Every year, we invariably hear of one or more movies that “redefine” or “reinvent” the horror genre. Most times, careful viewings of the films in question reveal a slick repackaging of familiar conventions. Often, the redefining is a twist on a twist; the reinvention is a reversal of expectations. Horror fans take these slight alterations in style in stride, noting the degree of success by the extent of the imitations they spawn. The new becomes the old within a relatively short period of time, and the genre is reset. Read the rest of this entry »
The Eyes of My Mother Review
Posted: September 19, 2016 in 2016 Fantasy FilmFest, Drama, Horror, ReviewsTags: Diana Agostini, Kika Magalhaes, Nicolas Pesce, Olivia Bond, Paul Nazak, Will Brill
1
The Crew (aka Braqueurs) Review
Posted: September 14, 2016 in 2016 Fantasy FilmFest, Action, ForeignTags: Crime, French movies, Heist Movie, Julien Leclercq, Philip Lozano
The Crew (aka Braqueurs) is a phenomenon – an 80-minute, pure adrenaline, perfectly crafted exercise in action filmmaking. Writer/director Julien Leclercq has assembled a dragster built for speed and stripped of anything that would weigh the story down for even one beat. This movie is mandatory viewing for all would-be genre directors. Scratch that. The Crew should be studied in film schools or shown to anyone interested in a pure economy of storytelling. Of course, not every film should be be built according to these specifications, but given that too many movies are simply too damn long, Leclercq beautifully demonstrates the art of the possible. Read the rest of this entry »
The Greasy Strangler Review
Posted: September 13, 2016 in 2016 Fantasy FilmFest, Comedy, Horror, ReviewsTags: Elizabeth De Razzo, Jim Hosking, John Waters, Michael St. Michaels, Sky Elobar
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Drive-In Dive In: Initiation
Posted: August 12, 2016 in Action, Drive InTags: Dan Benamor, Dan Horton, Exploitation Movies, Hunter Smit, John Winscher, Oren Benamor, Raze
The last couple of trips to the virtual drive-in have been pretty rough. The movies weren’t good; they weren’t drive-in good; hell, they weren’t even so bad, they’re good. They were just bad. The kind of bad that makes you wonder if you’re spending too much time watching movies and not enough time exercising or reading or talking to your family or engaging in some other bizarre behavior. Thank goodness then for Initiation, a little exploitation diamond in a rough patch of mediocrity.
This flick is just damn good drive-in. And what do we mean by that? The finest pieces of exploitation film make you feel just a little bit bad for even wanting to watch them. They tap into the primal, the urges we were meant to have put behind us, but still lurk just below the surface veneer of civility. Lurid is the perfect adjective to describe a good drive-in movie: gruesome, sensational, and unrestrained. Read the rest of this entry »
Make American Movies Great Again
Posted: August 10, 2016 in UncategorizedTags: Box Office, Future of Cinema
The state of American movies can best be summarized by the old Borscht Belt joke employed by Woody Allen in Annie Hall as his metaphor for life. Two old women are suffering through a miserable meal at a restaurant. One says to the other, “This food is terrible!” And the other says, “Yes, and such small portions.” In 2016, American movies are terrible – and there are way too few of them.
There are a handful of reasons – some obvious, others not. Hollywood has become obsessed with gross over profit. Prestige is now measured almost strictly in box office grosses. Studios focus narrowly on numbers, particularly those generated in the opening weekend. The business model behind this approach is that individual movies are of far less importance than properties than lead to franchises that provide the opportunities for additional products. If you watch certain films as simply two-hour commercials of the type that generally run during Saturday morning children’s programming, they make a great deal more sense. The aim of the movie is motivate you to buy something: tickets to another movie, admission to a theme park, a comic book, an action figure. And when I say you, I don’t mean you. I mean the 10-year old kid sitting in front of you. Read the rest of this entry »
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? Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Desperately Seeking Sanity: The Failing Economics of Summer Cinema
Posted: August 4, 2016 in UncategorizedTags: Blockbusters, Box Office, Genre Films, J.J. Abrams, Summer Cinema
The oft-cited smart ass definition of insanity is the act of doing the exact same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Week in, week out during the summer of 2016, we have seen a vivid illustration of textbook corporate insanity, courtesy of the Hollywood studios. With metronome frequency, a new release – new being relative as it is most often the case a sequel or reboot – comes out on Friday (Thursday night, actually). It plays wide, underperforms at the box office, is ravaged by critics not on the payroll or motivated to see their name in blurbs, falls off a cliff in its second week in the theaters, and then is forgotten.
Meet Mr. Karma 