Category Archives: Horror

Sunday Review: Scream 4

Posted on April 18, 2011 by | 1 Comment

Editor’s Note:  Hey, guess what?  There are spoilers in this!  It is all Susan’s fault.  But if you don’t wanna know who the killer is, turn back now!

Geoff:
So, we’re now to the fourth of the Scream films, if you can believe it. Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), and Deputy (now Sheriff) Dewey (David Arquette) are all still alive and well and once again being haunted by a new round of dual killers dressed as the now-iconic Ghostface. The entire franchise of fourth-wall-breaking (and perhaps fifth and sixth walls … I wish I had more time to think about this and put it together in my head) films had gotten steadily more conventional and hammy and less clever in the first through third movies, and while this one has some pretty enjoyable moments, I feel like it was pulled from the oven before it was completely cooked. (But that might be because I’m asking too much of the film.)

In this one, Sidney returns to Woodsboro on the tenth anniversary of the original murders she survived to promote her new book about being a survivor (again and again). Unfortunately, someone decides yet once more to start picking off teens, this time concentrating on Sidney’s younger cousin (Emma Roberts) and her cohort while Sidney, Gale, and Dewey attempt to keep as many people alive as possible and solve the whodunit.

I’ve always enjoyed Wes Craven horror films more than others because they’re at least about thrills and hiding and running and jumps rather than straightforward gross-out gore, and the guy’s done this so long that he knows how to move a camera during a chase scene and how to block a shot to induce jumps and etc. If you’ve seen the first three movies, though, you might find yourself yearning for a set-piece as good as the original’s final house-party scene or the sequel’s silent, incredibly tense attack-and-chase scene in a college sound studio. They’re just so skillfully done, and in this film there are some jumps, but the chases and tension are brief, fleeting. There’s rarely even a moment that you think whoever’s in the crosshairs in a given scene might have even a chance of making it out alive.

Still, there are some fun, clever jokes, both at the beginning and the end, and it was interesting to watch the incredibly self-conscious series try to think about the horror film landscape of today as compared to a decade ago. I just wish it had gone further with it, played with it a little bit more, I guess, both in the execution of its scenes and the discourse it was trying to have with itself.

Susan:
Well, Geoff, you can blame this on either my terrible taste in movies or the fact that I haven’t seen the first three Scream films, but I really, really liked this thing.

I especially liked that even when I thought I knew what was going on, the movie’s insistence on laying out all the rules for me and then breaking some of them but following some of them kept me overthinking it and underthinking it at the same time!  Maybe that happens in all of them?  But luckily, I had a mother who discouraged our watching of scary things, which means this reboot feels fresh to me.  It made me want to go back and watch the first three, and I can’t remember ever having a desire to watch them before.  GOOD WORK, HOLLYWOOD.

Also David Arquette and Courtney Cox are back together!!!  And Neve Campbell is there!!  And people are using land lines!!  I mean, HEY THE 90s REMEMBER THEM??  Watching this movie was like putting on a flannel shirt and a pair of Doc Marten boots and a baby-doll tee and being impressed by Yahoo! Mail.  You get to jump at the scary things and squirm in your seat because of anticipation and tension, instead of gross-out discomfort.  You say it felt unbaked to you, but I thought it was near perfect.  Simple, easy, predictable enough, and fun.

Also:  LADY VILLAN!!  Right??  I mean, did that happen in one of the earlier ones too?  Because that was a pretty bomb-ass twist, I thought.  I never, ever suspected her.  In fact, except for the dude with the camera, the two killers would have been my last picks.  And that’s the fun, right?  It’s supposed to be the people you least suspect, but not the people you’re aware that you least suspect, but just the people that you legitimately don’t suspect.  UGH SO COOL.

I dunno, Geoff, I think sometimes it’s hard to review horror flicks with you because I’m just so late getting to the genre and I still think all the things about them are super neat, whereas you are a jaded old man.  But whatever, I think this flick’s totally good enough.

