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Film Review

The Grudge (2020)

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American movie studios are wild, man. They’ll remake Asian horror films, pump out a few sequels, and then once they get bored of that they (pauses, takes off glasses and rubs bridge of nose) remake their *own American remake* of the Asian horror like they forgot they even did the initial one in the first place. That’s not to say this bizarre behaviour can’t produce decent horror flicks as a rule but in the case of The Grudge (2020) I’d say they’ve done a pretty terrible job. The 2004 American Grudge film with Sarah Michelle Gellar scared the piss right down my leg at age 14 and despite being desensitized now that I’m older I’d still consider it a well made, effective chiller. But this new version is so all over the place and contains so little of what made the 2004 one so special it doesn’t even make sense to call it a Grudge film. So basically there’s two moody, hard boiled detectives played by the arbitrarily unlikely combo of Andrea Riseborough and Demien Bichir, who are investigating the classic case of a Grudge spirit hovering around a house and the unfortunate folks who are unlucky, stupid or morbidly curious enough to hang around it. There’s Lin Shaye in the Grace Zabriskie proxy role as the dementia ridden old woman who doesn’t know what planet she’s on, Frankie Faison as her desperate husband who enlists a lady (Jacki Weaver) who facilitates assisted suicides, John Cho and Betty Gilpin as a young couple trying for a baby that fall victim (in the film’s single, solitary effective scare, I might add), William Sadler as a disfigured, mentally disturbed former cop who ran afoul of the ghost and others. It has a huge big cast of talented, recognizable and engaging actors who run around in unnecessary subplots doing not much of anything. There’s barely any ‘classic Grudge moments’ and even when there are they feel somehow ‘off’ and not deserving of the franchise name. The single effective scare involving John Cho is a nicely shocking moment with a great choice of where to place the camera, but if your remake of your own remake only has one scary scene and not much else, I think it’s time to pitch the drawing board out the window and completely rethink your approach. It’s beyond me why they felt the need to do this, and make it so overloaded, needlessly elaborate and bereft of what made the initial Grudge film so good.

-Nate Hill

Film Review

The Vicious Brothers’ Grave Encounters

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I’ve had graver, more memorable encounters in the horror genre than I did with The Vicious Brothers’ Grave Encounters, a film that’s much hyped up in the horror community but just sadly didn’t do much for me overall. I’m all for found footage horror if it’s done well and effectively and there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the way this film is crafted, it’s just it spends way too much time building up to the scares that are few and far between when they finally do show up near the end. Like.. a cheapie, self aware faux ghost hunting comedy farce like this should be packed to the gills with scares from stem to stern and not try and attempt the slow burn buildup thing, that’s for horror that takes itself seriously. This is a silly film that should have pulled the ripcord of ridiculousness a way harder and way sooner and went full on nuts in the way stuff like The Evil Dead did, but it feels frustratingly restrained and reined in for much of the runtime, and by the time a few leering spectres and ghouls do show up, it’s a classic case of too little too late. The characters are a mixed bag and mostly bland except for Mackenzie Gray as a hilarious, charlatan dime-store psychic out of his depth. It’s shot in Coquitlam’s abandoned Riverview hospital (but what isn’t) and there’s a few eerie moments when the camera crew find themselves lost in never-ending corridors, but overall this just feels like a big missed opportunity. Perhaps the sequel goes for broke a bit more but if this one is any indication.. then perhaps not.

-Nate Hill

Film Review

Adam Egypt Mortimer’s Daniel Isn’t Real

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I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Daniel Isn’t Real and based on the synopsis it seemed like your classic case of ‘dark elements of one’s psyche’ manifesting themselves into physical form’, in this case an imaginary friend. But there was something.. *off* about the poster artwork, an esoteric colour scheme and title font that intuitively said “no, there’s more than that here.” Yeah, a whole lot more. This is one of the most visually unafraid, thematically complex and stylistically bizarre horror films I’ve ever seen and my hat is several miles off to its audacity, vision and immersive realm crafting. Director Adam Egypt Mortimer says he was inspired by Adrian Lyne’s classic horror film Jacob’s Ladder, which makes sense in casting Tim Robbins’ own son Miles as quiet, disturbed college student Luke. He witnessed an unthinkably violent event when he was just a boy and has been dealing with his severely mentally ill mother (Mary Stuart Masterson) his entire life and in coping with that trauma he has employed the companionship and assistance of a mysterious imaginary friend named Daniel (Patrick Schwarzenegger). Daniel is cucumber cool, adept in socially murky situations and always knows just what to do. He’s a stalwart ally and handy to have around, yet of course is only a facet of Luke’s own fragile mind… or is he? That’s where the film gets really fun and not so easy to pin down. Daniel is only a friend when things go his way, and when the hereditary tentacles of illness plaguing his mother come for Luke as well, things get downright scary. Daniel becomes reckless, selfish, sociopathic and wholly destructive, especially when Luke meets a feisty art major (Sasha Lane) he has genuine feelings for. I don’t want to reveal to much because this is so much more than just what you read in synopses as far as premise goes. This is deep, philosophical filmmaking full of dark psychological unrest, chilling ambiguity and disturbing metaphysical implications that still have me pondering the overall experience over a week later. There are some truly soul disturbing visuals once things get hallucinatory and otherworldly for the characters, made real by terrifying practical effects that look like something straight out of a literal nightmare. There are elements that reminded me of SyFy’s brilliant anthology series Channel Zero in terms of unconventional, cerebral storytelling that takes what could have been a run of the mill horror concept and elevates it to stratospheric heights using form, sound, menacing visual abstractions and unfiltered artistic expression to plant us into a world we won’t soon forget. I could not recommend this film enough to people who enjoy challenging, unabashedly dark meta-psychological horror and lots of it.

