natewatchescoolmovies

Liam Gavin’s A Dark Song

September 7, 2021 by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I always appreciate it when a horror film spends like 80% of its runtime lulling you into a trance with slow burn pacing and impossibly subtle advances in plot and then, in the final few minutes just cranks the dial up way past eleven and let’s it’s climax rip for a no holds barred grand finale that leaves you in the dust. Liam Gavin’s A Dark Song does precisely that and is superior quality atmospheric horror that sees a haunted, introverted young woman (Catherine Walker, who has an appropriately angelic presence) hire the services of a jaded, ill tempered occultist (Steve Oram) to guide her through a spiritual summoning ritual, for reasons that she’s.. not entirely honest about. So the two of them rent a small cottage in the remote English countryside (filmed just outside Dublin) and vigorously prepare to summon some otherworldly forces. Now, I wasn’t kidding when I said this is a slow burn, because for literally most of the film we see these two odd characters simply interacting, practicing occult magick, bickering and running about the house looking for signs that their efforts are even doing anything at all. It might feel interminable to an impatient viewer and I wouldn’t blame anyone for giving up at least halfway through. However, if you have the patience to stick it out through this very, very restrained and character based piece and make it to the final ten minutes or so… well, let’s just say you’ll be rewarded with one of the most harrowing, bonkers, surreal, atmospherically disorienting, thoroughly creepy final acts I’ve ever seen in the horror genre complete with a few dark narrative surprises and even a light one. It’s a brave, bold story structure and once the ritual takes hold, the heavens shake and the supersensible realm is made tangible, it’s nothing short of breathtaking and terrifying in equal measures, and all the more effective as a jarring thunderclap in the story after almost an entire runtime of only restless overcast skies. Terrific, unconventional and highly recommended.

-Nate Hill

The Breed

September 5, 2021 by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

How scary can killer dogs be? I imagine in real life they’d be terrifying but in the horror genre (perhaps, Cujo aside) they’ve seldom gotten the aesthetic right and especially so in The Breed, a movie about some hard partying college kids on a remote, plane-only accessible island who find themselves hunted by a pack of angry, homicidal pooches. There isn’t much to it, it’s shot in striking broad daylight and the island isn’t much to look at scenery wise so in terms of atmosphere it’s kind of a dud. Honestly it’s strongest asset is the very young duo of Michelle Rodriguez and Taryn Manning, two edgy, cult actresses who don’t usually do the bikini clad slasher scream Queen stuff and as such are a standout here. The male actors are a few forgettable cookie cutter dude bros who make zero impression whatsoever. The production feels cheap, rushed and tactfully awkward, the dogs are good enough actors but, like, how hard is it to slather up some puppets in corn syrup blood, get a PA to dangle a drumstick on a string and have it look like they’re chasing people around an island? Oh and don’t be fooled by Wes Craven’s name above the title, he has nothing to do with this beyond an arbitrary executive producer’s credit. Silly times.

-Nate Hill

Uwe Boll’s Alone In The Dark

September 4, 2021 by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I know Uwe Boll’s reputation as a horror video game adaption filmmaker and I’ve seen a few of them so my personal expectations for Alone In The Dark were set pretty damn low, and yes it was a terrible godawful cheap mess but not… *quite* as bad as I was anticipating. Here’s the thing: I have years of watching B grade horror trash under my belt and when you’ve got that kind of buffer there’s not much, Boll’s output included, that can make you really, truly recoil, like I love trashy shit, it’s fun if it knows it’s place and fits it’s groove. This? This one is especially lowbrow and unapologetically so, as we see Christian Slater being a wannabe Blade/Van Helsing type monster hunter complete with an emo trench-coat, hilariously moody narration and a sexy/nerdy scientist sidekick played by Tara Reid who is about the farthest from nerdy scientist type you can get, which is great for a laugh here. Slater is embroiled in some murky supernatural hogwash involving human inter dimensional hybrid monster things that lurk around dark corners and disembowel people occasionally. He shoots some of them in between bouts of adorably sincere expository diarrhea dialogue and silly high tech gadgetry, and clashes with the gruff commander (Stephen Dorff) of a paranormal tactical squad and that’s about it. A weird subplot about an orphanage and the kids being used for experiments there back in the day went right over my head but I never played the game this is based on so that could be why, although I suspect it’s Boll’s haphazard direction and complete lack of focus in editing. I will hand it to the guy though for doing Vancouver proud, he not only films most of his stuff here in my city (and owns a restaurant in Gastown no less) but he actually sets it here too, so that Britannia Mines, Lions Gate Bridge and the Robson art gallery actually get to play themselves for once and not double for some hack USA location. This is cheap slipshod stuff, full of dodgy effects, indecipherably shadowy monster attacks and complete with an out of nowhere soft-core porn sex scene between Slater and Reid set to a giggle inducing emo lament by a group called ‘Nightwish’ who I’ve never heard of but outdo themselves in the Evanescence-lite department. This is one of the rare cases where there’s a sequel that’s way better than the original, they made a follow up with Lance Henriksen and Danny Trejo that actually attempts to do something worth watching, whereas this is just shameless, throw-in-the-towel dogshit.