The novice/pro divide deepens after the cut…

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Horror

Tagged , , , , ,

Sunday Review: The Rite

Posted on January 31, 2011 by | 3 Comments

Susan:
Ostensibly, I should have loved The Rite. It has so many things I love in it:  brooding dark-haired men with blue eyes, college, Catholicism, Anthony Hopkins, Italy.  And while I would say I enjoyed a good 60-80% of the movie, as a whole I can’t really recommend anyone go see it.  It’s the kind of movie you should “watch” in the background while you’re cleaning the house or making an intricate baked good.  Maybe then you’ll only see the good/interesting parts and miss the awkward lines at the end that make you embarrassed for Anthony Hopkins.

The plot seems fairly standard, although maybe not for a movie about exorcism:  Michael Kovak (Colin O’Donoghue, who I would guess is Irish-Italian because he is beautiful in that way only Irish-Italian men can be) is the son of a mortician who decides to become a priest because apparently in his family, if you aren’t going to prep dead bodies, you have to become a man of the cloth.  He attends seminary school, but right before graduation decides he wants to resign and not take his vows, citing a lack of faith.  After watching Michael perform Last Rites on a woman who has been hit by a car suddenly, the Father Superior at the school convinces Michael to take a course on exorcism at the Vatican before deciding to resign.  Because Michael does everything anyone ever tells him to do apparently, he goes to Italy, where he meets Father Lucas Trevant (Anthony Hopkins) who does exorcisms for a living.  Michael still suffers from a lack of faith, despite seeing a bunch of crazy possession stuff happen (over and over and over again) and keeps wanting to blame psychosis for what he sees.  Eventually Lucas Trevant gets possessed (it’s not really a spoiler — you see it coming early on) and Michael has to save him with the help of a pretty young girl-reporter, Angeline (Alice Braga), which causes him to start believing in the Devil and therefore in God, which means he finally has enough faith to beat the devil back to hell or whatever.  Then the movie ends, but I don’t really remember how, except for that the filmakers left a lot of space open for a potential sequel, which is gross and hopefully will not happen.

So anyway, it’s basically a story about finding yourself.  The stuff about religion I found interesting and compelling.  The possession stuff was okay the first 3-4 times it happened, and then the possessions got a little tedious.  Anthony Hopkins did as much as he possibly could with a relatively ridiculous script.  I mean really, I totally liked the thing for the first hour or so, and then they just couldn’t see to sustain it.  So I guess I’m giving it a “meh.”

Geoff:
I could probably go with a “meh,” I guess. I was pretty bored for most of the movie, but maybe that’s just because the whole possession thing feels pretty played out. The demonized individual writhes, seduces, cajoles, screams, and strains while one priest looks on horrified and another calls out the prayers.

Michael’s discussions in the Vatican with the elder priest about the difference between psychosis and possession were interesting to me, but they take up only about five minutes of actual screen time, so for most of the movie you’re just watching Anthony Hopkins be as awesome as he can be with the words he’s given. (I can’t deny he’s a damn good reader, but some of the stuff they have him spouting toward the end is, as you said, pretty ridiculous.)

I’ll go ahead and be honest with everyone here and mention that I nodded off for a few minutes in the middle, so it’s possible I missed something integral (though I don’t think I did) somewhere between the death of the possessed pregnant woman and Michael’s discussions with the possibly possessed little boy. I just … I was THAT bored. I wasn’t getting anything out of the film except that Father Lucas seemed to be your friendly neighborhood exorcist with tons of cases in a little region of Italy.

I guess the film’s one constant thread is Michael’s struggle with belief, but it mostly feels like trodden territory, and really you’re just waiting for him to go ahead and believe already by the end of the film. (Like, seriously, dude. Father Michael is clearly possessed. He’s saying stuff only dead people you know would know about. Just BELIEVE.) So … I might even downgrade the film to “meh” with a dose of “bleh.”

The yawns continue after the cut…

→ 3 Comments

Posted in Drama, Horror

Tagged , , , , , , ,

Tuesday Review: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Posted on May 4, 2010 by | 1 Comment

Geoff:
Drag Me to Hell was fairly slapstick, and Orphan was scary but not much of a slasher, so Susan and I thought we’d finally take in the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street and offer some thoughts on a true flick of the blood-and-guts genre. Anything for the blog, right?