-Nate Hill

Film Review

Ted Geoghegan’s We Are Still Here

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Ted Geoghegan’s We Are Still Here is a blissfully simple yet tremendously rewarding exercise in dark comedy/horror that hits the mark incredibly well by castling well known faces that are already totems in the genre, employing sidesplitting situational comedy that hovers on the edge of droll and a script that anchors it all with a well written confidence, not to mention a cool retro visual palette that brings to mind minimal yet affecting stuff like Rosemary’s Baby, The Evil Dead and others from back in the day. A middle aged couple (Andrew Sensenig and Barbara Crampton) have moved into a rural house and are still grieving the loss of their son but this house, naturally, is spectacularly haunted and they find themselves and their friends plagued by a vicious dark force emanating from the basement. The life of the party is Larry Fessenden and the gorgeous Lisa Marie as their avant-garde hippie friends who arrive for a seance and get way more than they bargained for. Fessenden has a way of delivering dialogue that just had me holding my sides even when he wasn’t trying to be funny, while Marie is an ethereally beautiful presence who has mostly shown up in various Tim Burton films over the years and not much else, but it’s lovely to see her branch out. The special effects are gruesomely tactile, the scares genuinely unsettling and the story, albeit scant and simple, works very well in servicing some intensely gory mayhem in the third act after a blessedly slow burn getting there. This may be an uncomplicated, super traditional exercise in genre horror that doesn’t necessarily bring anything we haven’t seen before to the table but what it does set out to do, it does exceedingly well and I had a great time with it.

-Nate Hill

Film Review

Hunter Adams’ Dig Two Graves

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Indie horror can go a lot of ways, but it’s always life affirming when you find a real hidden gem, and Hunter Adams’ Dig Two Graves is just that, a morally complex, atmospherically beautiful, unpredictable modern fable with horror hues woven in and, most important in any production, believable human characters that you can actually empathize with and take a journey alongside. Young girl Jake (Samantha Isler) loses her brother one day in a cliff jump gone wrong, or he appears to be missing anyways. She lives in a small Illinois county with her parents and loving grandfather (Ted Levine) who is also the sheriff. She finds herself stalked by three mysterious men who have a vaguely occult aura, and they tell her they have the power to bring her brother back, but at a heinously dark price. This is only the surface level premise of the film and I don’t want to spoil much because it’s truly a beautifully unpredictable narrative. Ted Levine has spent most of his career in memorable but sidelined supporting roles, he gets a lead here and is wonderful as the conflicted, caring grandfather who has sin, guilt and violence in his past but will do anything to protect the granddaughter he fiercely loves. This is a small film with a huge emotional impact as we see the karmic cost of revenge, sins of the past refusing to be forgotten and, as we’re reminded by Levine’s character, that no person is just one thing, there aren’t heroes or villains but simply choices human beings make both negative and positive, left the rest of their lives to reconcile them. Fantastic folk horror family drama revenge saga with gothic undertones, beautiful cinematography and a story worth investing one’s time and emotion into.

