans will dismiss, dislike or just plain old avoid James Wan’s Dead Silence, and that’s kind of a shame. The gorehounds who walk in expecting yet another example of Saw-style lunacy may walk out sorely disappointed, while those who were raised on the quick-cut hyper-stylized horror flicks of(…)
Jul 1, 2007
It’s not just that mounting a remake of Robert Harmon’s cult classic “The Hitcher” is a bad idea; it’s that this slapped-together afterthought of a remake doesn’t even come close to capturing what made the original such a ferociously refreshing piece of genre filmmaking in the first place. Basically it’s just another example of a(…)
Jun 22, 2007
From the garish early advertising, the “accidental” firestorm that hit when the MPAA was not amused, the rating embargo, the release delays, and the “hushed tones” that inevitably arise whenever an allegedly ultra-nasty new horror flick hits the scene, After Dark and Lionsgate’s “Captivity” has been the recipient of tons of free press. If only(…)
Jun 8, 2007
What I find most amusing about the “torture porn” flicks like Saw, Hostel, and The Hills Have Eyes is this: The outraged and the intimidated choose to dismiss these films as mindless gore-fests, when in fact they’re all a pretty effective bunch of psychological horror movies. It’s the threat (and eventual arrival) of the red(…)
May 22, 2007
If you’ve got a soft spot for trashy pulp thrillers like Malice, Arlington Rd., and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, then save a place in your weekend for Bruce Evans’ “Mr. Brooks,” a high-budget psycho-thriller that lets two of our more “sedate” leading men cut loose with some entertainingly juicy performances. The flick’s got(…)
Mar 30, 2007
The Hills Have Eyes 2 takes place in the same patch of rock-strewn desert that we visited in the recent remake. This time around, instead of a generally helpless family being terrorized by a group of man-eating mutants, we get a crew of amazingly clueless National Guard soldiers who venture into the wrong patch of(…)
Mar 16, 2007
It’s a zombie flick, a broad comedy, a clever satire, and a bizarrely touching “coming of age” story all at once. No, it’s not the sort of zombie movie that’ll have you hiding your eyes in fear, but if you’re a big fan of the undead sub-genre, you’ll probably find a lot to like in(…)
Feb 9, 2007
I don’t know who it was that said “OK, look. Anthony Hopkins is too old (and expensive) at this point, but damn this Hannibal Lecter series just oozes money from every pore. Let’s get that Harris guy to bang out another book, which we can release a month before the movie comes out.
Jan 26, 2007
The vampire has been a powerfully tenacious movie villain for the past century or so, and every once in a while there comes a new flick that adds some much-needed creativity to the classic creature. Veteran of hundreds of movies both half-decent and entirely rotten, the vampire doesn’t get to star in all that many(…)
Jan 6, 2006
Both Hostels and all three Saws; I actually dig ‘em all. There must be something wrong with me, right? Possibly, but if being shocked and jolted by some “big boy” horror flicks is wrong, then I don’t want to be right. But just because I consider the original Hostel to be a damn fine horror(…)