If you’ve even caught a whiff of the major horror franchises in the U.S. anytime in the last twenty-five years or so (I don’t know the exact year the original Nightmare came out, but I believe it was sometime in the mid-’80s … maybe I should Gigablast the answer [you'll know what this means if you see the movie]), you’re probably already familiar with the basic premise of this Michael Bay-produced retread. Basically, a bunch of teens suddenly find their dreams haunted by a burned and disfigured man wearing a tattered fedora, a red-striped sweater and a truly nasty set of claws on his right hand. His name’s Freddy Krueger, and when he kills you in your nightmares, you die for real, and the group of high schoolers is picked off one by one even as they try to stay awake and figure out what’s happening and why Krueger is after them. They eventually discover he’s a pedophile who was burned alive posse-style by the kids’ parents when they were young (I think this slightly deviates from the original, where he was a child murderer … but the point either way is that he’s a supremely bad dude), and the finale of the movie involves a plan to go into the dream world and pull Freddy out so they can kill him in reality.

All of this could be very interesting, but the film instead chooses to go through the motions. There’s virtually no character development to speak of, outside the brief establishment that the lead female is a misfit painter and that the lead male likes her, and it becomes clear early on just how much the other teens are there simply as meat for the plot to grind. I’m aware that horror films are supposed to have stock characters that can be killed off easily, but here they’re barely fleshed out enough to even fit archtypes, and they all die so quickly, too. Out of the main cast of six teenagers, four are killed off seemingly before the film’s even half over, and then you spend the rest of the time waiting to see how the final two will survive rather than feeling any suspense about an increasing death toll. The climax is similarly disappointing, Freddy getting dispatched in less than a minute after entering the real world. I mean, c’mon, at least escape briefly into the shadows and make it a challenge.

No doubt thanks to Mr. Bay, the film certainly looks good, and it still induces a jump at one or two points, and there are a scant few moments where the filmmakers betray a sense of humor about the whole thing (Freddy’s claw going back under the bathwater when there’s a knock at the door). But on the whole the remake of Nightmare is without much of a heartbeat.

Susan:
GEOFF WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU THIS MOVIE WAS AWESOME.

I laughed!  I jumped!  I sat tensely in my seat!!  Cheesy maybe, and yeah, the kids do start dying off right quick, but so what?  Even if they didn’t fit specific archetypes, they all read as “teenager in a horror movie” which was enough for me.  Also, I am a sucker for any film with a brooding arty couple that band together.  She draws!  He wears a jaunty stocking cap!  They are victims of child molestation!  Oh tortured youth!!

Blame it on my lack of exposure to horror films as a child/young adult, but I found the movie charming in its kitsch.  I laughed at Freddy’s cheesy horror/action movie lines (“How’s this for a wet dream?” for example, as our girl Nancy drowns in a hallway full of blood) and most of the jumper scenes totally got me.  I’d not seen the original either, so I really enjoyed watching the psychological backstory develop.  (Although I’ll admit I wanted him to be wrongly accused and turned evil by the monstrous acts of the suburban parents, but I guess whatever, he’s a better slasher villain if he’s just a monster and then the audience doesn’t have to feel conflicted about being somewhat sympathetic to his plight.)  The sets were creepy, the dreams were dreamlike, and the cast did a good job of seeming really tired and really, really scared.  TWO THUMBS UP FROM THIS GIRL.

My one complaint about the film would be the casting of the new Freddy Kruger.  There is just no way to out-creepy Robert Englund.  I think they tried to make the burn makeup more gruesome, but without Englund’s crazy eyes, your new Freddy just isn’t going to hold a candle to the old one (no pun intended).  Also, I don’t know if they did the dubbed voice in the original, but I found it distracting and silly.  It sounded like the guy who does horror movie trailer voiceovers — not very scary.  So the Freddy character wasn’t as creepy as I might have liked, but other than that, this movie got me hook, line, and sinker.

We say a couple more things after the cut…

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Horror

Tagged , , , , ,

Sunday Review: Orphan

Posted on August 3, 2009 by | 6 Comments

EDITORS NOTE:  THIS REVIEW IS COMPLETELY FULL OF SPOILERS.  IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW THE SECRET TWIST, TURN BACK NOW.  GEOFF AND I WILL TOTALLY RUIN THIS MOVIE FOR YOU.

Geoff:
Don’t adopt a kid.  Don’t keep a gun in your in-home safe.  Don’t doubt your wife.

