Tag: creepy

Jordan Graham’s Sator

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I love when a horror film hits all the right notes in the aesthetics department of what resonates with me, so listen up if you are into: elemental, esoteric folk horror, lyrical, almost Malick level dialogue and character interaction, eerily hazy home video footage, misty, rugged wilderness cinematography, atmosphere so think you could cut it with an antler knife, demonic pagan deities that live unseen in the natural world and can be summoned by unwitting, weak minded human beings and more. Jordan Graham’s Sator is a stunning, immersive, spectacularly terrifying and absolutely visually gorgeous folk horror that cuts right to the heart of what genuinely freaks me out in the genre: atmosphere, the unknown, being alone, dark forces outside our narrow scope of belief and knowledge and how these forces corrupt, reshape and pervert the human condition to disturbing new heights. The film sees one man (Michael Daniel) alone far out in the remote California wilderness, living in a ramshackle cabin and setting out each day into the territory looking for… something. He has introspective flashbacks to a mother (Wendy Taylor) who went missing years before, a sister (Aurora Lowe) who was on the verge of mental illness, a brother (Gabriel Nicholson) who tried to keep the family together and an ailing grandmother (June Peterson) who spent the last few dementia ridden years of her life chronicling her unsettling internal relationship with a being she calls ‘Sator’, who reportedly talks in her head, dictates books filled with disquieting scripture and seems to have some stranglehold over this family as a group. When he’s not lost in dreamy memory recollection he wanders the perimeter of his property checking on motion sensor cameras he has set up all over the place and trust me you do *not* want to know what he finds they saw. This is a slow burn, arthouse, borderline surreal film through and through, and anyone without the patience for atmosphere, gradually cultivated tension and lyrical storytelling will be lost. There are payoffs and they are huge but first the film asks you to settle, to surrender and be swept away by the sights, sounds and dreamy world it offers before it reveals any secrets. It’s like if A24 did something akin to Blair Witch but with really earthen, nature based lore and a very atmosphere based approach. And as if the film weren’t scary enough, the concept of Sator and all the handwritten lore we see is authentic, very real stuff that actress June Peterson (who is the director’s real grandmother by the way) experienced in real life after a Ouija experience left her in psychiatric care going on about this ‘Sator’ thing for the rest of her life. If that doesn’t stand your hairs directly on end I don’t know what will, because when a film this scary can legitimately claim to be based on a true story in the *truest* sense of the concept, it’s enough to send anyone running for the hills and back again once they find whatever’s really out there. An absolute stunner of a horror film in every sense and one of those rare finds like It Follows, Hereditary, or The Blair Witch Project that successfully do what so many films in the genre promise to yet seldom deliver: scares the absolute fuck out of you. Streaming on Shudder now.

B Movie Glory: Deep In The Darkness

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I love being pleasantly surprised by a DTV horror flick because there’s honestly so much garbage out there it can be like navigating a minefield, but Deep In The Darkness is a fun, vicious, well made little folklore shocker that kept me entertained throughout and was legitimately scary here and there. Sean Patrick Thomas plays a big city doctor who moves with his wife and kid to set up his practice in a town so small they “don’t even have cable,” as the stressed out, cigar chomping mayor played by the wonderful Dean Stockwell informs him. He’s met mostly with acceptance and hospitality as a newcomer but it soon becomes clear this town has a very, very disturbing secret underneath it. In subterranean caverns dwell an ancient race of spectacularly ugly, murderous humanoid beings called ‘Isolates’, who pretty much call the shots throughout the county. As the only doctor in the region he now finds himself and his family drawn into a dangerous hereditary power struggle between the isolates, those who have cross-bred (fucken EW) with them over centuries and the humans caught in the middle. These things are a fascinating bunch, all played by real actors with no CGI, absolutely drenched in nauseating, terrifically creative prosthetic makeup and they come across as a less ruthless, more esoteric version of the Troglodytes we saw in Bone Tomahawk. The film is lower budget and naturally has that feel but all of the actors are very good in their roles, particularly Stockwell who gives his tired patriarch genuine guilt and a hint of long dimmed warmth. When the Isolates do show up they are an incredibly fearsome presence full of snarls, blood and fluid, lithe physicality that makes them a memorable antagonistic pack indeed. The story has some twists I didn’t see coming and one kick in the nuts of an ending, a narrative that’s not just full of cheap scares, chases and gore but one that actually feels like a proper story, of the folk horror variety infused with a creature feature aesthetic. Recommended for fans of easygoing, accessible monster horror fare, this can be found streaming on Canadian Amazon Prime!

