The beautiful young woman who goes to Hollywood and sells her soul for fame and fortune as an actress is a familiar allegory, but seldom has it been spun in quite as chilling a manner as seen in the new horror flick, Starry Eyes. Even more rare is to see a unknown in the lead role turn in such a remarkable, defining performance that she elevates the movie above mere Midnight Madness fun. Alex Essoe as Sarah Walker, the would-be thespian who discovers how far she is willing to go for success, is astonishing; it’s sweet justice of a sort for a newcomer to use such a role to establish her own claim to stardom. The directing/screenwriting team of Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer wisely piggyback on Essoe’s achievement to bring a fully realized story to the screen.
Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Starry Eyes Review
Posted: September 3, 2014 in 2014 Fantasy FilmFest, Horror, Reviews, ThrillerTags: Alex Essoe, Black Swan, Contracted, Dennis Widmyer, Fabianne Therese, Hollywood, Kevin Kolsch, Louis Dezseran
The Babadook Review
Posted: September 1, 2014 in 2014 Fantasy FilmFest, Drama, Horror, ReviewsTags: Bedtime Story, Boogeyman, Essie Davis, Jennifer Kant, Movies, Noah Wiseman
While the debate goes on about female roles in mainstream movies, women continue to kill it – literally and figuratively – in genre films. On the second day of the 2014 Berlin Fantasy Filmfest, audiences were treated to consecutive screenings of a trio of strong flicks with an actress in the lead role, two of which also have a female director/screenwriter behind the projects. Honeymoon stars Rose Leslie, and Starry Eyes features Alex Essoe, but it is Essie Davis in The Babadook who turns in the most remarkable performance. Working in her feature film debut, director/writer Jennifer Kant unleashes childhood horrors on a defenseless widow (Davis) and her maladjusted son (Noah Wiseman) in a movie that works the nerves of the audience by manifesting familial dysfunction and behavioral disorders into the ultimate boogeyman in the closet.
Honeymoon Review
Posted: August 31, 2014 in 2014 Fantasy FilmFest, Horror, Reviews, Science Fiction, ThrillerTags: Harry Treadaway, Leigh Janiak, Phil Graziadei, Rose Leslie, Under the Skin
Imagine the body as a vessel, an exterior shell that holds the essence of the individual. The body plus the psyche equals the being. Now, imagine an external force either filling the vessel or emptying it.
Two thought-provoking films with this concept at the center have been released this year. The first was Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, in which Scarlett Johansson plays a predatory alien who first acquires a body and then a sense of humanity in order to attract her prey. The second is Honeymoon with Rose Leslie as a newlywed who is seemingly having the humanness drained from her. Under the Skin became something of a darling for the Art House crowd, due to Johansson’s superior, naked-in-more-ways-than-one performance and a moody, broody atmosphere that bordered on pretentiousness, but never quite crossed over. Director Leigh Janiak’s Honeymoon is less ambitious and more conventional than Glazer’s work, but remains a worthy companion piece to that film.
The Voices Review
Posted: August 30, 2014 in 2014 Fantasy FilmFest, Comedy, Horror, ReviewsTags: Anna Kendrick, Gemma Arterton, Marjane Satrapi, Michael R. Perry, Olivier Bernet, Ryan Reynolds, Serial Killer, Talking Pets
The Voices is the type of movie you root for.
If you see a lot of films and are disappointed by far too many of them, you savor the hidden gem, the flick tucked away in the schedule of a film festival, the one without a trailer, with only a faint whispered positive word-of-mouth. Generally, you’re hooked from the first scene as the director invites you into a corner of the world you’ve often walked by, but never entered. Once inside this director’s world, you don’t want to leave. That’s a telling sign for this type of movie. Unlike so many films produced today, there overlooked treasures seem to end too quickly. You enter the theater as a jaundiced viewer; you leave as a cheerleader, hoping that the film will find its audience.
Out of the Dark Review
Posted: August 28, 2014 in 2014 Fantasy FilmFest, Horror, ReviewsTags: Bad Movies, Colombia, Enemy, Haunted House, Julia Stiles, Lluís Quílez, Pixie Davies, Stephen Rea, The Last Days
Out of the Dark is a useful reminder that resumes are not always accurate predictors of success in the movie business. How often do we see the phrases “From the Producers of” or “By the Director of” or the even vaguer “The Team That Brought You” splashed across the promotional material, only to find that the new film is nothing like its purported antecedents? Here, we have a collaboration of writers whose recent projects include fan favorites like Enemy and The Last Days. With such credits, viewers could reasonably expect, at the very least, a competent, workmanlike ghost story, while holding out hope for a new take on the familiar haunted house flick. Instead, screenwriters Javier Gullón (Enemy) and David and Àlex Pastor (The Last Days) deliver a dog of a script that is banal, derivative and so fraught with third act problems that the onscreen action provoked derisive laughter from the audience at the film’s premiere at the Berlin Fantasy Filmfest.