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: Papertrail aka Trail Of A Serial Killer

September 3, 2021 by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

In the realm of cheap, lazy, perpetually nocturnal Seven ripoffs you can do worse than watching Papertrail aka Trail Of A Serial Killer but unfortunately you can also do way, way better. This is a murky, messily plotted, bizarrely acted, clunky, borderline incomprehensible mess that is given the dimmest bit of pedigree from two things: Michael Madsen and Chris Penn. The two have acted together quite a bit over the years before Chris’s untimely death and here they give notably overcooked tough guy turns as FBI Agents stationed in Toronto, one a weary, stressed out one (Madsen) and the other a disgraced unstable one (Penn). The latter is apparently a notoriously gifted asset for hunting killers in the tradition of Will Graham and such and is lured in by the former to track a murderer who has been eluding them for several years. Their investigation leads them to many dimly lit, depressing urban locales and eventually to the therapy group of a mysterious shrink (Jennifer Dale), one of whose patients, it seems, might just be the killer. While we’re on the subject of ripoffs, that idea is a blatant loft from the Bruce Willis erotic flick Colour Of Night, I might add. That’s about the most sense I could make out of the plot, which at best is a lurid frenzy of odd elements parading by and at worst is a flatlining series of WTF plot turns with no real interest. Penn was a genuinely good actor, despite what some people may tell you, and he isn’t half bad here as the near suicidal divorced lawman who is at the hysterical end of his rope. Madsen gives a performance that is just plain weird, he’s fired up and pissed in scenes that require him to be restrained and low key and then he’s oddly relaxed in instances where he should be on edge. It kind of works in a counterintuitive fashion, if you’re willing to overlook credibility and just accept that any Madsen is good Madsen in a film. This is honestly just a shamelessly trashy B grade pile of nonsense that I would never have lent ninety minutes of my time to if it didn’t star these two great actors, and I won’t lie in saying that if you aren’t an avid fan of both, you’re gonna hate this thing and resent giving it a shot.

-Nate Hill

Dark Places (2015)

September 3, 2021 by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Any fans of deep southern gothic potboilers with shamelessly lurid trappings, hectic, labyrinthine mysteries spanning decades acted wonderfully by a massive cast of character versions both old and young should greatly appreciate Dark Places as much as I did. It’s based on a book by Gillian Flynn who also penned the source material for David Fincher’s Gone Girl but for me this was a much, much stronger and more rewarding film. Fincher approached the material with his custom clinical, cynical tunnel vision detachment and meticulously calibrated style while director Gilles Paquet-Brenn adopts a much more sprawling, scattered, rough around the edges vernacular that is more narratively oblong and hazy yet no less compelling and even throws in the faintest glimmer of humanity. Charlize Theron is excellent as ever as Libby, the lone survivor of a farmhouse massacre that left her entire family dead when she was a kid, the killer never found and her left wandering as a broken adult trying to cope. The film intersperses dense, overlapping flashbacks to her difficult childhood life, a troubled brother (Tye Sheridan and Corey Stoll in present day scenes) who was ultimately blamed for the crimes, a desperate mother (Christina Hendricks) and aggressive deadbeat father (Sean Bridgers) who all may have had some hand in the events, although nothing is made clear until you are well beyond neck deep in this tragic, increasingly bizarre small town family saga. Chloe Grace Moretz gives a terrifically creepy performance as her brother’s unstable, untrustworthy teen girlfriend and there’s lots of solid supporting work from great folks like Glenn Moreshower, Andrea Roth, Jeff Chase, Laura Cayouette and Drea de Matteo as a shady stripper with ties to Libby’s past. You know this is a film for true crime fans (even if the story itself is fictitious) when a subplot literally features a club of true crime aficionados led by a twitchy Nicholas Hoult who reach out to Libby in attempts to help her bring the case to a close. There is a *lot* going on in this film, and while not all of it gels into an ultimately cohesive tapestry, the resulting patchwork quilt is beautifully scrappy, full of jagged loose threads and is just an awesome, inky black, deliberately overcooked, chokingly sleazy pit of depravity, hidden half truths, deplorable human beings and even some very well buried pathos that sneaks up out of the slime to surprise you in the back end of the final act. Theron anchors it with her haunted, pensive aura as a fiercely guarded woman who is likely a lot more vulnerable and damaged than she’d care to admit, and the messy, bloody trajectory she must descend down to solve an infamous murder she was unwittingly at the centre of. Absolutely great film.