-Nate Hill

William Butler’s Madhouse

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

There are so many horror movies set in mental institutions that it’s pretty much a sub genre at this point, and while these days we realize that the aesthetic of presenting that world in such a.. heightened and lurid manner isn’t all that enlightened, we can still appreciate a good entry on its own trashy terms I guess. William Butler’s Madhouse is a gory little diversion with a kind of messy story that it makes up for with some truly unsettling, deeply disturbing visuals that are very clearly influenced by Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder, but such influences on other works are welcome, even if worn shamelessly on their straightjacket sleeves. Joshua Leonard, who comes across as a kind of subdued, less succinct Sam Rockwell, plays an intern taking up residency at an underfunded, spooky asylum run by a head doctor (Lance Henriksen, naturally) who has little interest or compassion for the patients and whose safety protocols and ethical groundwork are, shall we say, questionable. Most of the patients run about willy nilly and the terrifying subterranean maximum security wing is a furnace heated nightmare corridor of leering monstrosities and deliberately grotesque personalities, like the hallway of prison cells from Silence Of The Lambs went to sleep and had a bad dream. There he finds a sort of ‘patient X’, a mysterious mummified individual who tells him a long forgotten tale of a young boy decades before who was mistreated by the asylum staff (you know, more than usual anyway) and whose ghost still runs around at night, and I found it funny how the script acts as if the ghost of a little kid is the *scariest* thing left to run about the place at night when the film has this level of freaky production design and prosthetic soaked extras on hand, which are really quite impressive, even if the story can’t quite get it up. Henriksen does little more than bluster, but his presence is always welcome, the lovely Natasha Lyonne has an extended cameo as a severely distressed patient and that adorable little southern dandy hobbit Leslie Jordan (a frequent staple of American Horror Story) has a nice bit as one of the facility’s doctors who reaffirms our primal fear of being murked while we sneak out to the refrigerator for that 2am snack. Director William Butler has a solid body of DTV horror work including the Danny Trejo/Tom Sizemore vehicle Furnace and while he can’t quite land the narrative here with overall coherence and the twist is felt a mile away, Madhouse has atmosphere in spades, truly horrific gory imagery that borders on the surreal and a very effectively creepy vibe.

-Nate Hill

Arthur Hiller’s Nightwing

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Arthur Hiller’s Nightwing is ostensibly billed as a horror flick about bats plaguing a native reservation in New Mexico and yes it is about that, but it’s less about the beasts themselves in the traditional monster movie sense and more about the very well written characters, the sociopolitical underpinnings and economic issues in the region, the indigenous mysticism and shaman folklore surrounding the situation and the biological threat of very real vampire bats, all coalescing into one hell of an entertaining film. I admire a script and execution that makes room for all facets of a story and doesn’t just opt for a cheesy creature feature with no real narrative or thematic heft. Nick Mancuso plays a sheriff from the Maski tribe who is investigating mysterious human and livestock deaths in his jurisdiction while carrying out the burial ritual of his mentor and local witchdoctor, a man greatly feared by others in the tribe. At the same time a vivacious, worldly bat hunter (the great David Warner) arrives and warns everyone that there may be a massive colony of deadly vampire bats roosting in the canyons nearby, while another opportunistic Maski (Steven Macht) wants to sell mining rights on their land to a nasty oil company and all of the factions get the surprise of a lifetime when the bats start attacking. You also get a cantankerous old Strother Martin as the local general store owner who married into a Maski family and still has the balls to talk shit about them to their faces. I’m not gonna lie, the bats themselves aren’t that impressive overall, they’re just a standard combo of shots of real bats flying and then rubber prosthetics for the actual attacks. There’s a scene inside a makeshift ‘shark cage’ style contraption that generates good suspense and a terrific sequence inside their creepy cave, but they’re not the most memorable monsters I’ve seen. What this film does have is atmosphere, very well written characters and genuine sense of place. It’s filmed in New Mexico and the scenery is breathtaking, brought to life by a wonderful score from Henry Mancini that samples Native instruments and echoes off the canyons eerily. There’s very cool shaman lore and the performances are exceptional, especially Mancuso’s fierce tribal cop, Macht’s slippery, morally secretive entrepreneur and Warner’s bat hunter who makes an almost religious, zen like fervour out of the vocation. Good times.