-Nate Hill

Film Review

Let Us Prey

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If you’re going to bill your film as a ‘biblical horror version of Assault On Precinct 13’ you’d better make damn sure that the thing lives up to that legacy and is a worthwhile experience, and Let Us Prey is a terrible one from icky start to unpleasant finish and all the way in between. One day a mysterious stranger called 6 (Liam Cunningham) literally walks out of the ocean along the coast and ends up in county lockup under the collective watch of Scotland’s sleaziest small town police force. He then makes everyone’s life literally hell by forcing the cops and fellow prisoners alike to confront their sins and… well die, I guess, his motivations never seem too clear. The staff consists of deviants, killers and violent sexual offenders to the point I wondered how the fuck there weren’t proper background checks in the academy, but oh well. Cunningham is a terrific actor and does all he can playing what’s clearly supposed to be the devil, but the film is so murky, muddled and disorganized that not even his slick performance and a sometimes witty script can do anything to pull it out of the quicksand of haggis it wilfully wanders into. The characters are mostly vile, idiotic, psychopathic and very annoying characters, their dark deeds shown in flashbacks that are needlessly gratuitous, cruelly exploitative and explicitly show extreme violence and sexual torture inflicted on children, which I could have done without and I’d warn anyone who gets easily upset by that to keep a wide berth. Pollyanna Mackintosh as the precinct’s only good cop is also the only character with any redeeming qualities but she spends the film so terrified and traumatized it’s tough to root for her beyond wishing her character would pack up and leave for a less tasteless, bitter hearted film. Cunningham’s Satan is charismatic and almost likeable in a sardonic way but he’s just doing his job I suppose, and Liam has a way of making any character resonate no matter the quality of the film. It’s got an intense, stylized opening credits sequence but beyond that, this is needlessly excessive trash with a barely discernible storyline and far too much ill advised gore, nihilistic barbarism and crass inhumanity. Fucken waste of time.

-Nate Hill

Film Review

Ted Geoghegan’s Mohawk

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Some films just place you right into the action without a moments setup, exposition or prologue, they just ruthlessly air drop you right into a furious bedlam of urgency and incident with nary a moment of narrative foreplay or warmup and I love them for it. Ted Geoghegan’s Mohawk is a breathless, unconventional and altogether brilliant horror/western hybrid (my favourite genre amalgamation) that tells the tale of young Mohawk woman Okwaho (Kaniehtiio Horn) fighting alongside her two lovers against a vicious regiment of American soldiers hellbent on her destruction as her Mohawk elders try to retain the tribes neutrality amidst a nasty personal vendetta on both sides. Peace and neutrality unfortunately just weren’t in the cards for the early days of America and the hatred, rage, violence and conflict of it all are reflected in this lean, mean, taught, streamlined and spectacularly thrilling piece of esoteric escapist exploitation that I have fallen in love with and immediately ordered the DVD. Horn is actually part Mohawk herself and owns the role with intimidating physicality and stoic yet emotional resolve, I’ve seen her work in Letterkenny and noticed her in Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor earlier this year, she’s one to watch out for. Okwaho’s two lovers are a fierce fellow Mohawk named Two Rivers (Justin Rain) and young British officer Joshua (Eamon Farron, who we remember as the evil Richard Horne in Twin Peaks: The Return). She does her best to protect them and the entire time she’s forced to run, fight and survive she is also with child, which makes for one intense character arc. The American soldiers are a mottled, complex bunch led by a cold, hard bastard of a captain played by the otherworldly looking Ezzra Buzzington in a performance of terrifying sadism, unabashedly verbose fury and curiously contradictory rationality that makes him a believable character with dimensions as opposed to a villain composed simply of leering caricature. This is in contrast to his second in command who is a gruff, racist asshole with headgear that Ichabod Crane would be proud of, played by Robert Longstreet who was so good as the groundskeeper in Haunting Of Hill House. I’ll be honest, not everyone is going to love this film: it’s severely low budget which is noticeable, it does this tightrope walk between brutal splatter horror sensibilities and eerie, surreal mysticism that might not work for every viewer and it may just be too much of a nerve wracking gauntlet for some to get through and keep up with the pace, violence and mile-a-minute sociopolitical flourishes peppered into the colourful, detailed dialogue. The things I’ve mentioned are all part of what made me appreciate this film though; the stirring opening credits scooped me up and threw me right into the action, the emotional core of Okwaho and her two lovers kept me caring for them even when action took over for character development a bit, the dastardly nature of the soldiers and preening theatricality of Buzzington’s villain was engaging, the audaciously unapologetic violence and surging momentum literally had me putting down my phone and hovering on the edge of my seat in rapturous tension. Not to mention the gorgeous, propulsive, dark-synth laden score by Wojciech Golczewski that keeps mood, atmosphere, menace and emotion thrillingly alive and pulls the slack shockingly tight for the duration of the film until it’s unbelievably fearsome climax. If you love sweeping, emotional stuff like Last Of The Mohicans but you also appreciate mean, fucked up, grisly horror tinged westerns like Bone Tomahawk you’ll dig this absolutely terrific film.

