How you feel about The Greasy Strangler coming out of the theater will be directly related to how you were feeling going into the theater. In other words, the more altered your perception of reality, the more likely you are to spend the 93 minutes giggling and gagging, while enjoying yourself immensely. The designated drivers among you will not be having the same experience. In the spirit of full disclosure, when seen at a 6:30 screening by a stone cold sober critic, The Greasy Strangler still provoked some laughter and absolutely no ill will. (more…)
Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
The Disappointments Room Review
Posted: September 12, 2016 in Horror, ReviewsTags: Gilbert & Sullivan, Kate Beckinsale, Lucas Till
Yes, I suppose we need to get the obligatory pun on the title of this awful movie out of the way.
Q: What’s a disappointments room? A: Any theater showing this mess of a would-be horror film.
While we can acknowledge the guts, foolhardiness, or disregard surrounding the decision to title a film The Disappointments Room, nothing else in the endeavor merits recognition, beyond the scope of the disaster and a vague desire for answers to inexplicable questions surrounding this production. Simply put, The Disappointments Room is one of the worst major releases (1554 screens) of 2016. How bad is it? After the first weekend, Rotten Tomatoes had a reading of 0% on its Tomatometer for this movie, meaning that even the hack critics who live to see their name in blurbs did not have the balls to give this a thumbs up. (more…)
Under the Shadow Review
Posted: August 30, 2016 in 2016 Fantasy FilmFest, Drama, Foreign, Horror, ReviewsTags: Avin Manshadi, Babak Anvari, Bobby Naderi, Iran-Iraq War, Iranian Films, Narges Rashidi
The Iran-Iraq War was an interminable sequence of horrors, largely unseen by the West and then quickly overshadowed by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent Gulf War. The conflict stretched from 1980-88 and featured some of the most brutal warfare since the First World War including child soldiers, chemical weapons, trench fighting, human wave offensives, and wide-scale civilian bombing. To set a fantastical horror movie within the horribleness of this conflict would seem to risk trivializing the tragedy, but the eloquent, understated film Under the Shadow amplifies the terrors of the war and the all too real consequences for the populace. (more…)
Drive-In Dive In: Thirst
Posted: August 6, 2016 in Drive In, Horror, Reviews, Science FictionTags: Clare Niederpruem, Greg Kiefer, Jes Macallan, John Redlinger, Karl Makinen, Monster Movies
First things first – Thirst is a lousy name for this movie. It’s a pretty bad one for almost any movie at this point, considering how many times it’s been used in the last 40 years as a film title. On almost every occasion, the movie in question has been about vampires. That’s not the case here. This Thirst is about an alien that arrives on earth hungry. Yeah, apparently Hunger as a title might have given too much away.
And that beautifully illustrates the core problem for this movie – it’s lazy, sloppy work. The inspiration likely came from the mind of a nine-year-old boy who spent his school days drawing fantastical creatures in his spiral notebook and his nights watching Alien, Predator, and Terminator movies. The monster in Thirst is a B movie classic – with a lizard body, an alien mandible, predator dental work, a terminator metal skeleton, and an anus in the middle of its chest. Nice work, kid.
Unfortunately, that same nine-year-old apparently wrote the screenplay. How else to explain that the character among the group of eight wandering the Utah backcountry who is given the most backstory is among the first killed? Or that no proper motivation can be given for the group going further away from civilization after a dead body is found? Or that the most annoying among the many annoying characters sticks around until almost the end? (more…)
Drive-In Dive In: The Remains
Posted: August 5, 2016 in Drive In, Horror, ReviewsTags: Hannah Nordberg, Haunted House, Thomas Della Bella, Todd Lowe
Horror is a forgiving genre. Fans do not expect perfection; they generally do not nitpick to excess. They are adept at overlooking minor flaws such as bad acting, lack of logic, and narratives that take a sudden 90-degree turn at the end out of sheer desperation. All they ask is is to keep the pace up, keep the scares coming, and when in doubt, at least keep it weird. The one filmmaking error that cannot be forgiven in horror is when the movie is just flat-out boring. (more…)
Train to Busan (Busanhaeng) Review
Posted: August 1, 2016 in 2016 Fantasy FilmFest, Foreign, Horror, ReviewsTags: Korean films, Yeon Sang-ho, Zombies
Rap versus rock. The designated hitter or pitchers batting. And, of course, the most contentious of arguments pitting fans of a classic approach against a band of upstarts: slow-moving zombies or their quick-footed brethren.