Leprechaun: Origins Review
Posted: August 26, 2014 in Horror, ReviewsTags: Chucky, Dylan Postl, Hornswoggle, Jennifer Aniston, Leprechaun, Stephanie Bennett, Warwick Davis, WWE
Nostalgia is not what it used to be when it comes to consideration of Leprechaun: Origins, one of the oddest of all possible horror franchise reboots. What you remember from the original Leprechaun films, the first of which debuted in 1993, will be of little value. Longtime fans hoping for another glimpse of Warwick Davis dispensing rhymes and rough Irish justice for anyone fool enough to steal his gold will be in for a disappointment. WWE studios produced the movie, so it comes as no surprise that they have cast one of their own in the lead role. Dylan Postl, known as Hornswoggle in the wrestling ring, takes over as the Leprechaun, but he’s buried under latex and has no lines. Why they have stripped Postl of any possibility of making an impression in the role is unclear. Indeed, why even draw attention to who is under the make up, when the actor will suffer by comparison to the original?
The Prince Review
Posted: August 22, 2014 in Action, ReviewsTags: 50 Cent, Bad Movies, Bruce Willis, Jason Patric, John Cusack
Here is what you need to know about The Prince.
It is not a Bruce Willis movie. It is not a John Cusack movie. It is, in fact, a Jason Patric movie. While the trio share prominence in the trailer, poster, and other marketing material, the three do not appear as a group in the film. Willis and Cusack do not have a single scene together. Willis and Patric are ostensibly both in the finale, but are never in the same frame.
This is Old Hollywood – or, at least, the marketing department at Old Hollywood. The same people who put all the good scenes from a movie in the trailer because they know you’ll think, “Hey, they wouldn’t put all the good stuff in the trailer, would they?” place Willis front and center so you’ll think, “Hey, they wouldn’t draw my attention to Bruce Willis unless the movie was all about him, would they?”
Guess again.
The Zero Theorem Review
Posted: August 21, 2014 in Action, Comedy, Fantasy, ReviewsTags: 12 Monkeys, Brazil, Christoph Waltz, David Thewlis, Lucas Hedges, Mélanie Thierry, Movies, Terry Gilliam, The Fisher King
A unique pleasure awaits in the not-too-distant future for a film archivist or critic or festival organizer charged with organizing the definitive Terry Gilliam retrospective. The body of work he has amassed to date has already established Gilliam as a historically significant figure in cinema. With each subsequent release that begins with the placard “A Terry Gilliam Film,” his legacy expands. We know his vision: the steampunk designs of modern society strangling itself on ducts and tubes, cathode ray technology, and soul-sucking workplaces populated with mid-level drones assigned to tasks of mindless repetition. Outside, the infrastructure is crumbling, the cacophony of post-modern life is numbing, and the individual is targeted for extinction. The only escape is fantasy and women and a fantasy woman that exists only as long as one can whisper the word, “Hope.” (more…)
Séptimo (Seventh Floor) Review
Posted: August 20, 2014 in Foreign, Reviews, ThrillerTags: Belén Rueda, Buenos Aires, Patxi Amezuca, Ricardo Darín, Twin Peaks
The landmark television series Twin Peaks initially focused on the death of the young, beautiful homecoming queen Laura Palmer and the subsequent search for her killer. The creator of the series, the visionary director David Lynch, had no intention of ever solving the mystery in the course of the show, but rather planned to use the murder as the springboard for an exploration of the underside of small town America. Lynch was eventually forced by the network to reveal the killer. In doing so, Twin Peaks lost its special quality and was canceled at the end of its second season. This cautionary tale comes to mind when seeing the Spanish-Argentinian thriller, Séptimo (Seventh Floor). The build up in the first half of the film is such exquisite, stylized suspense that the viewer wants it to continue as long as possible. When an explanation appears and a resolution follows, the movie almost immediately becomes a pedestrian procedural. (more…)
Hector and the Search for Happiness Review
Posted: August 18, 2014 in Action, Comedy, Drama, ReviewsTags: Bad Movies, Christopher Plummer, Jean Reno, Ming Zhao, Movies, Rosemund Pike, Simon Pegg, Stellan Skarsgård, Toni Collette
Hector and the Search for Happiness fancies itself a comedy, a drama, an action movie, and a travelogue, but the film fails in each of the genres, revealing itself to be nothing more than an awful little film about one uninteresting man’s mid-life crisis. Wrapped in pretension with a bow of psuedo-self help nonsense and delivered by a squandered all-star cast, Hector is a two-hour illustration of vapidness without even a hint of a redeeming satirical sense. It is a cyncical, clumsy, excruciating exercise in failed manipulation without a single genuine moment.
The critique of Hector as comedy is simple: it is not funny. As a drama, it lacks characters that we care about or a situation that we wish to see resolved. The action/adventure component is ludicrous, while the travelogue is very definitely offensive. (more…)
Meet Mr. Karma 