Just a few things I learned from Orphan, a dark-lit horror film set in winter that almost made me forget the clear, sunny day in full resplendence outside the theater.  Here’s the breakdown: Kate and John Coleman are a struggling but happy couple with two beaming kids (the daughter a near-deaf mute, and you know as soon as you see sign language that it’s gonna come into play later), but Kate has a miscarriage or a still birth or something during the third go-around, so they decide to adopt.  Kate’s a recovering alcoholic.  John’s a … wait a minute … I’m just now, just as I’m typing this, catching all the potential “John & Kate + 3″ jokes.  Regardless, John cheated once, so that’s his cross to bear.  The couple adopt a little girl who paints nice pictures (unless you put them under a blacklight) and who has a Russian accent, which takes some getting used to hearing without chuckling a little bit.  Anyhoo, the little girl turns evil on ‘em, but not without using the innocent act to play the parents against each other, all so she can *spoiler coming* sleep with John, because it turns out she’s actually a sociopathic, 37-year-old little person, which actually did genuinely creep me the fuck out, to be honest.

It’s part of the point of a horror film, so I can’t really begrudge this one for doing so, but it’s the kind of film where I spend a lot of my time pulling my hair out because people a) don’t listen to one another, or b) are oblivious to certain goings on, or c) don’t tell things to others even past the point of when they clearly should.  It makes for a very stressful viewing experience, because I’m sitting there thinking, “Answer that phone!” “Don’t drink that whole bottle of wine and get drunk, John!” “Go for the gun in your safe before she gets to it!” “Go upstairs and find your daughter and, the both of you, for God’s sake, keep your backs to a wall so she can’t sneak up behind you!”

And, most importantly, “LISTEN TO YOUR GODDAMN WIFE WHEN SHE TELLS YOU THE CHILD IS EVIL.”  I don’t know if I would call this a good film.  It was sufficiently stressful, so … marks in that area, for sure.  But I don’t know if I’d ever buy it or rent it off the shelf to remember any part that I really liked all that much.  Maybe that means I’m giving it a “meh”?

Susan:
OH. MY. FUCK.

Yeah, this movie was scary….SCARY AWESOME.  I’m sorry, call me daft but I did not see the oh-my-god-she’s-really-a-dwarf twist coming and I sat literally on the edge of my seat for the last 15 or so minutes of the film.  My jaw hurt when I left because I had been clenching it so badly.  This movie affected me viscerally and yeah, no one listens to anyone but then again WHO WOULD BELIEVE YOU IF YOU TOLD THEM ANY OF THIS???  Seriously, if your twelve-year-old son came to you and was like, “Um, my nine-year-old adopted Russian sister held a utility knife to my junk and threatened me like a seasoned member of the KGB,” would you believe him?  Probably not.  Because that is CRAZY.

The audience I saw the movie with reacted similarly.  There were a lot of chuckles (mostly because the movie borders on absurdity at times) but during the scene when Esther tries to seduce her “daddy,” a wave of discomfort, disbelief, confusion, and aversion rolled around the entire theater.  Some people laughed, some sort of groaned, but there were WTFs all around.  Then comes the big reveal when you want to crawl out of your skin.  UGH CRAZY TINY DWARF LADY, I said to myself, PLEASE DO NOT KILL PETER SARSGAARD.  I LIKE HIM.  She did not listen.  That’s what you get for drinking all that wine, Peter Sarsgaard.  I guess you shouldn’t let your GAARD down next time!  (GET IT???)

I am too overwhelmed by all the awesome to even write a coherent thought about the thing.  Alls I know is I checked my backseat for crazy tiny lady dwarves (dwarfs?) when I left the theater.  It’s the best kind of scary movie where you know it probably couldn’t really happen but then again maybe (just maybe) it could.

The spoilers continue after the cut…

→ 6 Comments

Posted in Horror

Tagged , , , ,

Two Line Trailer Review: Jennifer’s Body

Posted on July 7, 2009 by | 1 Comment

Geoff: I’m loathe to admit to the world that this looks fun.

Susan: Diablo Cody can blow me.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Horror, TLTRs

Tagged ,

Two Line Trailer Review: Shutter Island

Posted on June 18, 2009 by | 4 Comments

Susan: Scorsese does horror??  Count me in!!!

Geoff: While I don’t know if the actual film’s any good, this is the kind of preview I’ll see before a lot of shittier summer movies and think, “Man, I wish I were watching that instead.”