-Nate Hill

Captain Ron

September 2, 2021 by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Kurt Russell doesn’t usually go for the comedy scripts so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Captain Ron but it was a legit blast of good times and the character he creates here is a legendary tornado of dreadlocked, suntanned, beer swillin’ manic energy. Martin Short plays a reliably high strung Chicago businessman who inherits a decent sized sailboat from a distant relative, and has to go down to the Caribbean to sail it back up before it can be appraised by an oily marine magnate (Paul Anka, of all people). So he decides to take his wife (Mary Kay Place) and two teenage kids along for the adventure, and since Russell’s renegade rascal Ron seems to be the only skipper on the rock who isn’t too hungover to be their guide and navigator, he hires him on the spot. What could go wrong? Well… not as much as I expected from the marketing on this thing but like… in a good way. The comedy is surprisingly restrained, very situational and well written where it could have been pretty 90’s silly slapstick and Russell’s performance, although loopy as all hell, is actually pretty subtle when it comes to getting those small, spur of the moment laughs that sneak in and become the funniest bits of the film. Like when he’s explaining the hierarchy of a ship crew to this clueless family and he goes “incentives are important. I learned that in rehab.” They encounter storms, pirates, packed harbours ready to party hard and armed ‘guerrillas’ (another joke that landed spectacularly) attempting to overthrow an unstable government and although Short’s attitude sometimes makes this feel like the ‘trip from hell downward spiral of insanity’ kind of flick it wants to be, it inadvertently just ends up having a great time out at sea and becomes a party, laidback hangout film, which is fine by me. This is thanks mainly to Russell and his effortless good ol’ boy charisma; even when he’s playing the most stoic, unfriendly badasses you always just get the sense that he’d be a guy you’d love to have a beer and just kick it with. Well you can do that here, and Captain Ron is one of the most easygoing, flat out hilarious and downright fun films of his career. Good times.

-Nate Hill

Ben Wheatley’s In The Earth

September 1, 2021 by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

In The Earth is only the second film from Ben Wheatley I’ve seen, the first being his spunky noir shootout flick Free Fire which seems to be the odd duck out and a far cry from the dark, morose, esoteric folk horror fans are used to from him. This was a very interesting film and while the pieces don’t necessarily all fit together in a way that struck the ultimate timbre with me, it’s certainly a visually galvanizing, stylistically impressive work. As a research scientist (Joel Fry) and a park ranger (Ellora Torchia) trek deep into a wild forest in rural England on some sort of mission they encounter two very different individuals who are both trying to communicate and study some sort of… I dunno, entity or force that hides within the very structure of the natural world. There’s borderline zealot Zach (Reece Shearsmith) who lives as a homeless person would and approaches this being from a folk point of view, offering it iconography in a religious fashion like the pagans who lived in the region eons ago would have. His ex wife Olivia (Hayley Squires) lives in another region of the woods where nary the two stray into each other’s path (like most exes) and her efforts are a lot more scientific but no less bizarre, using complex machinery to reach out to this thing with light, sound and rhythm. The two leads find themselves stuck squarely between two duelling fanatics who are in way over their heads with a force of life neither can comprehend and are both slowly being driven mad by. And that’s as far as the plot goes in the realm of what is coherent and comprehensible anyways. The closest thing you could describe this entity as is a stone monolith punctuated by an opening through which you can view the stars, and nature on its terms but never is it presented as a physical or visible ethereal being beyond hints, abstract hallucinations and sounds out there in the dark. If that’s your thing than cool, I enjoyed the odd, surreal, impenetrable nature of it and recognized the welcome nods to many influences including Alex Garland’s Annihilation, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening and even John Carpenter’s Prince Of Darkness in a few brief strokes. Just don’t expect to walk out of this thing with answers; it’s a moody horror SciFi that quickly transforms itself into a wild arthouse romp from which there is no rhyme or reason to be distilled from but what one’s own intuition says.

-Nate Hill

Mark Pavia’s Fender Bender

September 1, 2021 by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

The next time you get into a mild vehicular dustup be careful how much of your personal information you give to the other party involved, lest you end up like the unfortunate girls in Mark Pavia’s Fender Bender, a vicious little Grindhouse exercise that doesn’t quite achieve genre greatness but is still good fun. When a teenage girl (Mackenzie Vega, Sin City) is rear ended by a weird guy (Bill Sage, American Psycho) in a mysterious black muscle car she exchanges information and heads home to face the disappointment and subsequent grounding alone at home from her parents for taking the car out, she discovers that that’s the least of her worries for the night. It turns out this guy, beyond just having creeper vibes, is a stalker/serial killer who deliberately causes fender benders and uses the insurance contact info to hunt girls down and murder them, and he’s on his way to her place. This leaves her to fight him off initially alone, and then with the help of two ditzy friends. Now, this is a competently made, atmospheric and very suspenseful piece and while I *usually* am not the type of person to be like “why didn’t this character do this” etc in terms of plot, these characters, including our lead, are especially stupid in their attempts to evade and overpower this guy, to the point where the ‘slasher trope’ excuse just doesn’t cut it. That aside it’s a good time and Sage is wonderfully sinister as this dude, credited simply as ‘The Driver.’ The score is done by an electronic group called Nightrunner and adds a lot of dark sonic synth ambience too, which is always great. Aside from how braindead the lead is in frantic situations this is a nice little retro slasher with tense set pieces and a genuinely memorable killer.