-Nate Hill

Brian Yuzna’s Return Of The Living Dead 3

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Brian Yuzna’s Return Of The Living Dead 3 is my baptism into this franchise, so to speak, and while I try overall to not just haphazardly launch into a franchise midway without regard for chronology, this was recommended to me by a friend and it’s one of her favourites so here we are. This was an absolute blast, and although it’s obvious this franchise had reached its ‘weird’ zenith, it’s ‘Jason Goes To Hell’ or ‘Michael Myers is actually in a Druid cult’ area of bonkers sequel writing, I love the ideas, special effects and fresh spin on the zombie genre found here, even if I had no context in regards to the many Living Dead films that led up to this point. There’s an army base where a gruff Colonel (Kent McCord) conducts bizarre experiments on the undead in a world that has been living with the existence of zombies so long they’ve just become like, part of the scenery, less of a novelty threat and more of a given. The general’s kid (J. Trevor Edmonds) is one of those motorbike riding, earring sporting, dreamy 90’s bad boys whose rebellious nature is constantly at odds with the shirt tucking, militaristic nature of his pops, who doesn’t approve of the girlfriend (Melinda Clarke) that he’s clearly very in love with. After a horrific bike accident leaves her on deaths’s door, the kid sneaks her into his dad’s facility in hopes of using the strange zombie necromancy within to resurrect his love. Well.. that just sounds like a recipe for chaos and indeed the film turns the dial way past eleven as some kind of otherworldly magick takes the girl over and she gains these snazzy, Hellraiser style clothes, weaponry and undead powers, with the makeup and costume department making her look fearsome and raw for the latter half of the film. What’s fascinating is that she doesn’t really lose her humanity either and doesn’t become a shambling corpse, she metamorphoses into this mesmerizing amalgamation of a bloodthirsty monster who needs to eat human flesh but with her emotions, drives and her thinking skills of a human being still clearly intact, gilded by these striking costume choices and surgically implanted, jagged looking weaponry. The character is a stroke of genius, actress Clarke sells every facet of it from the longing for her former self and her love for her boyfriend to her burgeoning primordial need to cause mayhem and carnage, she’s one of the most interesting characters I’ve ever seen in horror and I would have loved to see a whole spinoff franchise just about her. There’s a rather silly subplot where a loud, obnoxious Mexican street gang begins to transform into zombie-like creatures as well and it’s got its charms including a neat effect where a detached spinal column terrorizes anyone around it. The film works best when it focuses on the girlfriend and her chrysalis-esque remoulding into this spectacular undead demigod though, and I’d heavily recommend the film just for that event alone. Soon I’ll explore this franchise more in depth and have a better grasp on the world building and storytelling, but if the rest are anything like this, baby I’m sold.

-Nate Hill

Shadow Of The Hawk

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I expected Shadow Of The Hawk to be campy, cheesy or at the very least creaky, but this is a genuinely spooky, effective and quite earnest old school ghost story with three good natured lead performances, absolutely gorgeous Vancouver locations and eerie, atmospheric indigenous mythology. The great Chief Dan George plays a Native elder who voyages from his home in the British Columbia mountains to find his halfbreed grandson (the late Jan-Michael Vincent), to get his ancestral help in battling the ghost of an ancient sorceress who has put a deadly curse on their bloodline. Grandson is less than happy to be pulled into a facet of his life that he’s actively distanced himself from, but has no choice really as the dark magician and her evil minions are plaguing his life too. Together with a helpful reporter (Marilyn Hassett) they embark on a road trip into the sacred lands of BC to contend with these powerful dark forces amassing against them and cleanse their family lineage of this voodoo mysticism. Being an obscure 70’s horror flick theres naturally a touch of camp, most notably in Vincent’s doe eyed, slightly androgynous aura, but for the most part this plays it straight and spooky. The spirit of this witch first manifests as a legitimately terrifying masked phantom that haunts the characters wherever they go accompanied by some sound design that truly stood my hairs on end, then later she shows up in dreamy flashbacks as a snake charming witch-doctor played by Vancouver indigenous actress Marianne Jones. There are very well done set pieces here including a white knuckle suspension bridge crossing, an ongoing car chase between our three leads and a mysterious, supernatural black car that tails them all around the BC landscape. Vincent must fight a bear to death and as if that wasn’t strenuous enough then a Wolf as well *and* some masked cultist acolytes of the sorceress high atop a craggy bluff in a confrontation that has some Last Of The Mohicans vibes. It’s a fun film, with some really engaging visual atmosphere, very frightening score and a neat ‘modern world clashing with ancient spiritualism’ feeling as our characters venture from the cement and glass world of 70’s Vancouver out into the lush, elemental Pacific Northwest wonderland of British Columbia.