→ 4 Comments

Posted in Horror, TLTRs

Tagged ,

Sunday Review: Drag Me to Hell

Posted on June 7, 2009 by | 3 Comments

Susan:drag-me-to-hell-poster
When Geoff and I were selecting the movie for this week, he told me he had made plans to see Drag Me to Hell, Sam Raimi’s new horror flick.  “Oh good!” I told him. “We haven’t done a horror film yet.”  After seeing the movie, I still don’t know that I would venture to say we’ve done a “horror” film, since Drag Me to Hell, like the Evil Dead films before it, is full of moments that startle you but leave you laughing.  A comedic horror piece, this film will entertain those with a nostalgic appreciation of Raimi’s blood-n-guts sensibility, but it certainly didn’t make the pack of 14-year-olds sitting next to me very happy.  (“The gayest movie I’ve ever seen,” quoth one.)

Plot synopsis (which probably isn’t necessary):  Christine Brown (Allison Lohman) is a post-fat farm-girl-turned-loan-officer dating Clay Dalton (Justin Long), a first-year professor of psychology from a wealthy family.  In an effort to win a promotion, she denies a gypsy woman a loan extension (man, do not MESS WITH GYPSIES!  Everyone knows that!), and the gypsy woman curses her by stealing her coat button and chanting some incantation over it. (Is gypsy a racial slur?  Should I be calling her a Roma?)  She seeks the assistance of a psychic, who explains that she is being chased by a goat-spirit and that after three days the goat-spirit will take her soul to hell.  Her only choice is to try to exorcise the spirit or to give the accursed button away.  However, if she gives the button to someone, THEIR soul will burn in hell for all eternity, which is a lot of guilt for a good-hearted girl like Christine to deal with.  Lots of gross/gory things ensue, most of which read like Evil Dead in CGI, and in the end, everyone gets what’s coming to them.

While I can appreciate the appeal of the Evil Dead films, I think the funny-scary over-the-topness of the low-budget originals doesn’t translate well to this sort of high budget studio affair.  The movie was entertaining and had its laugh-out-loud moments, but I missed that rubber-and-ketchup aesthetic found in the earlier films.  What did you think, Geoff?

Geoff:
Man, I can see what you’re saying about missing the low-budget look, but I still had a hell of a lot of fun with this movie.  So many laugh-out-loud moments!  My favorite scene vacilates between the gypsy trying to bite Christine in the car without her teeth and Justin Long almost hitting the old man who repeatedly shouts “You’ll burn in hell!  You’ll burn in HELL!!!”  Something about that old man turned me into the guy in the theatre who’s still laughing long after the scene has ended.  People were staring.  I had to apologize out loud.  Sure, certain jokes were a bit over the top (Anna, a friend I saw it with, leaned over at one point and said “everything keeps going in her mouth!”), but I enjoyed the movie anyway.

I think it’s a pity your 14-year-old viewing mates couldn’t appreciate what the film was trying to do.  I can understand not loving it, but I have a feeling those 14-year-olds went in hopes of seeing yet another colorlessly shot, Asian-import-style horror film with a name like “The Sign,” or “Eyes.”  Am I the only one who’s tired of those?  I found it refreshing to see a horror film that wanted to have some fun with itself, that wanted to legitimately entertain, that actually fleshed out its characters instead of just leaving them as barely characterized bodies to kill off.  You won’t find a character like Stu in most horror films of the past few years, and that’s a damn shame because he complements so many scenes.  He’s the very embodiment of anyone who undercuts everything you do in order to look better than you, and the moment when he tells Christine she got his sandwich order wrong is perfect.

I liked seeing Raimi (after the luke-warmness of Spiderman 3) go back to his origins, and I actually think his old horror/comedy schtick translates pretty well to a larger budgeted film.  It allowed some authentically haunting shots he probably wouldn’t have been able to get otherwise.  I was particularly struck by the last shot of Christine, her face starting to disentigrate into a skull as she’s dragged underground.  Effectively arresting.  I had a lot of fun with this movie and would probably recommend it to anyone with a bit of tolerance for the gore.

Things start to go south after the cut …

→ 3 Comments

Posted in Comedy, Horror

Tagged , , , ,