-Nate Hill

Silent House (2011)

August 31, 2021 by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Elizabeth Olsen has been making a huge impact on film these days and already was a decade ago I was pleased to learn with 2011’s Silent House, a superior, intelligent and unconventional horror film that showcases some of the best ‘scream Queen’ acting from her that I’ve seen in the genre overall. This is a simple story that sees her play a teenage girl who is helping her father (Adam Trese) and uncle (Eric Sheffer Stevens) pack up a house that they are about to move out of. Everything seems routine save for a little bickering until suddenly she finds herself trapped in a threatening netherworld version of the house, full of half seen ghosts, whispering voices and apparently no contact with the outside world. Is she dead? Hallucinating? The switch from the opening scenes into frightening territory is so swift and so abrupt that at first I had no idea what was going on and felt disoriented, but then realized that’s exactly how this poor girl must feel and noted how effectively and promptly the film drew me into its world and the point of view of its protagonist. She wanders about with little notion of what to do beyond hide, scream and run until she finds old Polaroids and other long forgotten totems of memory and we see the truth slowly come to light. It’s a sad, tragic revelation that so many girls who went through what she did as a kid must later unearth in their own repressed memories and Olsen’s performance is note perfect on every level. There are some deeply terrifying scenes here including a sequence where she uses the brief flash of the Polaroid camera to gain some visibility in the dark and quickly wishes she didn’t as we catch momentary glimpses of the horrors surrounding her. The camera work, staging and spatial dynamics are all excellently done by husband and wife directing team Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, who are remaking a Uruguayan horror film here of the same name that I have yet to see but based on the sterling quality level I experienced here, it must be something else indeed. This is dark, tragic, genuinely creepy horror on all levels, a story told in almost dreamlike fashion with a lead performance from Olsen so potent with raw fear and deep anxiety I’d almost be hesitant to discover what her actor’s process is. Really great stuff.

-Nate Hill

Taylor Sheridan’s Those Who Wish Me Dead

August 31, 2021 by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I miss the days in the 90’s or so when big budget, star studded thrillers dominated the summer and they’d often have slightly outrageous yet totally exciting high concepts that melded different elements into one palette. Taylor Sheridan’s Those Who Wish Me Dead is a terrific example of this and a banger of a film, the exact type of summer popcorn escapism I miss having around a lot. Angelina Jolie plays an ex wildfire fighter/smoke jumper with PTSD after a mission gone horribly wrong, now relegated to fire-watch atop a lonely tower and occasionally getting arrested by the local sheriff (Jon Bernthal) for doing insane daredevil stunts just to keep the pain at bay. One day a kid runs into her region of Montana forest trying to escape two psychotic contract killers (Aiden Gillen and Nicholas Hoult) who have chased him and his dad (Jake Weber) in there from the city, for dark reasons that are, wisely, only hinted at. It’s up to a haunted Jolie to protect this kid at all costs with the help of Bernthal’s badass lawman, his equally badass and very pregnant wife (Medina Senghore) and some of her former smoke jumping crew, but will it be enough to stop these incredibly heinous assassins? I’m not even kidding either, these two are literal cold blooded monsters who aren’t above blowing up houses with families in them, killing pregnant women and kids and even deliberately starting a wildfire that torches half a valley just to smoke out their prey. “I hate this place” growls an unreasonably sinister Gillen (if you thought he was slimy in Game Of Thrones, well…), to which another character replies “it hates you back” in trademark pulpy yet elemental Taylor Sheridan writing fashion. Jolie is stunning here and I wish she’d headline more films these days, she captures the flint-spark resilience and crushing vulnerability of her character beautifully in a top shelf performance. The sweeping Montana cinematography is gorgeous and threatening in equal parts, the violence and action vicious and unrelenting, as is the very effective suspense. I see that this has gotten lukewarm reactions almost all across the board and I’m really not sure what film most people were watching; this is the kind of blockbuster stuff I live for and miss greatly these days. It’s bombastic, grandly drawn, hearty genre meal material that’s exciting, tightly written, unforgivingly brutal and solidly directed. One of the best so far this year, I’m my books.

-Nate Hill