These are the unresolvable debates of our time. And while the Korean horror action flick Train to Busan (aka Busanhaeng) will not end the vitriol, advocates for a more fleet flock of undead have received a major boost from writer/director Yeon Sang-ho. In his first live-action feature film, Yeon has crafted a thrilling ride through a society sliding into the zombie apocalypse, utilizing a passenger train as his literal and metaphorical vehicle. (more…)
Nerve Review
Posted: July 30, 2016 in Action, ReviewsTags: 13 Sins, Ariel Schulman, Cheap Thrills, Dave Franco, Emma Roberts, Henry Joost, Kimiko Glenn, Machine Gun Kelly, Samira Wiley, Viral
Nerve had the good fortune to be released in the same week that Pokémon Go may have crested. The underlying conceit of the film is that a game app for smart phones could be so alluring that it would drive users outside to play it. What once could have been dismissed as satiric science fiction is now an established fact. If you doubt the potential power of apps, go to any urban area and watch for the folks holding their phones slightly above waist level as they shuffle forward and swipe, occasionally breaking the spell to shout, “I got a Jigglypuff!”
The app in the film is called Nerve, but it could be called Dare or I Bet You. Users register as players or watchers (the latter forking over $19.99 for a 24-hour window). Players are challenged to complete tasks directly tied to personal phobias culled from data mining online profiles. Predictably, there’s a good bit of being in public naked and almost falling off tall buildings. Complete the dare and a deposit is made in your bank account. Fail or bail, and you lose everything. Oh, and don’t forget – snitches get stitches, so don’t tell your mom or the cops. (more…)
Drive-In Dive In: Viral
Posted: July 29, 2016 in Horror, ReviewsTags: Analeigh Tipton, Ariel Schulman, Henry Joost, Michael Kelly, Sofia Black-D'Elia, Venereal Horror
Like a parasite or a particularly unpleasant invasive species, venereal horror can be a nasty and truly gruesome phenomenon – if done properly. The source of the horror can spring from the earth or drop in from outer space. The result can be sex crazed maniacs, hopped-up zombies, or just any non-specific antisocial and lethal behavior, but the motivation of the creature that results from the infection is simple: survive and multiply. Prime examples in this sub-genre are David Cronenberg’s Shivers and John Carpenter’s The Thing. Viral is closer in its DNA to Cronenberg’s film than Carpenter’s, but whereas Shivers was full frontal venereal horror, Viral is the equivalent of just holding hands.
The Wailing (aka Goksung)
Posted: June 13, 2016 in Foreign, Horror, Reviews, ThrillerTags: Cannes, Chun Woo-hee, Jun Kunimura, Kim Hwan-hee, Korean films, Kwak Do-won, Na Hong-jin
The Wailing is a film that works – almost in spite of itself. It plays footsie with several genre conventions, while outright flouting others. It’s a horror movie that runs for 156 minutes. It’s a police procedural with an overweight, adulterous barely competent cop on the periphery of the investigation. One moment, The Wailing is about as subtle as a rake stuck in the head of a zombie (an actual image from the movie), and the next, it is as enigmatic as the mysteries of the world’s religions. It’s a Hitchcock mystery. No, it’s a gruesome hunt for a serial killer. Wait, it’s a biblical allegory.
You could spend the entire post film discussion arguing about the proper categorization for this latest offering from director/screenwriter Na Hong-jin, and not even have time remaining for a discussion of what the movie’s epigram from the Book of Luke means when it is uttered by a character in the denouement. (more…)
The Sad, Sweet Poetry of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
Posted: June 3, 2016 in Reviews, WesternTags: AFI Silver, Apocalypse Now, Bob Dylan, James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, Sam Peckinpah, The Wild Bunch
More people have heard the stories behind the making of Sam Peckinpah’s last Western, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, than have seen the film – or so it seems. Made by a director in an alcoholic haze with the antipathy of studio bosses, the film has become the stuff of legends, punctuated by the apocraphyl tale of Peckinpah urinating all over the screen after a viewing of the dailies. Faced with a production that was over budget and behind schedule, the studio yanked control and hurried a version far from the director’s vision into theaters where it was panned. The film has been “rediscovered” twice since its initial release, with a “preview” edition in 1988 and a “special” edition in 2005. The AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland recently screened the special edition, simultaneously confirming AFI as the premiere conservator of America’s cinematic legacy and the film’s unique brilliance. (more…)
Meet Mr. Karma 