-Nate Hill

White Noise 2: The Light

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

It can be jarring when horror sequels do something almost entirely different with their concept but still use that same franchise name as the first one, it either means bravely pioneering new ground or gravely deviating from an already solid blueprint into a morass of sideshow muck. In the case of White Noise 2: The Light I couldn’t tell you which of those two categories it fits into because it was such a confounding, nonsensical story I really didn’t make too much sense of any of it, so I suppose the second one if I had to say. Following the exploits of the excellent first film in which we saw Michael Keaton communicate with the dead, including his wife, via spooky VHS tape static, this one goes in a drastically different direction. Nathan Fillion plays a guy whose wife and child are murdered in the opening scene of the film by a disturbed, gun wielding maniac (perennial UK tough guy Craig Fairbrass) before the man blows his own head off. Lost in a pit of despair, Fillion attempts suicide himself and has a brief trip to the afterlife (cue the XBox 360 cutscene effects) before returning to make it a near death experience and discovering he has certain… abilities. Premonition, foresight, the power to sense impending catastrophes and save those in their path and the clairvoyance to know when certain seemingly benign people are going to perpetrate horrible acts of their own, kinda like the guy… well you can see where this going. He meets a friendly nurse played by the wonderful Katee Sackhoff and I must admit that their pairing is pretty much a casting match made in Heaven and the best thing the film has going for it, even if the script doesn’t do all that much with them together. The cast beyond them aren’t people I recognized except for a hilarious early career cameo from Jared Keeso, who Letterkenny fans will be just tickled to see here and may even do a double take. The film is set in Vancouver again and as always it adds a lot of atmosphere, but you can only do so much for a story that’s told as loosely and unconvincingly as this. There’s no real reference to the first film or it’s premise, this for sure didn’t even need to be called White Noise at all, it’s more a sequel to that Sandra Bullock flick Premonition than anything resembling a tie-in to the Keaton one, and it’s just not gripping, interesting, scary or affecting enough to recommend whatsoever. If you must give it a look to see Fillion and Sackhoff gently flirting for a few scenes then go for it, I don’t blame you, but just don’t expect anything close to an involving thriller here.

-Nate Hill

House Of Wax (2005)

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

It amazes me what a dismal critical reception that House Of wax got because to me it’s a treasured horror film and one of the most disturbing, freaky ass experiences my stoned 14 year old ass ever had as an introduction to the genre. Just to prove that I’m not wistfully beefing up a mediocre horror flick through the treacherous prism of teenage nostalgia, I recently revisited it and it *still* just absolutely slaps, so I’m not sure what bone the critics had to pick with it other than it being a horror remake and having to face the unfair bias and hostility of being saddled with that yoke right out of the gate. So it’s the classic scenario where a bunch of reckless, impossibly sexy teens end up in some godforsaken county with a dried up town full of spooky abandoned buildings, menacing inbreds and a dark history. They’re played by people like Chad Michael Murray, Jared Padalecki, Elisha Cuthbert and Paris freakin Hilton, which is more pedigree than these horror flicks usually get to boast. They discover that a creepy old wax museum isn’t as derelict as outward appearances may suggest and that it’s demented curators never really retired, and have taken up a, shall we say, disconcerting brand of human ‘Wax-idermy’ as extracurricular activities in their spare time. They now find themselves on the run from these whack jobs and fighting for their lives to not be turned into living human wax dolls, or simply hacked to pieces by these crazies. This is one fucked up, super gruesome flick and the refreshingly practical effects are truly some brain melting, squirm inducing eye candy. They must have had to hire a ‘wax wrangler’ just to keep all of their production design materials in line because once they get deeper into this museum and the narrative overall, there are some genuinely nauseating, profoundly disquieting and altogether impressive visual gags and set creations on display. Don’t let anyone ever tell you this movie sucks or is anything other than an absolute banger, because they have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s sweaty, greasy, spooky, waxy, sleazy, trashy, shameless and wonderful in all the best ways a slasher can be. And for the record, I have seen the original, it’s cool, but for a kid my age it’s dated and creaky and something as balls out and energetic as this is just always going to take top spot. Great film.