-Nate Hill

Film Review

The Ruins

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I’ve seen a lot of Mexican vacations go wrong in the horror/thriller arena but never as specifically and drastically so as it does in The Ruins, a stressful, gruesome, brightly lit body horror vehicle written by someone who probably had a traumatic experience with poison ivy as a kid. Your typical American kids are lounging at a resort, dealing with petty relationship issues and getting drunk when a German backpacker tells them of an archeological expedition at a nearby Mayan pyramid, so they decide to take a day trip and check it out. Well this pyramid just happens to be covered in an exotic, sentient and very pissed off species of carnivorous vine and once touched, you’re fucked. The local villagers have apparently already had run-ins with it and surround the ruin with guns, blocking off any escape or further contamination. This leaves these kids atop the pyramid to slowly be hunted, starved, preyed upon and driven insane by this horticultural nightmare, which is fun enough as a B grade exercise in grossology. The kids are all played by reliable actors like Joe Anderson, Jonathan Tucker, Shawn Ashmore and Jena Malone and they handle the desperation, fear and anguish fairly well. The vine thing itself is kinda neat, it looks like weed leaves and does this cool thing where it’s flowers can mimic people’s voices and other sounds to confuse and terrify it’s prey. There are some extremely unsettling moments of bone shattering gore and uncomfortable body horror that is effective and shocking, but most of the film is set on top of the pyramid in broad daylight so it’s not terribly evocative in terms of atmosphere. It’s fun enough, but nothing great.

-Nate Hill

Film Review

Urban Legends: Bloody Mary

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I love the first Urban Legend film and always wondered if the two sequels were worth a look, and after checking the third one last night I can say with resounding conviction that no, they are fucking not worth a look. At least not this piss poor Bloody Mary one, which barely registers as a passable motion picture at all, let alone a near half decent horror flick. A very young Kate Mara heads up a group of college friends who are stupid enough to invoke the wrath of Bloody Mary, a vengeful mirror dwelling ghost who was once the victim of date rape at the hands of leering frat boys which we get to see in a cheap, sleazy prologue. That’s really about it, the story barely exists, the ghost looks nothing close to as terrifying as she does on the poster and resembles a hungover Spirit Halloween employee in the film itself. The acting is beyond amateur except for Mara, and although I’m a sucker for her in anything, not even she can do anything for this dollar store mess. It looks like it was shot with a bleeping fax machine, the horror effects are painfully cheap and just… everything, *everything* about it is lame, ridiculous and underproduced. The thing is, the first Urban Legend film is really good, it’s got a huge prolific cast, well written script and high production value for a horror of its caliber, and yeah I mean sequels in this kind of franchise are never as good as the first but like, I didn’t expect *that* much of a drastic drop in quality, this thing is just hurtin, man. I’ll thank Kate Mara for being the literal only reason I could sit through the entire thing.

-Nate Hill

Film Review

Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation

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Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation revolves around a brief but very important exchange of dialogue between two strangers in a crowded park, recorded by unseen surveillance experts. But the real conversation, at least from what I felt, was one that the introverted main character has with himself, one of guilt, conflict and paranoia. The introverted protagonist is Harry Caul, played by Gene Hackman in one of the film’s surprises, for we are used to this actor in abrasively alpha, outspoken, charismatic leads. Caul is a pensive, restless, reclusive fellow who dutifully does his job, and does it very well too but we always get the sense that he’d rather be somewhere else and is somehow broken inside. The first thread of his unravelling is pulled when surveillance on the aforementioned conversation in the park picks up a brief swath of dialogue implying murder, or at least the attempt thereof. Caul is now at loggerheads with himself between delivering the audio footage to a shady operative (Harrison Ford playing against type as quite sinister) working for someone known as The Director (I won’t spoil this cameo because it’s too juicy) or keeping it to himself and potentially saving two innocent lives. I wouldn’t necessarily call this film a thriller, at least not in the traditional sense. There are moments of intrigue, shocking violence and certainly a good deal of suspense, but the most effective aspects are the shrouded nature of Caul as a character and how he interacts with those around him including mouthy coworker Stan (John Cazale), even mouthier business rival Bernie (Allen Garfield) and others. He’s a very religious man which obviously clashes with the frequently clandestine and often dangerous nature of his work, providing fascinating conflict. The key moment of the film is an eerie dream sequence complete with a fleet of fog machines and very tricky camera angles in which Harry follows the female target of his surveillance mission, trying to tell her details of his personal life, warn her of impending danger and just simply level with her. This is an important scene because it’s the only time he actually verbally communicates with someone he’s hired to bug, and perhaps this is the core of what has broken him: human interaction relegated largely to wire taps, cameras, vans parked around the corner and informal, all seeing secrecy. That can’t be good for a soul, and it clearly haunts his, alongside the collateral damage of what that job can cause, in terms of violent repercussions. Anyways it’s a fantastic film with a truly captivating Hackman performance, a terrific supporting cast, sensationally immersive retro-tech sound design, a kick in the nuts twist ending and the kind of narrative that has you thinking for days.

-Nate Hill