-Nate Hill

Rachel Talalay’s Ghost In The Machine

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

What if like, a serial killer committed suicide, but not before making sure that his soul would be uploaded into a computer server through some pseudo hacker wizardry, leaving his essence free to roam throughout entire systems of data and machine control, manipulating everyday household items into deadly weapons of murder? It sounds ridiculous and it is but it’s also a lot of fun, an old forgotten cyber horror flick called Ghost In The Machine. Now, obvious comparisons might be made to another 90’s cyberpunk SciFi/horror called Virtuosity with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe but besides having a way lower budget, scrappy feel to it, this film is about a serial killer who was already human and then died and went into cyberspace vs the other way round. The killer here (played by Ted Marcoux) is just a nondescript, nasty piece of work dubbed the “address book killer” for his arbitrary, imagination deficient mode of picking victims. One night he deliberately totals his car off a cliff and kicks the bucket, only to resurface in cyberspace to hunt a young mother (Karen Allen) and her kid using everything from toasters, home entertainment systems, crash test dummy courses and basically anything electronic he can posses using his weird supernatural hacker magic. Their only hope is a super hacker of their own, (played by Chris Mulkey aka Hank from Twin Peaks) a good natured dude who once embezzled a million bucks from the IRS and gave it back to the people. This is fairly lowbrow, schlocker type entertainment with really, really cheesy 90’s virtual reality effects in the vein of something like The Lawnmower Man, but it has a certain viciousness and violent edge that I appreciated. Several murder scenes are pretty jaw dropping including one where the killer turns the entire interior living room of a dude’s house into an irradiated microwave zone and lets him literally fry to death, or an instance of electricity induced spontaneous combustion that is genuinely jarring in its sudden gruesomeness. Rachel Talalay the director also did the criminally underrated cult classic Tank Girl so she has a flair for the bizarre punk sensibilities that come across here. If you like retro SciFi goofiness, grisly slasher aesthetics and just a cheesy, lovably VHS feel, you’ll get a kick here.

-Nate Hill

Robert Zemeckis’s The Witches

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Robert Zemeckis is a perfect director to tackle one of Roald Dahl’s books; he’s got an inspired mastery over cutting edge CGI, a talent for dynamic visual storytelling and a genuine sense of the macabre, this willingness to be honest about the darker aspects of real life and include them in a story geared towards children, which is an attribute that he directly shares with Dahl himself. His crack at The Witches is an admirable, mostly successful, visually stunning and opulently stylish bit of devilish fun and although obvious comparison will be made not only to Dahl’s book (which simply cannot be topped) but also to Nicolas Roeg’s brilliant 1990 take on it. Zemeckis definitely takes the more playful route and while still injecting palpable dread and menace into the proceedings, his version isn’t quite the prosthetic soaked nightmare Roeg offered. The setting here is switched up from the UK to Deep South Alabama where a young boy and his grandmother (Octavia Spencer) encounter a coven of nasty real life witches holding a convention at a swanky bayou hotel. Anyone who has read the book knows that these witches are all about murdering children in frighteningly inventive ways and are led by the preening, aristocratic and supremely evil Grand High Witch, here played by Anne Hathaway in a performance that has to be seen to be believed. In the book the character is mean enough, in the 90’s version Anjelica Huston gave her a kind of.. ‘dark empress socialite’ vibe but Hathaway just grabs the script in her jaws like a dog and runs off with it. Sporting snowy blonde hair, a jittery Norwegian accent and mandible modifications that would make the vampires in Blade 2 shudder, she devours scenery, steals every scene and annunciates every syllable with the force of a snake sinking its fangs into someone. She truly makes this character hers, it’s the most impressive work I’ve ever seen from her as an actress and is by and far the best thing about the film. Even Stanley Tucci, who is usually the life of the party in any film, stands back in restraint as the hotel’s fussy manager and gives Anne a wide berth for her typhoon of a performance to unfold. The special effects are wondrous creations and I can’t figure out why anyone would bitch about the CGI on display here (it’s always inevitable I suppose) because it looks and feels incredibly tactile and terrifying. Zemeckis takes liberties with the witch anatomy that Dahl never dreamed of but they are righteous departures in style that make sense and add to the mythology nicely. Chris Rock narrates the film vivaciously as an older version of the young boy, and I never thought I’d say it but he has an uncannily perfect way with Dahl’s passages that had me wishing for a ‘The Witches audiobook as read by Chris Rock.’ My only one complaint is that it feels too slight in the latter half and I would have appreciated more of a runtime, but what they do give us really is a treat. Solid, comprehensive storytelling from Zemeckis, audaciously beautiful costume design, a gem of a score from Alan Silvestri and one unbelievable banshee howl encore performance from Hathaway who is truly having a blast.

-Nate Hill